Epic bus journey
Hey, a public transportation nerd! I’m a public transportation nerd too!
The headline is misleading.
This man travelled from Canada to Mexico on only public transport
It’s misleading because duh, millions of people do that every week. It turns out they meant local public transportation, i.e. city buses and the like.
William Hui has been fascinated with public transportation for as long as he can remember. So it only made sense that the 40-year-old systems engineer would challenge himself to travel from his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, to Tijuana, Mexico, solely on public buses and trains.
On 24 June, Mr Hui set out to do just that, taking a nine-day journey along the US Pacific coast. Mr Hui told the BBC he only had a few rules for his trip: absolutely no Greyhound buses or Amtrak trains were allowed, and walking between bus stops had to be kept to a minimum.
“At no point in this trip did I have to walk more than maybe 15 minutes from one bus stop to another,” he told the BBC on Friday. “It was just remarkable to see how the different services connected, especially in rural areas,” he added.
Now that is cool. I wouldn’t have guessed that would be the case. Connections are impressive around here: I can go way the hell out in the suburbs via buses, but then this is a huge prosperous metropolitan area full of tech people and tech money. Between here and Tijuana there are stretches where that is not the case, to put it mildly. I’m surprised and chuffed to learn that they nevertheless have good public transportation.
Hui tried to do it a few years ago but there was a big broken piece he couldn’t cross. No buses.
But earlier this year, he learned of a new, four-hour bus route that links Eureka, a city in northern California, to another city named Ukiah, about two hours north of San Francisco.
Wowza! A four hour local bus! That is fancy.
Another thing Mr Hui noted was the difference between public transport in bigger cities, like Seattle or San Francisco, and smaller rural areas, where one bus would travel several hours to link people over the span of hundreds of kilometres.
For sure. Rural areas are rural. No Google or Microsoft to provide thousands of customers.
One of my favorite buses: it has one stop on Mercer Island, a two minute walk from a gorgeous lakeside park, then a stop at Mercer Slough, a marshy grassy natural area/wildlife refuge, then into B’vue and to the transit center where all the buses fan out all over the region.
I love buses, too, but have never lived in a city with an adequate bus line. When I’m in cities that do, I travel that way. I loved going by the El in Chicago, and the subway in NYC. The double decker buses in London were absolutely great.
We’ve been thinking about doing a cross-country trip by train. That isn’t anything unusual, of course, a lot of people do it, especially retired people. I used to take the train back and forth from Texas to Oklahoma when I was in graduate school, and I loved it. Freed me up to read, sleep, study, grade papers, or just look at the window.
That is impressive. I’m not sure it would be as doable here in the heartland, mainly because of the no-Amtrak rule. Both Amtrak and Greyhound use Chicago as a major hub, and so it’s difficult to not use those systems for long runs that go beyond the fringes of the suburban public systems. And of course, ‘rural’ here is both more common, and larger than he had to wend his way through.
Much much much larger.
Behold: the Redwood Coast Express:
https://hta.org/new-express-route-eureka-to-ukiah/
The fare is an eyewatering two dollars. That’s right, two whole dollars.
Since I moved to Sacramento I find my car sitting in the garage more and more. It helps I am retired and don’t have to commute, but I find almost everything I want within walking or cycling distance. And I am exactly one mile from the Amtrak/Capitol Corridor station, so I no longer need to do that awful drive to the Bay Area.
Only negative is my gym is on the Corridor of Despair, West Capitol Avenue. I was followed by a cursing, shouting, stick swinging crazy incompetently trying to steal my headphones the other day. He followed me for a solid quarter mile. Sacramento area has a terribly massive Lost Soul population. I will say one of the local residents walked with me until the crazy wandered away. Thanks, Mark!
So does Seattle. It’s absolutely gruesome.