From Portland, Oregon: "Here? No? Here?" [a Top Ten Bus Stories nominee], by Bill Reagan (posted on Trimet Diaries)

The man waiting on the corner had no way of knowing that the young woman’s bus ride had been thoroughly exasperating. He would have understood her exuberant leap from the bus if he had known how she spent the entire ride from downtown wondering if the next stop was hers, or the next, unsure if she was even close, wishing someone on the #35 spoke Japanese. But he didn’t know, and that’s why he got the wrong idea.

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From Herriman, Utah: "Because I'm Selfish," by Greg Platt

I've met a lot of people who ride transit.  It kind of comes with the territory of riding transit.

Some people ride because of Global Warming. Or Global Climate Change. Or because Al Gore has them scared, I don't know. (I could have the discussion about the impact of humans on the global environment; I even teach a class where we discuss the relative merits of each side of the argument; this is not that discussion).

I admire those people. They see a problem, they see something they can do about it, and they do it. I find that laudable.

But that's not why I ride.

(Read more here.)

From Silicon Valley: "Diary," by Rebecca Solnit (The London Review of Books)

The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course wifi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.

(Read more here.)

From San Francisco: from kateohclock on Tumblr

They say you aren’t a New Yorker until you’ve cried on the subway without caring about what people think about you.

(See more here.)