Public Transportation Is Other People
One of the first things I remember doing after I started at Telchemy was paying my taxes, which, that week actually starting the Monday before, means it took me three months to the day to get completely fed up with driving. Today I decided to triple my commute time and took the bus to work.
I think I may be able to cut that time down a bit, but it’s going to take some experimentation. This morning I took the train to Doraville where I hopped on to the GCT route 10, which takes a slow, meandering path up through Norcross to the Gwinnett transit hub, a dingy circle of concrete and traffic cones behind the movie at theater at Gwinnett Place Mall. Having missed the next bus there by about ten minutes or so, I then waited another twenty for the number 40 which heads up to Discover Mills and from there on to Lawrenceville. The 40 was a bit problematic in that I’m not sure exactly where it goes or stops through Discover Mills. There’s a park and ride lot near where I’d like to start biking on Sugarloaf, but it appears to only be accessible to southbound buses, so once the bus started circling around the far side of the mall I just bailed out. Maybe it circles back; I don’t know. At any rate, they’re both local buses and both seriously slow. There’s an express bus that travels from Arts Center, a seemingly distant start but really only station south of where I transfer for the northeast line. It’s probably faster, though it’s on a less forgiving schedule and costs an extra $1.25. Maybe I’ll give it a shot some time.
The transfer process between MARTA and GCT is pretty goofy. Though I did see one bus with some sort of a disabled Breeze reader on it, but this bus was noticeably different in other respects—high ceilings, luggage racks, reclinable Greyhound-style seats—so I suspect it was meant for GRTA routes and perhaps pressed into local service after the distressingly early Xpress cutoff time had passed. GCT does not do Breeze. To transfer to GCT from the MARTA station, though no physical proof of fare is possible in this transferless tomorrow, they still want something, so the driver asks to see your Breeze card. Perhaps this made sense a couple of years ago, back when you could only buy the paper ticket and couldn’t reload it, but now that the driver can’t take away whatever else might have been loaded on there they simply ask for proof that you were at some point in your life a paying MARTA customer, or at least you went through the trouble to mug one. On the way back they use those old bus-to-rail transfer cards that used to litter the floors of the station back before we were supposed to be able to do away with them.
With the exception of that one I rode on the way home, the buses were basically MARTA buses—same hard plastic seats, same layout, same stuttering sigh when they brake. However, they seemed much more austere than MARTA buses: the comically huge fire extinguisher is replaced by one you might find in a home, equally ineffective against a CNG engine catching fire, and, more strikingly, there were no ads, no TVs incessantly blaring, no placard on the bike rack offering me low low financing on a used car. I think this is just because GCT hasn’t found any bail bondsmen or loan consolidation companies willing to spend money on a second tier bus system. A handful of the bus shelters had their ad space filled with big “YOUR AD HERE” banners, but never was there a taker.
In conclusion GCT isn’t so bad, but if the crowds making the same transfers I did were any indication, GCT really needs to expand. Maybe Gwinnett will wise up and let MARTA in one of these days.