Gryffyd Eamonn Dempsey » Public Transportation Follies

Oops

Gryffyd — Tue, 03 May 2011 02:48:40 +0000

This is what happens when you open your car door without checking your mirror: Yes, if you make that mistake, that bus will crunch your car door real good. And yes, that did happen, despite this picture angle and the sun’s glare not showing it in detail. And yes, that bus full of passengers will have to disembark to wait for the next bus, so there will be plenty of strangers to gawk while you and the bus driver figure it all out. And certainly there might be one amongst that gaggle who will snap a picture for posterity. But will you realise that those two white lines to the side of your car are the boundaries of a bike lane, and that this street is a busy one for bicyclists? It could just as easily have been a biker that you doored, instead of getting your door wrecked by a bus. This kind of inattentiveness is why I’ve pretty much given up on my work bike commute. In other news, here’s a picture of an abandoned syringe I took while waiting for the bus one morning:

Get those animals off those horses

Gryffyd — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:27:05 +0000

I was at the bus stop on the northeast corner of the Bank of America building during this, but didn’t see this:

The protest left some damage in its wake, police said, with windows broken at the Bank of America building on Southwest Fifth Avenue.

I was at Fifth and Salmon; maybe the windows were further up Fifth, but I didn’t hear glass breaking. I will go and check it out.

If I’d had the presence of mind, I would have taken a picture of the moment when the anarchists tried to break away from their police escort, but as they swirled around me and the others at the bus stop, they were stopped in their tracks by the wall of mounted police on Salmon St. It was quite a tableau, with the black flags on one side, mounted cops on the other, cops on foot blocking off the street to the north. That’s when I moved into the bus shelter, in case there was a charge by either side. The situation was fluid, in respect both to how quickly the scene changed and the manner in which the crowd changed direction and flowed east, channeled in that direction by the pressure of the cops. Then I stood for awhile, waiting for my bus home, but the cops still had Salmon blocked off to the west. I used my PDXBus app to figure out where they had re-routed it to and set off to meet it. I saw no more, heard no more, of the protest.

Darwin on the bus

Gryffyd — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 01:24:05 +0000

In the recent past I have joined a couple of social networking sites, one at the invitation of my sister, the other at the urging of my wife. I’ve found it surprising how easy and pressure-free it is to reconnect with old friends. Some of them have gone on to impressive things, including one who is a post-doctoral fellowship in things evolutionary. Which reminds me of a bus trip years ago. There is a high school at the end of this particular line, so on my way to work I am sometimes afflicted with high schoolers. This one incident began when a girl was chattering on about how much she liked her biology class, and how interesting evolutionary theory was. Her boy companion interrupted with a sneering, “Well, it’s only Darwin’s theory, you know”. She immediately back-tracked and disavowed believing any of it at all. I wanted to smack the boy for thinking that he’d made some trenchant point, but which only demonstrated his own ignorance of the whole subject. But I felt it wasn’t my quarrel, and was probably too tired to say anything. What stuck with me since was my hope that the girl, sooner rather than later, would realise that just because some stupid boy disagrees with you doesn’t make him right.

This is why I avoid the bus during non-commute hours

Gryffyd — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:31:31 +0000

Saturday late afternoon, boarding the line 15 bus at 34th and Belmont. I hear a woman ahead of me snarl at the bus driver, “Can you explain why you’re over an hour late?” The driver looks bewildered, says he is right on time. I follow this unpleasant woman down the aisle, giving the back of her head the stinkeye, because I know she is full of it. A half-hour before I had disembarked from the previous 15 that stopped at that intersection, went to run an errand nearby, than walked back to the busstop to get on this bus which arrived as scheduled, lo at half-hour intervals that time of day.

Four blocks and two stops later, she gets off the bus. So perhaps she was deranged by the excessive heat of the weekend and imagined she waited over an hour just to ride four blocks. I’m sure she complained all evening about the tardy driver. I don’t want to judge, since in all likelihood that she has physical and/or mental disabilities, but monkey-on-mercury crazy is what you get on the bus in the many hours of the day when taxpayers are not commuting to work.

Demographic Tension

Gryffyd — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:50:38 +0000

There were a couple of loud-talkers on the bus ride home this evening. Just before Loud-talker One disembarked around 26th & Belmont, he mentioned to his interlocutor that he owned a house nearby. Loud-talker Two babbled loudly about what a great neighborhood that was (true). Number One replied (loudly), “Yeah, but gay as fuck.”

Not part of the normal commuter mix

Gryffyd — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:42:30 +0000

Overheard on the bus home from work yesterday evening:

“Yo, so it’s just Mexicans you hang out with?”

“mumble mumble mumble.”

“Well, if it’s so unfortunate, whyn’t you quit?”

Plus snippets of information about “when I was in prison” and various X3 gang signs duly noted in someone else’s house.