Instructional columns are “in” right now, and have been since the 60s, so today, instead of screaming at you to adjust your opinion to mine and embarrassing this newspaper, I thought I’d do you a favor and tell you how to ride the bus. Think of this as a recipe for transportation success.
First, as a UNM student you get to ride the bus for free, so pick up your ABQ RIDE sticker from the information desk in the SUB and get ready for unmitigated fun.
With gas prices as high as they are, you will find that the idea of saving money will propel you through freezing or burning waits at bus stops with strange strangers.
Ignoring these strangers is of the utmost importance to enjoying your bus ride. The bus is an unfaithful mistress, and as she lets anyone who wants a ride come inside. Ignoring others is a critical skill.
Buy headphones, crank them up, keep your arms crossed and your eyes down. This is even more important for women to do because there will be a line of perverted old men desperate to hit on the fairer sex if any openness is perceived.
For men, this is an occasional problem, but I have personally observed a young woman so beset upon that she had to start handing out numbered tickets to keep any semblance of order.
The other thing ignoring people can help you with is social interaction of any kind. Talking to people is passé. Things like iPods not only keep you isolated, they also have the added benefit of keeping away people who want to tell you that caffeine, chocolate, cranberries and cocaine are all the same thing because they start with a “C.”
And they fend off people like the fellow who wishes to inform the world that you and everyone else on the bus is going to die on Nov. 12, 2012 because of Mayan space aliens who wish to engage in some sort of discombobulated and badly formulated reclamation plan.
Once you’ve mastered the art of the ignore, you can move on to calculating your trip time. I personally always leave an hour before I likely need to. This is crucial. If you miss a bus, you may be as much as 45 minutes late; the bus being slower than a car, more crowded and having a bad tendency to stop to let crazy people on. You may end up 45 minutes early to every place you wish to be, but at least you’ll get there.
Remember to beware of streets running north to south. These buses have odd schedules and are less reliable than buses that run east and west. When planning a trip, try to always travel east or west.
There are some people who complain about all the scheduling. This is nonsense. In the 90s when the buses ran under SunTran, you were lucky if you only waited an hour. You were lucky if a bus even came. ABQ RIDE as run by Greg Payne has greatly increased in effectiveness to a modern bus system that works.
The buses are modern enough to have a pleasing female voice announcing the streets as they pass, another useful feature of the fully functional buses. Some buses even have TV screens playing city propaganda, often with quiz sections. The trick with the quizzes is to memorize the information and impress your friends with the correct answer every single time.
And you will have time to memorize them all, given the travel time.
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But given all this, just imagine the time spent trying to find a parking space on campus, waiting for a shuttle, vandalism to your vehicle, gas prices, paying the absurd prices for a parking ticket, racing to pay your meter before you get another type of ticket and all that traffic, traffic, traffic.
Riding the bus is like a walk in the park.
