Schedules are evil

I'm trying the bike in, bus home, bus in, bike home, idea. AT the moment two 36km rides a day is too much biking. It would probably be fine if they were good clean rides like the 24km ride I sed to have down Innes Road but they're often not. Downtown is a mess to bike through, much worse than I recall. More congested and the "free money being spent to delay the collapse" construction only exacerbates matters.

Living here has also revealed to me why I have never been comfortable with western Ottawa. Don't get me wrong, staying with the Running Man Clan is great, it's only when I leave the house that it bothers me. I've concluded that Ottawa west wasn't built with human beings in mind. It was built on a basis of automobiles and consumers. If, when I leave the house, I get in my car everything is fine. Driving is good, wide open boulevards lots of parking. There are also lots of recreational trails but it's all constructed very much the idea that walking, running and cycling are things you can choose to do as hobbies. If you want. Just stay out of the way of the consumers driving their Explorer's to and from. If I try to do something without using my car there's this pervasive aura of "you don't belong here bicycle as transportation man".

But I'm off topic. I'm here today to rant about schedules. Why post a schedule if you're not even going to try to follow it? Yesterday I bus home. I want to run a quick errand downtown so I decide to change buses there. I get off my 95 bus and lo and behold there is a 96 right in front of us loading. 96 is the route I need from here. A quick look at the schedule says the 96 comes by every 6 minutes. Excellent, I'll quickly do my business and catch the next 96. I get back to the stop after about 3 minutes. After a 23 minute wait a 96 arrives and I'm wondering what happened to the three route 96s that didn't show up in the meantime? At least when this used to happen to me years ago with the 95s all four buses would show up at the same time as a violent reminder that light rail is long overdue.

This morning I catch a 96 in Kanata a little later than I'd like my fault. According to the schedule it's 36 minutes to Hurdman station. In real life, during summer vacation light traffic and on far from packed buses it took a little over 50 minutes. At this point I'm too afraid to wait the "15 minutes" for the 190. If it's anything like the 96 I'll be over an hour late for work. So I take the next bus I see headed east and walk the last 15 minutes to the office.

How, I ask, can the government expect people to take public transit under these conditions? Is it reasonable to ask people to replace a 45 minute commute by car with a 120 minute (just in case a driver calls in sick) public transit ordeal? Not until the oil runs out.

All this to say the guy who invented the clock should be even more ashamed of himself than the guy who invented the calendar. I am so looking forward to passing my days by rising with the sun and walking until I get where I'm going that day.

I'll ett when I'm hungry,
An' I'll drink when I'm dry,
An' if moonshine don't kill me,
I'll live 'till I die!