The little things

The first difference you notice between the buses in Austin, Texas and Glasgow, Scotland (I recently returned from the former and live in the latter) is that the drivers in Austin don’t drive along cocooned in reinforced plexiglass. They politely correct you when you put your day pass through the slot the wrong way, and smile at you with such earnestness that you’d believe they’d be perfectly happy shaking your hand were their own hands not primed on the steering wheel ready to help smoothly accelerate you away to your destination.

Or possibly I’m imagining things, and I wasn’t in Austin long enough for my rose tints to tarnish at all. It definitely made a change from the grunts one receives from the average Glasgow driver, the nonchalance when they halt the bus you’re travelling on at a stop where they’re to change with another driver and just walk off without saying a word to anyone. I was told that in Austin all the crazies sit at the front of the bus; in Glasgow, they sit on the back seat, cycle through their ringtone MP3s (the songs all seemingly voiced by very sugared-up chipmunks), and talk in unhushed tones about stabbing people. I’m not joking, or hyperbolicising either. You can see why the plexiglass is required.

None of those differences, though, are the fault of the bus companies in question. Ironically, I believe that FirstBus Glasgow and Capital Metro of Austin are both ultimately controlled by First Group of Aberdeen (bizarrely, large swathes of the globes public transport infrastructure is now owned and run by two Scottish families with curious politics). I could, indeed, wax lyrical about the stupidity of FirstBus Glasgow’s introduction of a two-trip £2 fare which required the buyer, once the ticket had been printed off by the machine, to then pass the ticket through a slot in the plexiglass to the driver who, after fiddling for a blue highlighter pen from his shirt pocket, puts the ticket against the uneven nodules of the steering wheel, then draws the best line he can harriedly muster down the middle before handing it back. I could then extend that rant by telling how that fare (a nice round £2 for your daily commute) became so popular that a few months later FirstBus put it up to £2.50, 10p more than the cost of two singles. But this would be fun I’ll save for another day.

Nope, the one detail that I noticed, beyond the basic matter of cost (at the current US-UK exchange rate it is five times cheaper to take the bus in Austin than Glasgow), was that a day ticket is just that, a day ticket. Buy one at 10pm one evening and it doesn’t expire at midnight, or 1am, or whatever the witching hour happens to be arbitrarily set at in your town – you’re good until 10pm the next evening. Little ideas like that will increase the numbers of people using the bus to a greater degree than, say, a 20% drop in fares. Little ideas like that make you feel respected as a user and a citizen, rather than ripped off to some greater or lesser degree.