Bus Vs Train

I have a well known loathing of public transport. It is of course a necessary evil that gets me to work and saves me from paying astronomical sums of cash for car parking.

I usually travel by train, which at my new abode it not as simple as it used to be. Once I had a three minute walk to the station and a train straight through to my destination. Now my trip to work looks something like this;
1. Drive to the vicinity of the station and park as close as possible. 10-15 minutes.
2. Walk from car to station. About 10 minutes, depending if I parked outside number 8 or 15 and anywhere in between.
3. Wait for train, could be up to 15minutes if I have just missed one.
4. Travel to Epping. 5 minutes.
5. Change trains at Epping, can be up to 14 minutes and involves going down two very long escalators and waiting.
6. Ride train through the Tunnel from Epping to Chatswood. 25 minutes of blackness outside and usually a flickering fluorescent inside.
7. Walk from station to office, 5 minutes.

This is of course done in reverse order on the way home. So I travel for up to an hour and a half each way, with a number of changes and loads of waiting. I find it very hard to do anything on my trip, such as reading, because I’m not really settled for very long in any particular place. I find it hard to read on the stations, because frankly, I just try to stay warm, which is not always possible when the platforms seem to be a wind funnel.

Today I tried another option to see if it was a better way to travel. I took the bus:
1. Walk to bus stop. 6minutes. Today I stepped straight onto the bus, but there could be up to a 5 minute wait.
2. Sit on bus for an hour and watch the world go by.
3. Get off bus and walk to office. 3 minutes.

This is a 70 minute option. It knocks 20 minutes off the trip, plus I don’t have to fight for a seat or do the escalator shuffle. I’m going to give this a go for the rest of the week to see how it goes. I arrived at work feeling marginally more relaxed than when I travel by train despite the constant stop start to let passengers on and off and the driver locking us all in while he nipped to the loo at Macquarie Uni.

What I like about the bus is that you get to look around. The world passes you by just a little slower and you get to see things you would normally miss. You travel down roads you always wondered where they led. This morning I saw the side of Eastwood I have never seen before and discovered there is Rice Cake shop there. Love rice cake :-) Also, no travelling backwards on a bus...backs of heads only, sometime an ear if you're near the sideways seats in the disabled bit.

You still get inconsiderate passengers of course. No feet on seats, but some woman did get on with a pull along suitcase and proceed to put it on the seat. It had muddy wheels.

I’ll let you know how it goes.