Go Metro?

The hot sun, staring at me, wakes me up as if its trying to lift my eyelids up and poke a finger in my eyes. There is hot dust around me and I am not on my bed, I am at the changeover bus stop called peck road, waiting for my next connecting bus to office. Worst of all I am as sleepy as one is when he just puts the tooth brush in his mouth in the morning. The bus stop!! Is just one pole which reads the bus number (interestingly not even the stop name). Its difficult to feel this harsh on the morning Sun unless one sees it for himself, how hot or pinching is morning 7:30 Sun in dry California. The 35 mins in the first bus used to be so sleepy that it was almost as if being thrown out of the bus while you were sleeping.

I used to see this advertisement daily in the bus which said, "Free yourself, go metro". Well! Irony has never been fun at such times but some times I used to analyze what freedom one would get if he chose metro. Here's what I could get:

First of all metro wasn't a choice, I had to choose it because that was the only means to my office. I think in my most previous sojourns also I never made a choice for public transport. Public transport generally is not a choice by conventional wisdom, choosing a luxurious transport is rather. Well for here, its a little opposite. I researched the LA area metro pamphlets, website, maps and understood the value of the shortest path algorithm finally. Not that it could have solved any problem if I had studied it properly, only thing is that considering all the options in this world from my home to office there was only one way by changing a bus in between, both run by different companies, both honoring different monthly passes and most helpfully, different offical times and late timings. So very often my ~1 hour travel time used to translate into ~1 hour 40 mins: courtesy late/missing buses. Also the frequency of the office hours buses is 30 mins (and very intelligently these buses keep to their 30 mins frequency even when there would be no one using them whole day).

So to the traveler, who has become wise and become free I would suggest to get a backpack and keep the following stuff at all times of travel: Food (muffins/fruits), an umbrella for these 40 mins wait in the sun, something to read if you can do that in the sun and headphones to avoid distraction from other free spooky travelers.

So wisdom says, gas prices have gone up, freeways are choked etc and one should use metro only. I would say please go ahead and tell me when you see one wise or free man traveling with you. As for me it was none less than a freedom struggle to free myself from this metro!! For me the campaign always used to read "Go metro? Free yourself (rather)"