Bad business
Downtown, the cage is up around Market Square, which can only mean one thing: St. Patrick’s Day. The masses are smartly gathering at the end of our street, waiting for a bus to take them to the “fun.” There’s one problem, though: there’s no bus.
I’ve watched the crowd grow from 5 to 20 to probably 50. With each passing bus, the mumur of drunken discontent grows louder. Some Most are abandoning the wait, choosing, probably unwisely, to walk back to their cars and make the trip by other means.
The buses run at a frequency unchanged from their normal weekend schedule, and the ones that do go by fail to stop. I don’t know if the riders are being passed by because the buses are full, or because the drivers don’t want to deal with a bunch of happy drunks in Abercrombie & Fitch.
Either way, it’s a loss for the Port Authority, and for its regular riders. Failing to be flexible and accommodating to the special needs of the day is just fuel for the fire of those who posit the growing irrelevance of our transit system. I can imagine 50 different conversations once the revelers arrive downtown, all going something like this:
“Dude, what took you so long? I’m already smashed!”
“It’s the fuckin’ bus, man. I waited an hour for it and watched three go by without stopping.”
“Dude, the bus sucks.”
“I know.”
