The bus is an interesting place. Mix together people of varying incomes, states of cleanliness, and health, add a seat shortage, a wet and slick linoleum-esque floor and the discomfort that occurs when you have to touch people you don’t know, and you have the recipe for a terrible mode of transportation. I don’t take the bus anymore, as you may have read, I bike. But when I did take the bus, I learned that people are dumb. One major problem on the bus is people who don’t prepare for their stop appropriately. There are a couple of offenders in this case.

The first offender is person who pulls the cord far too late. In some cases, this could be an offense of someone who just doesn’t know the route. A first-time late pull is totally ok…we’ve all been there. I am talking more about a person who didn’t prepare because they were talking loudly about “the 3 chicks that wanted to come home with [them] at the bar last night”. Pay attention, jerk. And if you miss your stop for any reason, there should be no question that you will just have to wait until the next one. People who make a big deal about it and ask the bus to stop after they have missed it are ridiculous. If it costs under 4 dollars to ride on it, it ain’t a cab.

Another type of offender is someone who doesn’t make any attempt to get near the door until the bus has stopped. If this is a person with limited mobility, of course that is fully acceptable/encouraged. But if you are able-bodied, you better be within feet of that door before when the bus stops. If the bus is packed full, I realize that it is hard to maneuver, but make the effort anyways. It will only save you panicky moments later when you realize that the surly teen in front of you has her music on so loud that she can’t hear you and you will never reach the door.

The bottom line is this…prepare for your stop. If you don’t, you are dumb. A bus is shared space, and we all need to step up our game so that everyone gets home a few minutes earlier, not a few minutes later.

Humorous but mostly unrelated sidenote: Remember that slippery floor I mentioned at the beginning of this? Well, one day, on my birthday, I was on a slick bus standing in that front section where there seems to be no handles or rails or anything to grab on to. The bus lurched to a stop and I stumbled forward in cartoon-like slow motion, flailing my arms and trying desperately not to fall. I make it all the way to the front of the bus, still on my feet but my last flail has landed my hand on the lever that makes all of the change and tickets fall into the bowels of the bus. It was rather humiliating.