A bus rider’s glossary

Speaking of transit-inspired language…

[Note: This post is updated regularly as new terms are added.]

Bus luh, n: A bus-based interaction between two people who are attracted to each other. The interactions vary widely, but participants are always: riding on or waiting for a bus; in love, lust, or very deep like; and engaging in some sort of physical contact.

Bus mack, n: An attempted bus hook-up, in which one rider approaches another in a way that indicates romantic and/or sexual interest. On rare occasions, a bus mack can result in future instances of bus luh (see above).

Bus foul, n: An action or behavior–on a bus or at a bus stop–that negatively impacts other riders; a bus equivalent of a party foul. An example: taking up more than one seat when the bus is full. (For more examples, see above.)

Bus chick bag, n: A reusable bag that experienced riders use to carry bus necessities. These necessities might include: bus pass, wallet, book, cell phone, laptop, bus schedules, umbrella, gloves, hand warmers, flashlight, glue stick, Swiss Army knife, compass, notebook, pens, pencils, hair implements, plastic bags, chapstick, mascara, mp3 player, snacks, to-do list, city maps, lotion, antibacterial gel, digital camera… Bus chick bags take many forms but are most commonly backpacks.

Pack jam, n: An unfortunate incident that involves a strap or buckle of a rider’s bus chick bag (see above) becoming entangled with (or trapped beneath) some part of the bus or another rider at the moment the rider is preparing to disembark. This usually results in frantic shouts for the driver to “Wait!” and is often followed by extreme embarrassment.

Bus-wide discussion, n: A conversation that involves at least three passengers who were not previously acquainted and is conducted for the benefit of everyone on the bus. Common topics for bus-wide discussions: weather, elections, major sporting events, “the good old days.”

Lentement, a, n: Slow, either literally or figuratively; uncool; a person or object that exhibits the aforementioned characteristics.

This term can be applied beyond the world of public transportation.

Schmipod, n: A non-Apple (read: affordable) mp3 player (preferably with a radio tuner) that one can use to listen to music, podcasts, recorded books, and other audio delights on buses and at stops.

Bus crush, n:
1. Feelings of overwhelming admiration–occasionally, though not necessarily, of a romantic nature–for a fellow passenger; excessive interest in, or curiosity about, a fellow passenger.
2. The object of such admiration or interest.

BWI, v: Busing while intoxicated. Riding any form of public transportation while under the influence of alcohol or other (less legal) drugs. BWI is usually identified by the telltale scent of the intoxicating substance and its associated bizarre, antisocial, or otherwise transit-unfriendly behavior. (See also: bus foul, trife, Seahawks Special)

BDP, n: Bus driver’s pet or bus driver’s pest, depending on the circumstances. A person who sits in the front of the bus, in the seat nearest the driver, and engages the driver in conversation for the duration of their ride. BDPs tend to be regular riders and commonly offer advice and assistance (solicited and otherwise) to other passengers.

BCiT, n: Bus chick in training. A young person, usually under the age of 12, who is learning the bus-riding ropes. A BCiT always rides with an experienced bus chick while she masters basic bus survival skills, such as when to ring the bell, how and when to pay, and appropriate bus behavior–and then more advanced skills, including schedule-reading, trip-planning, and street safety. If she shows promise, she is permitted to ride without a mentor, and, eventually, initiated into the sisterhood of full-fledged bus chicks.

Bus legs, n: The ability to effectively balance oneself while standing or walking on a moving bus, no matter how unpredictable the traffic or inexperienced the driver.

The transfer trade, n The system of exchanging bus tickets, paper transfers, and bus passes for money or other items of value.

Stop sense, n: The ability to detect when one’s transit destination is approaching without looking out the window or at the digital display at the front of the vehicle; a subconscious awareness of the location of one’s transit stop.

Stop sense is essential for those who enjoy transit catnaps, regularly read while riding, or frequently find themselves sucked into the black hole of their smartphones.

OBC, n: Original bus chick. A person who has actively chosen transit over other forms of transportation for several decades; an extremely experienced transit rider.
OBCs have all the necessary skills and equipment for bus successful bus living and tend to have encyclopedic knowledge about routes and rules. Most have personal friendships with their regular drivers.

Transit-inspired language

In May of 2005, Bus Nerd and I took a trip to Paris. I speak French fairly fluently and so gave him a few lessons (enough so he would feel comfortable ordering in restaurants and reading the odd sign) before we left. He decided, in true nerd fashion, to practice his newfound skills by speaking only French on the trip–even to me.

On the RER ride from the airport, which was taking longer than he expected and jeopardizing an appointment in the city, he turned to me and blurted out the only French word he knew that could communicate his frustration: “Lentement!”

Lentement (my best attempt at a phonetic interpretation: lontmaw), you see, is the French word for slowly.

I fell out. (So, I assume, did most of the French people riding near us on the train. At least they had the decency to do it in their heads.)

Thankfully, the ride was not as “lentement” as it originally seemed (turns out, the map was somewhat misleading), and we arrived in the city right on time. For the rest of the trip, the word became our private joke. If we were stuck behind slow pedestrians or waiting to cross the street at an interminable traffic light, one of us would whisper it to the other. Line too long at a museum? Grounds for a “lentement.” And etc.

The tradition continued after we returned to Seattle (often, not surprisingly, when we were riding the 4). Over time, it has evolved to encompass anything that we consider to be figuratively slow, or, to put it more succinctly, uncool. Some examples: SUVs, public displays of bus luh, Flavor of Love (Moni, I’m looking at you), modeling a ball gown at an art walk…

Lentement can be used as almost any part of speech, but it is most commonly used as an adjective (“That is so lentement!”) or a noun (“What a lentement!”). You get the picture. (I hope.)

Why am I telling you this? Because, almost two years after the Paris trip, I still use the word all the time. At least once a week, I am tempted to use it in a post. And then I realize that no one, other than Bus Nerd, my brothers, and a few unlucky friends, knows what the heck it means. Now you do. That makes you a lentement, too.

My 48 ride home

The bus is late and crowded, so I am forced to sit in the very back.

To my left: Two dudes rolling joints, counting change, and discussing the relative fluid levels in their lighters.

To my right: A young woman talking on a cell phone, apparently to another young woman who is taking care of her child. She alternates between coaching the caretaker in the fine art of potty training (Ask him if he wants to go poo-poo.), giving orders to the child over the speaker (Darrell, I’m not playing–you’d better eat that sandwich!), and gossiping.

To my far right: A mailman in short shorts, showing way too much thigh for February (OK, ever) reading a car-racing magazine.

Folks with car commutes: What you got?

The new transit advertising debate (or, Bus wraps: “so last year.”)

Because I’d like to see more and better public transportation in this region, I’d also like to see more–and better–sources of public transportation funding. In my ideal world, we’d fund transit with gas taxes, parking taxes, tolls, and congestion charges–instead of just sales tax. For now, I’ll settle for advertising as a source of revenue.

Which brings me to my point…

In December, the King County Transit Advisory Committee, “an appointed County board drawn from King County Metro Transit riders,” sent a letter to Seattle City Councilmember Jan Drago encouraging the city to allow “tasteful” advertising in bus shelters. (Apparently, this is currently not allowed.) An excerpt from the letter:

The King County Transit Advisory Committee respectfully requests that you and your Seattle City Council colleagues study the potential for Seattle to join with Metro Transit in placing revenue-generating, tasteful advertising panels on Seattle-area Metro Transit bus shelters.

Our committee has researched the use of bus shelter advertising in municipal locations within the United States and internationally. We have learned that municipalities can tightly control advertising content and images, while striking revenue deals that greatly enhance the ability to provide shelters and another important customer amenity, signage. Given the urgent need to upgrade customer service and amenities during the coming decade, the King County Transit Advisory Committee strongly favors the use of such advertising-enhanced revenue to increase the number, cleanliness and quality of bus shelters, adjacent lighting and informational signage within the City of Seattle.

(Full disclosure. I was recently appointed to the TAC. I attended my first meeting as a member on February 13th.)

I’d love to see more shelters and better signage, but I’m afraid it will be difficult to come to consensus about how we define “tasteful.” I was all for bus wraps (which, in case you missed it, are going away) until I saw McDonald’s-wrapped buses and Fox-News– and Mercedes-Benz- wrapped People Movers in Detroit. I also hate the idea of corporations having that kind of access to our public spaces. (Anyone seen the monument to Starbucks at Powell Barnett?)

That said, I’ve seen bus shelter ads in other cities, and they actually looked nice. Here are a few examples I found in my own photo archives:

Paris shelter ad
Paris shelter ad
Vacnouver shelter ad
Vancouver shelter ad

The TAC’s letter also has a few.

Bottom line: We need more transit funding, and we definitely need more shelters and better signs. I support the shelter ads, but I’ll continue to raise my voice (and vote) for more public funding of public transit.

Your turn.

Big (yet fashionable!) shoes

Unlike my Gail, my mother was not a bus chick sympathizer. Truth be told, she didn’t much like the bus or my decision to ride it every-dang-where. And truth be told, I often wished she was more interested in my ideas about sustainable transportation than she was in my ability to coordinate belts and purses. But despite our surface differences, she was an amazing role model for me, a model of courage I didn’t fully appreciate until now.

This week’s Real Change column:

On Jan. 3, after a four-and-a-half year battle with breast cancer, my mother, Caroline Dunne Saulter, died. She was 61 years old.
Caroline never approved of my choice to live without a car. She blamed herself, for allowing me to ride the bus at such an early age; my father, for showing me how; my husband, for providing my first example of car-freedom; and me, for being my stubborn, willful (and impractical) self. She wanted me to live a mainstream middle-class life, to stay indefinitely when I visited (instead of until the last bus left her neighborhood), to be protected from the elements, and to be inside (either a building or a vehicle) after dark. Despite my unwavering commitment to my choice, she hoped that one day I would grow up, get over it, and just buy a hybrid already.

The irony of this is that it was, in large part, my mother’s example that gave me the courage to step outside the mainstream and choose a life that reflected my values.

Caroline’s commitment to her own ideals began at an early age. Despite her head-turning beauty and easy popularity, she chose not to accept the bigoted views of her peers in the suburban Ohio town where she attended high school and almost always found herself on the “wrong” side of lunch-table arguments. When she was 16, she took a bus by herself from Cleveland to Washington, D.C., to participate in the March on Washington. She remembered the experience as one of the most moving of her life.

In 1966, she left college, joined Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), and moved to Oregon to help improve conditions for Russian and Mexican migrant workers. It was there that she met my father, a Seattle native and brilliant University of Oregon architecture student who also happened to be Black. They married — at a time when many states still had anti-miscegenation laws — and finished school together.

When Caroline was 28 and most of her girlfriends were shopping preschools, she and my father joined the Peace Corps and moved (along with my older sister, Carey, and me) to Morocco for two years. After we returned, she continued to give her time to the causes she cared about while raising her (eventually four) children.

When she was 57, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She battled the disease with grace and courage — continuing to participate in life to the extent she was able and, in the process, inspiring countless other cancer patients.

So it is not despite, but because of Caroline that I have chosen to live according to my beliefs. Though her life was cut short, she managed to leave the world in better shape than she found it. How could I, presented with her example, not attempt to do the same?

I’ve eased my way into life without her, but there is not a moment of the day when she is not on my mind. I only wish Real Change gave me a higher word count.

Another cool(ish) bus tool

Am I the only one who didn’t know that Metro’s website lets you create custom schedules? Probably, but just in case there are one or two others: Go to any route timetable; click the “custom print” button at the top of the page; and then choose the direction, window of time, and stops that are important to you. I just made custom schedule for the 8 and one for the 4. Easy. For a bus chick, even fun.

This feature would be amazingly useful (Finally–a way to manage the insanity that is the 3/4 schedule!) except that, you can’t create direct links to your customized schedules. (Someday soon, perhaps?) For now, I’ll use the same workaround I use for Trip Planner itineraries: copy the data into Word or Outlook.

Detroit visit: a recap

I’ve been to Detroit a total of four times–each time accompanied by Bus Nerd. Except for the second trip, when we stayed downtown and practiced getting around solely by bus, our visits have involved a fair amount of car use. His parents, though bus chick sympathizers, are not bus riders themselves, and since we usually go there to visit them, we roll how they roll. And then there’s the fact that Detroit is the most transit-poor major city I have ever visited.

In Seattle, folks tend to be surprised if you use the bus as your primary form of transportation. In Detroit, they are surprised if you use the bus at all. It’s not that people in Detroit don’t ride buses (the buses we’ve ridden there have been pretty full); it’s that people who have a choice don’t ride buses. As I’ve mentioned before, the bus-stop signs don’t even tell you which routes stop there. There are no schedules, and maybe that’s a good thing, since (so residents say) buses are regularly very late. Sometimes (as I learned on my second visit), they don’t come at all. The trip planner on DDOT’s website worked for us on one of our previous trips, but when we tried to use it last Sunday, it was down. I’ve tried using it since I’ve been home. Still down.

A Detroit city bus
A Detroit city bus

Many factors have contributed to the state of Detroit’s transit system:

1) The Big Three: These guys have been undermining and outright blocking efforts to create real transit in the region for decades. They sell the heck out of car culture, and it’s working. It also doesn’t hurt that almost everyone who lives there is employed by the industry (assuming they’re employed at all), and they are justifiably proud of what they produce.
2) Sprawl: Detroit is a huge, spread-out city with no real central point of commerce. Many (maybe most) of its employment and commercial centers are in surrounding suburbs. As I learned in Houston, planning routes and transfer points under these conditions is a challenge.
3) Poor environment for pedestrians: Let’s just say that walking around in the Motor City made me long for Montlake.
4) Two systems that don’t play well together: The Detroit Department of Transportation (DDOT) runs the city buses, but Suburban Mobility Authority for Rapid Transit (SMART) runs the buses in the suburbs, including buses that go from the suburbs to Detroit. Individual cities elect to participate in SMART, and some (Livonia, for example) have elected not to. This means no bus service whatsoever for the residents of those cities.
5) Racism: Detroit is one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country. The city is predominantly black, and the suburbs are predominantly (often, exclusively) white. Many suburban cities see transit as a threat (don’t want the “blacks from Detroit” to have an easy way to get there), so they don’t support it.
6) Weather: (Bus Nerd will disagree with me on this one.) It’s simply too dang cold to be standing outside in the winter.

Some reasons for hope:

1) Recent efforts to build a light rail line between Detroit and Ann Arbor: This would provide easy access to U of M and stop at the airport on the way.
2) Transportation Riders United: This is a very cool transit advocacy organization that is working hard on the light rail issue and also happens to have its offices in my very favorite Detroit building.
3) Post Super Bowl transit talks: During the Super Bowl, DDOT ran free shuttles from the suburbs and various neighborhoods to the festivities downtown. Lots of people–visitors, suburbanites, and Detroiters–used them, proving that folks will take advantage of options that are useful and convenient. It looks like city officials are starting to see the value.
4) Rosa Parks Transit Center: It’s in progress as I type and will have lots of cool features (for example, a climate-controlled waiting area) I’d like to see here.

And speaking of Miss Rosa (who, me?) … Detroit is also home to the bus she was riding on the day she become my shero.

Rosa Parks bus

More service!

I’m still in Detroit, so I almost forgot that the first phase of service improvements funded by Transit Now took effect today. Here’s a summary of the changes:

Route 8 – Adding several trips during the morning and afternoon commute to offer bus service every 15 minutes on the portion of this route between Seattle Center and Capitol Hill;
Route 44 – Adding early evening service on weekdays to achieve a 15-minute frequency for Ballard, Wallingford and the University District;
Route 101 – Adding three trips to relieve overcrowding and provide better connections at the Renton Transit Center and South Renton Park-and-Ride;
Route 120 – Doubling the amount of Saturday service to every 15 minutes from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. between Seattle, White Center and Burien;
Route 140 – Doubling midday weekday service to every 15 minutes on this route serving Burien, SeaTac, Tukwila and Renton;
Route 194 – Adding two early morning trips on Saturdays and Sundays between downtown Seattle and Sea-Tac International Airport to better serve airport workers and travelers with early flights;
Route 234 – Adding evening service on this route serving Kenmore, Juanita, Kirkland and Bellevue;
Route 245 – Doubling Sunday service to every 30 minutes on this route serving Kirkland, Rose Hill, Overlake, Crossroads, Eastgate, and Factoria; and
Route 271 – Adding trips between the University of Washington campus and Eastgate to increase afternoon service to a 15-minute frequency.

Around here, it’d be nice just to get route numbers and schedules posted at bus stops.