Car’s in the shop, bike needs a new seat, what’s a lad to do? Bus it is, then.

For those in the audience with short attention spans, let’s summarise: the bus system here in Music City, USA, was designed by someone with a serious mental retardation. I don’t think this person even knew what a bus looked like before getting the gig. I’m happy to provide further libelous statements as needed.

Consider the following:

  • In real bus systems (for values of “real” approximating “the ones in Switzerland”), they know exactly when the bus will be passing a given stop, down to the minute, and they let you know it; the schedules are phrased like, “a bus will stop here at :03, :18, :33, and :48 past the hour”. Except, you know, in four languages.

    In Nashville, the best they can tell you is the interval between busses. The intervals are usually something like, “a bus will stop here once ever 25-40 minutes”. Let me translate that: “we have no idea where our busses are”.

  • In Nashville, there’s a bus stop at every street corner. Americans are apparently too lazy to walk to a bus stop, so busses end up spending more stopped, picking up passengers by the ones and twos, than actually moving. Real bus systems know to space the stops out so busses can actually cover some ground between stops.

  • Bus stops aren’t covered, nor do they have timetables or route maps. You should just know. Fool.

  • Every route in the city (save one or two) run through a central choke point in the core of downtown Nashville. I don’t mean a covered central station. We’re talking about a single section of street, one city block long, one lane in either direction. Busses end up spending about 10-15 minutes at a dead stop here, waiting for the busses in front of them to move.

  • The only places to buy bus tickets are on the busses themselves, and you have to have exact change. Have a $5 bill instead of the $1.25 for a ticket? Well, you get your change back in bus tickets. Sucka.

  • In places like Basel, you buy a ticket and it’s valid for a certain number of zones for two hours. You can take as many busses as you need within those two hours, so long as you stay inside your concentric zones. Here in Nashville, everytime you change busses, you have to buy a new ticket, even if you were only on the first bus for five minutes. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is so brilliant.

All this combines to lead to a bus system that is so colossally inefficient, I cannot figure out how it functions. Going the two miles from Centennial Park to 4th Avenue took 45 minutes. Two miles. 45 minutes. I walk faster than that.