Category: buses

Dogs are well-behaved Metro bus riders!

Arf! Gracie here.

Seattle Weekly published an article about bad passengers….the kind who drive bus drivers crazy.

My mom was delighted. She’s tired of all those articles complaining about bus drivers. Most, she says, are saints to put up with everything.

And, she said as she pointed to the article, “you’ll notice there isn’t one complaint here about dogs on buses!”

My mom and I have a little game. When we get to the bus stop on Bell Street, near the park, we go to the front door so we’ll be ready to leave as soon as the bus stops. We wait behind the yellow line and my mom says, “Sit!”

Of course I make a big production of sitting proudly on command. Everybody oohs and ahs.

Did you know that dogs who can do a good “sit” have higher self-esteem than those who don’t? Well, my self-esteem is over the top.

My mom has many issues (from the canine perspective) but self-esteem isn’t one of them. She always says to the driver (and anyone in hearing distance): “Now, isn’t this a well-behaved dog?”

Nobody argues.

Smart People Ride Seattle Metro Buses

[My mom wrote this before I took over the blog]

Downtown in the ride-free zone, I hop on a bus for the library. The hill from Third to Fourth Avenue is dauntingly steep. If I’m on on the #2 — which stops right there — I’ve learned to get off earlier and walk or grab the first bus heading south on Fifth Avenue.

Today I’m on a bus with one of those mysterious three-digit numbers, which means he’s headed to an outlying area I’ve never heard of.

“Do you stop at Spring or Seneca?” I ask the driver.

“I stop at Spring.” He’s a tall, slim man with glasses, very friendly.

“Well, your sign says express, so I wondered…”

“The word express is a misnomer,” he says. “Downtown everybody’s a local.”

“Misnomer? Did you say misnomer? Are you a moonlighting graduate student?”

He laughs. Earlier he did indeed get a graduate degree in one of the language study areas, but he’s been driving for sixteen years, he tells me. He likes the job. It’s a bad job to hate, he says. You have to like it.

“I’d be a truck driver myself,” I say, “if I were a better driver. But I don’t like driving in the rain, or on bridges or tunnels.”

“Truck driving? Too much time away from home,” he says, and we wave good-by as I get off, right in front of the Fifth Avenue entrance to the library.

Why We Ride Seattle Metro

[My mom Cathy wrote this entry before I took over the blog.]

When I tell people I don’t drive, they first assume I can’t afford a car.

Actually, up to August 2005, I had a wonderful Toyota Corolla. I sold it four days after moving here, through Craigslist.

Why? I really don’t like to drive through rain, traffic, bridges and tunnels. I’m a cowardly driver: in traffic, everyone else gets to go ahead of me. I brake a lot on bridges and tunnels.

Once I was braver. I learned to drive in San Francisco and drove a VW there for years. When I moved back, years later, to attend grad school at UC Berkeley, I had a little 5-speed Nissan Sentra – a 1985 box. I drove across the Bay Bridge almost every day and later drove back and forth to Chico, California, where I taught for three semesters while finishing my PhD.

I kept it for 11 years and sold it in Canada. The locks broke and I was moving to Philadelphia, a bad place for an unlocked car. The Nissan’s new owner, a woman pilot who lived in the bush, she had no need for locks (and she could repair the car herself). For all I know, the car still runs around the Canadian wilderness.

When I moved to Florida in 1998 I bought a Toyota Corolla with air conditioning, automatic transmission and 4 doors. It seemed so luxurious! Four doors seemed excessive till I got Keesha, my very first dog. Forty-five pounds with extra fur on top.

I drove all up and down I-95 which was terrifying. Lots of tailgating drivers who made interesting gestures when I pointed to the rearview mirror.

I drove to New Mexico, where I lived for four years. Almost every month I went to Tucson, Arizona, which is one of the most beautiful drives in the entire country and maybe the world. Southwest drivers are kind. They signal for lane changes. They rarely tailgate. They pull over during thunderstorms, which is good, because the roads flood easily and even SUV’s can hydroplane.

I drove to Santa Fe where my car was rear-ended by a driver who admitted she wasn’t paying attention. Amazingly, the insurance paid everything and her company paid my deductible.

But I couldn’t wait to stop driving. Hence my move to Seattle. Driving four days in a car packed with 2 cats and a 40-pound dog convinced me: I don’t want to do this anymore.

And I haven’t.