![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnAs evidence of my life not having been terribly exciting recently, on Friday I was rather eager to try a new way of getting home from work. For two and a half years I've relied on the subway - both my workplaces have been right on the T's Red Line. The trouble is that the layout of the subway means that to get there I have to go all the way into the city centre on the Green Line and then back out again. That isn't so awful now that I work only a couple of Red Line stops down, but the further trouble is that when any arm of the subway breaks down (which is almost always, now - if you see no red exclamation marks on this page then consider yourself lucky) then they'll just keep you trapped in dark tunnels without speaking to you until the problem is sorted out. After experiencing a couple of these, including once when I was imprisoned between Park Street and Boylston (which are eight inches away from each other) in a crowded train for fully 40 minutes, I'm pretty sure that I've managed to catch claustrophobia. Even when the system was running perfectly the journey often took just under an hour altogether.
It was during a trip to that travel alert page that on a whim I decided to type my home and work locations into the T's route planner, expecting very little. But instead of the route that I was already taking, it gave me a bus that I'd seen around but never paid any attention to - the CT2, which goes between the Red and Green lines on its North-South route and happens to pass by the station next to my work and the last overground stop on the Green Line, therefore skipping all underground sections entirely. Despite my usual fear and loathing of buses brought on by working in Aberdeen, it looked very promising.
I tried it on Friday evening - even the route to the bus stop is as advantageous as possible because thanks to the U-turn it makes as it approaches my work, you have to walk backwards along its route for a minute before intercepting it further down, so you can always see the bus approaching and know exactly when to start running if it comes into view. As it happened, that evening I did exactly that - the bus zoomed past when I was walking to catch it, so after a bit of a dash in and out the other side of the hotel between the two roads, I arrived exactly as the bus did. Have you read this far? Goodness me. I was exactly half its ridership - though it could have been due to it having been a holiday for most people - and an indeterminate amount of undergroundness was replaced with ten minutes being rocketed through the streets by a bus-driving maniac. It dropped me off a few steps away from joining my usual route home (the T site says it's a ten minute walk, but this is only true if you're on a Zimmer frame or are a tortoise), and after a bit of a wait for the not-subway-at-this-point train, I arrived at home twenty-five minutes after I left work.
I feel like, after enduring two and a half years of the subway, I've just been handed some sort of instantaneous travel cheat code, or something. I also feel that it's probably a bad sign that that was the analogy that sprung to my mind first. It does have a catch in that that superfast bus only comes once every half hour, and with the T's usual promptness and reliability, getting to the halfway stop on the overground line while making the outward journey might be a bit of a gamble. But if it works out in both directions, then that's almost an extra free hour in the day I'm getting.
It was during a trip to that travel alert page that on a whim I decided to type my home and work locations into the T's route planner, expecting very little. But instead of the route that I was already taking, it gave me a bus that I'd seen around but never paid any attention to - the CT2, which goes between the Red and Green lines on its North-South route and happens to pass by the station next to my work and the last overground stop on the Green Line, therefore skipping all underground sections entirely. Despite my usual fear and loathing of buses brought on by working in Aberdeen, it looked very promising.
I tried it on Friday evening - even the route to the bus stop is as advantageous as possible because thanks to the U-turn it makes as it approaches my work, you have to walk backwards along its route for a minute before intercepting it further down, so you can always see the bus approaching and know exactly when to start running if it comes into view. As it happened, that evening I did exactly that - the bus zoomed past when I was walking to catch it, so after a bit of a dash in and out the other side of the hotel between the two roads, I arrived exactly as the bus did. Have you read this far? Goodness me. I was exactly half its ridership - though it could have been due to it having been a holiday for most people - and an indeterminate amount of undergroundness was replaced with ten minutes being rocketed through the streets by a bus-driving maniac. It dropped me off a few steps away from joining my usual route home (the T site says it's a ten minute walk, but this is only true if you're on a Zimmer frame or are a tortoise), and after a bit of a wait for the not-subway-at-this-point train, I arrived at home twenty-five minutes after I left work.I feel like, after enduring two and a half years of the subway, I've just been handed some sort of instantaneous travel cheat code, or something. I also feel that it's probably a bad sign that that was the analogy that sprung to my mind first. It does have a catch in that that superfast bus only comes once every half hour, and with the T's usual promptness and reliability, getting to the halfway stop on the overground line while making the outward journey might be a bit of a gamble. But if it works out in both directions, then that's almost an extra free hour in the day I'm getting.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-06 06:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-07 08:08 pm (UTC)http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/8136141.stm
no subject
Date: 2009-07-07 08:22 pm (UTC)