Halifax Transit

 

So it has been six months now living in the city and for the most part I have had success riding the bus to work. I have heard that I have been lucky with a route that is pretty good for being on time. Most people cringe at the thought of taking the bus here and it is certainly a car kind of town. Maybe I was spoiled in Toronto with the TTC and how often it ran and how little wait time there was.

 

In recent weeks my luck has been running out and two recent incidents has me dreaming of driving days ahead. The most recent one was Saturday night at the end of my shift at work. The one bus that goes out to where I work runs every 30 minutes but on weekends it is up to an hour. So I am very careful to always be early at the stop and I am always calling the phone service that tells you when the bus will be at your stop. For months I have been doing this and have the thing down to a science.

 

So on Saturday night I leave work am out to the street at 9:05pm with the bus usually rolling by anywhere from 9:12-9:17. I wait and wait and wait and wonder if it is running late or what. I won't bore you with details but I ended up waiting for an hour until 10:12pm. At this time the bus pulls up and I get on.

 

I ask the driver if he was the same driver all night and if there was any problems with the route tonight. He says no and I said well no bus came last hour as I was there waiting. He told me I was wrong and said there was nothing he could do. That really helped my mood for him to say I was wrong and had not been waiting. Clearly he was too busy chatting it up with the weird lady in the front seat to even follow the times of the route and came way early.

 

This was confirmed to me as every stop on the route home had an hours worth of grumpy people waiting. I know it is not the end of the world but when you have just worked a 12 hour shift and you just want to get home cause you have to get up and do it all over the next day, wasting an hour is a big deal.

 

So I wrote down the time, route# and bus #. I emailed the Halifax transit and they emailed back that they would look into it. I highly doubt anything will be done but it was the thing to do to wash my hands of the whole pain in the ass incident.

 

Transit wants people to leave the car at home and help save the environment by taking transit. Well if schedules are made and there are detailed phone services telling people when the bus is coming, you have to follow it or people will find other ways to travel. Especially when you reduce service to once and hour to a large business area of town with a many stores and a movie theatre.

 

I for one cannot wait to get a car and never set foot on that bus again.