When I can, I try to take public transportation. I believe in busses, trams, trollies, and depending on where you’re from or what kind of English you speak the metro/subway/tube.

Part of it is habit. I haven’t driven a car regularly since high school. For anyone counting, that’s four years of college, five years in Washington DC and five years in Bulgaria. I was able to do this because these cities both have decent public transportation by which I mean, buses and the metro came arrived at regular intervals and the systems had good hours of coverage. Neither was a great system (the DC system was expensive and the Sofia system made do with ancient vehicles) but both were good enough.

Additionally, I was lucky to be able to live in areas of town that were walkable which made things like grocery shopping much easier. I also don’t feel badly about grabbing a taxi when I need to, given my commitment to public transportation.

So when I moved to Seattle, I wondered if I even needed a car.<!--more-->

Clearly, the answer is: no I don’t need a car but I do have one.

I have one because I was lucky enough to get a good used car through family friends. I have one because the Seattle metro area is actually pretty spread out and the public transportation isn’t as good as other cities I’ve lived in. I have a car because it’s easy and frankly, I have a car because I can.

Still I take the bus more often than I drive places and I fill my gas tank up maybe once a month. This has given me plenty of opportunities to use Seattle public transportation and I like it just fine.

What I think is so funny about Seattle are the other passengers and the impact of the physical geography of Seattle on the experience.

There’s a crowded bus that I’ve been taking in the mornings. The bus fills up and standing passengers always grumble about moving back in the bus. The thing is, I don’t understand why passengers stop halfway back in the bus to start with. Why not move all the way back in the first place?

I also can’t get over passengers complaining about how crowded the busses are. Seattle busses just don’t seem crowded to me. If there are 8 or 9 people in the isle of the bus, this usually results in a fair amount of audible muttering over why the bus has gotten so crowded.

Me, I think: this isn’t crowded. I am reminded of buses I’ve taken in Sofia where to get on the bus you must physically push your way on and even if you can reach a bar to hold on to it’s okay because you are propped up shoulder to shoulder by fellow passengers. I have yet to experience this in Seattle and I suspect that I never will. I guess my bar for what is crowded or not is just different.

What I have experienced a few times recently are buses which after picking up passengers are unable to get in gear and make it up the hill they are climbing. When this happens the bus driver gets on the intercom and rather dejectedly announces: I am unable to move forward right now. If there are passengers who can get off at this stop, please do. Sometimes, this first announcement works. Sometimes it doesn’t and the bus driver must plead with passengers to debark.

Until this happened the first time a couple of weeks ago, I had no idea that this was an actual thing that could happen. After the first announcement, I thought: Of course, this is Seattle. Up until this moment, sitting on the bus on this hill, I’d assumed that the bus was broken. Ha!