Kudos for Public Transit

We're iced in up here in the Pacific Northwest. That, and Christmas shopping traffic over the holiday weekend got me taking the bus.

I'm not usually a bus person - I believe in them, but my schedule always seems to make it a tough idea. I suspect I'm not the only one out there thinking this is a good idea, but hard to implement. Partly because I'm doing this (there are a lot of reasons to do this blog, and one of them is to remind myself about habit changes I can make), I decided I should try it out the day after Thanksgiving when I needed to go to downtown Seattle on Black Friday. I have a flex-pass provided by my work as part of the commuter program. I hadn't used it in over a year. So I looked up the bus routes and discovered that if I drove a mile to the park and ride, I could get an express bus to one block from my destination. It worked perfectly.

I'm a horrible snow and ice driver. So I tried again when I needed to get to work yesterday. There's a bus stop across the street from the entrance to my neighborhood. I used it. It takes the same route I would have taken driving, and about two minutes longer than driving on a clear-road day. That's faster than me driving on ice. The bus, and my return bus, were both on-time, safe, warm, and the bus driver was friendly so I got a greeting and a "Have a nice day" out of it.
I'm going to take the bus again today. Better, even though my schedule really does stop me some days when I have mid-day meetings all over town, I suspect I'll start sorting for days that I can take the bus instead of making it so hard in my head.

Let's hear it for the bus-drivers and this excellent use of our taxes. The only sad part was that the busses weren't very full.