Argh. What will it take to get this town to actually run buses at halfway reasonable hours? I’m sure that a good number of people would get more use out of a bus running at 8 PM than one running at 1 PM… seriously, if you work 9 to 5, there’s not really any time to do anything else! And if you work past 6:30 PM or so…good luck getting a taxi; I read an article in the local paper a while back that some cab companies have flat-out refused to give people in other parts of town a ride at night because they were too busy escorting drunk students home from downtown.
And it’s really bad on the weekends. Some of the routes don’t run at all on Saturdays; others (the ones that actually do run more than once an hour) run on an even sparser schedule than usual, or at the least, force you to take a more roundabout route. And forget about getting to campus from the edges of town, or vice versa, on Sundays; the only route running then is the campus weekend route.
It wouldn’t be so bad if (a) everything weren’t so ridiculously spread out, and (b) roads actually had sidewalks and crosswalks in halfway logical locations. But no, we have things like crosswalks spaced miles apart on very busy roads, sidewalks that randomly disappear and reappear, busy intersections without crosswalks… and the traffic around here scares me sometimes. It’s bad enough as a pedestrian; there’s no way I could drive in this without crashing into something! And as for the whole issue of sprawl, the nearest grocery store to campus is about a mile from the nearest edge of campus (which, thankfully, is the south edge at which I’m living)— which is hardly the most convenient distance for carrying several heavy bags of groceries. It’s even worse in the other parts of campus. You’d think the zoning laws would actually encourage the placement of a store that might, I don’t know, actually be convenient for students!
I guess I should be glad that I at least live on one of the campus bus stops, which actually does run into the night (though only to campus destinations and downtown). I seriously don’t see how people can live off-campus and survive… oh, right, they’re un-spacey enough to actually pay attention to all the unpredictable traffic, or at least they can find someone to live with who can drive them around. Meh.
i hear ya, i hear ya. It’s been my rant for the past 5 years living in athens. the bus systems, the cab system, -this is just too much of a car-dependent town
Glad to know someone else here agrees! Seriously, it gets tiring reading about all these events that I literally can’t go to without having to find someone to give me a ride. :-\