The Worst Bus in Turku
4 Feb 2019 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneWhen my wife and I go to a grocery store together but without a car, we buy too much shit to conveniently carry far on foot, and then we get bit on the ass by transportation issues.
The supermarkets that are big enough to carry the kind of cat tuna that our cats like (the one pet stores don't carry of course!!!) are designed for people with cars and the one near us happens to be serviced by what seems like the city's least-reliable bus route. (Is it the length and # of stops??? idk.) Typically, Turku/Åbo buses are extremely reliable. Apart from this one Bad Bus, I can only think of two incidents when a Turku bus was more than 5 minutes late in my 15 years of using them, and maybe <5 where a bus left early and I missed it for that reason.
But bus route 99, which is the direct connection from home to supermarket and postal office and most unfortunately also from home towaxjism's new work location, is late and early frequently. One memorable time a winter or two ago I was stuck at the bus stop for 40 minutes with a tiny wrinkly old lady and 2 young women with babies in strollers because the bus simply never showed up at all and we had to take the next one; it's been observed to leave from the supermarket over five minutes early multiple times; and it's been as much as 20 minutes early or 20 minutes late for Wax's commute multiple times, so that the only way to be assured of not missing it is to go 20 minutes early and be prepared to stand there 40 minutes if necessary. Which is bad enough at the best of times, but needless to say, hardly ideal with our recent cold snap.
So today made the third time that both of us together were stuck with too many bags at that bus stop by the hated 99 and its vicissitudes.
The two previous times we tried waiting for the backup bus route, 60-61 (which involves one transfer and takes ~12 min + a few minutes to ten minutes layover waiting, for a trip that takes 4 minutes by car), the backup bus didn't show for so long that we eventually decided to walk along its route and catch it at the next stop and the next and the next..., and it ended up overtaking us over half an hour later I think??, and one of the times we also tried to wait for a different bus at a nearby bus stop for half the route only to have that bus also be so delayed that we gave up and walked the rest of the way, so both of those times we walked an unnecessarily circuitous route that took ... 45 minutes or so?, once in a miserable pitch-black driving cold autumn rain and once in the summer and sweating to death, both times carrying tons of bags.
Nowadays, there are multiple methods to check the expected ETA and the supposedly real-time location of each bus as well as the list of expected arrivals for one's bus stop. The problem is that these #s can occasionally be disastrously far off and usually disagree with one another. Today when trying to calculate a backup route after the 99 left 5 minutes before its predicted ETA, we got three disagreeing ETAs for the 60 and eventually had to give up and wait 40 minutes for the next 99. But I just wasn't dressed for standing outside for 40 minutes today! Sure, I'm glad it was only -6 (21° F) instead of last week's -21 (-6° F), but... my fingers and nose still haven't recovered and it's been almost 2 hours.
The supermarkets that are big enough to carry the kind of cat tuna that our cats like (the one pet stores don't carry of course!!!) are designed for people with cars and the one near us happens to be serviced by what seems like the city's least-reliable bus route. (Is it the length and # of stops??? idk.) Typically, Turku/Åbo buses are extremely reliable. Apart from this one Bad Bus, I can only think of two incidents when a Turku bus was more than 5 minutes late in my 15 years of using them, and maybe <5 where a bus left early and I missed it for that reason.
But bus route 99, which is the direct connection from home to supermarket and postal office and most unfortunately also from home to
waxjism's new work location, is late and early frequently. One memorable time a winter or two ago I was stuck at the bus stop for 40 minutes with a tiny wrinkly old lady and 2 young women with babies in strollers because the bus simply never showed up at all and we had to take the next one; it's been observed to leave from the supermarket over five minutes early multiple times; and it's been as much as 20 minutes early or 20 minutes late for Wax's commute multiple times, so that the only way to be assured of not missing it is to go 20 minutes early and be prepared to stand there 40 minutes if necessary. Which is bad enough at the best of times, but needless to say, hardly ideal with our recent cold snap. So today made the third time that both of us together were stuck with too many bags at that bus stop by the hated 99 and its vicissitudes.
The two previous times we tried waiting for the backup bus route, 60-61 (which involves one transfer and takes ~12 min + a few minutes to ten minutes layover waiting, for a trip that takes 4 minutes by car), the backup bus didn't show for so long that we eventually decided to walk along its route and catch it at the next stop and the next and the next..., and it ended up overtaking us over half an hour later I think??, and one of the times we also tried to wait for a different bus at a nearby bus stop for half the route only to have that bus also be so delayed that we gave up and walked the rest of the way, so both of those times we walked an unnecessarily circuitous route that took ... 45 minutes or so?, once in a miserable pitch-black driving cold autumn rain and once in the summer and sweating to death, both times carrying tons of bags.
Nowadays, there are multiple methods to check the expected ETA and the supposedly real-time location of each bus as well as the list of expected arrivals for one's bus stop. The problem is that these #s can occasionally be disastrously far off and usually disagree with one another. Today when trying to calculate a backup route after the 99 left 5 minutes before its predicted ETA, we got three disagreeing ETAs for the 60 and eventually had to give up and wait 40 minutes for the next 99. But I just wasn't dressed for standing outside for 40 minutes today! Sure, I'm glad it was only -6 (21° F) instead of last week's -21 (-6° F), but... my fingers and nose still haven't recovered and it's been almost 2 hours.
