Buses are shit.
Of course, everyone knows that anyway and there's a good case for not bothering to go any further, but since I am fond of blathering on and on I am now going to list some of the reasons just why buses are shit. It will not, I don't suppose, be an exhaustive list.
For a start, how do you even work a bus? How the pissing fuck do you get hold of the basic information required to achieve such fundamental objectives as buying the bleeding ticket and getting off in the right place? If you are not doing the journey in the company of someone who has done the exact same journey themselves so you can copy what they do, you're fucked. What the pissing dog's cock is the point of trying to persuade people to use a so-called "transport system" that is so utterly shit that it denies its users the most fundamental information needed to use it?
Trains are easy. All railway stations are marked on maps, so it's dead simple to look at a map of where you're going and see what the nearest station is and how to get from it to where you want to be. And all railway stations have NAMES. They each have a handy, easily-remembered, (functionally) unique identifier, so there's no problem about buying a ticket. You just ask for a ticket to whatever the NAME of the station is that you're going to. Then, when you get there, the NAME is repeated several times in fucking big letters on signboards all the way along the platform, so you know straight away that you've got to the point where you need to get off.
Buses don't give you any of this. You have no frigging idea where the stops are because it doesn't say anywhere, so you can't even figure out where you're supposed to be going in the first place. And the stops don't have a name, or indeed any other sort of useful identifier. They don't have anything. So how the fuck are you supposed to ask for a fucking ticket? "Single to, er, I don't fucking know, some unidentifiable concrete stick by the side of the road somewhere". How would you ask for a ticket to a lamp post? There are fucking thousands of the things and they are all exactly the same. And a bus stop is exactly the same as a lamp post except it has a metal flag saying "bus stop" instead of a light. The fucking thing needs a NAME so you can refer to it in a unique way that distinguishes it from all the other concrete poles with metal flags on.
And how in the name of encrusted semen stains are you supposed to know where the fuck to get off? The sodding thing doesn't have a NAME so you don't have anything to look out for to tell you where you are. You're stuck in this vehicle which is driving through some bloody place you've never seen before and every now and then it stops - but there is absolutely no fucking way at all to identify where it has stopped. It's just pulled up by yet another anonymous concrete stick and the only way to tell whether or not you are supposed to get off at this particular concrete stick is to guess.
A transport system where you have to guess where to get off because there's fuck all to actually tell you, and on top of that you can't even buy the fucking ticket in the first place because there's fuck all way to express where you want to buy a ticket to? That's not a system at all, it's a piece of random unusable shit.
To make matters worse the bloody things don't even necessarily stop at the fucking stop anyway. If there isn't anyone waiting to get on there they just sail merrily on past. You have to ring a pissing bell to make them stop. Well HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHEN TO RING THE FUCKING BELL WHEN YOU DON'T FUCKING KNOW WHERE THE FUCK YOU ARE ANYWAY? How the pissarsing shitcock are you supposed to know you're getting near the stop when you've never fucking been there before? What kind of stupid unusable fucked-up shit is this?
Similar difficulties arise in finding out when you're supposed to travel. Bus timetables are a fucking waste of space. They are hopelessly incomplete, and what information they do have is useless. They miss out the great majority of stops and only give times for a smattering of "important" ones - which they identify by some crappy name that isn't on the map and only makes any sort of sense if you've lived there for quite a long time already. Needless to say the name isn't on the fucking stop either. What kind of a fucking identifier is "Garston Arcade"? Where the fuck is Garston? This town isn't called Garston. There isn't fucking anywhere called Garston. The only way to find out what all this Garston shit is about is to live there for long enough to realise that the locals used to call a particular group of streets "Garston" fifty years ago and that's what the dickhead bus company means even though nobody calls it that any more and it isn't on any of the maps. And you won't have any more luck finding the Arcade because it isn't a fucking arcade at all, what they mean is the begrimed and grotty newsagent next to the hairdressers with the steamed up windows and the flaking sign next to the kebab poisoning shop. That, apparently, is an "arcade". Is it fuck. An arcade is a place like that fuck-off big thing in the middle of Milton Keynes - somewhere off the street, under cover, with a lot more than three shops, and the shop entrances indoors. Three grotty shops by the side of the road is not a fucking arcade. No, all three of them being next to each other does not make it an arcade. Or a parade. Or a shopping centre or whatever other fucking stupid pretentious bollocks name they choose to give it. It's just "the three grotty shops", and that still isn't any kind of identifier because there are precisely similar groupings of small grotty shops all over the fucking place. So your bus timetable gives the supposed time of arrival of the bus at a few sparsely-distributed places which cannot be identified without both arcane local knowledge and an understanding of the exact way in which some anonymous bus company dickhead is disconnected from reality - and is doubly meaningless on top of that because there is no fucking way a vehicle which has to share the streets with traffic jams can keep to a timetable anyway.
On time or not, the journey is slow as fuck anyway because of the incredibly tortuous routes the things take in order to serve as many unrelated places as possible with the minimum number of buses. A bus will be trundling along a road which does at least bear some hope of going in the right direction, but then suddenly turns off and goes into a housing estate. It goes right through the estate to the point where it starts to turn into fields, goes down a cul-de-sac because the most inaccessible stop in the county is down there, performs a three point turn in a manner reminiscent of a hippo in a bathtub, wanders all over the estate doing similar manoeuvres in more awkward corners, and finally after twenty minutes re-emerges onto the main road at a point fifty yards further down from where it left it. It keeps on doing things like this and what with that and the traffic jams it'd be quicker to bleeding walk.
Walking would also have the advantage of avoiding the way buses take one of the inherent downsides of any public transport system - that it is public - and make it even more shit than it usually is. There just isn't enough fucking room. The transverse seating insists on trying to cram four normal-sized human beings into a width which is only sufficient for four gnomes. Like the Underground, you end up being forced into close bodily contact with strangers with the sort of intimacy that is only appropriate with someone you regularly bump uglies with. Only the strangers on a bus are much more likely than the strangers on the Underground to be a teenage chav who won't fucking behave and sit still, or a drunk, or someone who smells of piss, or a screaming toddler with a dirty nappy and smears of some sticky brown substance which you can only hope is chocolate and a determination to transfer the smears to all around and a mother who doesn't give a tinker's fuck about keeping her simian brat under control, or... Similar unfavourable comparisons with the Underground apply if you're in the longitudinal seating. Here at least there is some opportunity to claim a respectable amount of personal space, but you also have a row of people sat opposite facing you, and while people in that position on the Underground at least have the decency to stare vacantly at the roof or their knees or even read something, the fucks on the bus stare at you, for the whole fucking journey, until you want to stab their fucking eyes out.
Buses also provide far too many opportunities for the council to yet again demonstrate that they are a bunch of unbelievably fucking stupid wankers who don't have the slightest vestige of a bleeding clue. All councils are cunts who hate cars but fucking love buses and can't understand why everyone else doesn't think the same - even though they use cars rather than buses themselves when they want to get about. And in their usual fuckarsed manner of approach to anything, they pursue their perverted and futile ideas of trying to make people use buses instead of cars not by doing anything to make the buses sufficiently un-shit that people might actually want to use them, but by trying to make things more shit for the cars. It seems completely beyond them to realise that this is never going to fucking work because no matter how shit you make car travel it still won't be nearly as shit as a bus.
They do cunty things like making "bus priority schemes" which give them lots of opportunities to be a shit to people, as they are so fond of doing. What happens with one of these things is that they find a stretch of road along which buses travel and comprehensively fuck it up. They take over the bit of road nearest to the kerb and dedicate it to buses, so the people who live along that side of the road no longer have anywhere to park. Then, where the road gets narrower so there is no longer room for a bus lane, they install a set of traffic lights which have separate aspects for the bus lane and the car lane, and set them so they hold up a great long queue of traffic while the fucking bus charges down the inside with a green light and gets in front. So when the cars' lights do go green they are then further held up by having a fucking bus in front which keeps stopping all the time. People are apparently supposed to think that this makes buses really fast so they will be quicker than cars. Which, of course, it fucking doesn't. The main reason why buses are slow is that they keep fucking stopping and farting around for ages while people get on and off. Creating an artificial traffic jam where there wasn't one before and letting the bus get past it doesn't make the bus any quicker, it goes at the same speed it would have done before and stops just as much only now everyone else is getting fucked up by the totally artificial delays. Even if the basic idea did work it'd still be a waste of time because it's only on a small number of relatively short bits of road that there is enough width to do this fucking thing. The majority of the roads just aren't wide enough for even council levels of stupidity to try installing it, and it is these narrow sections which would remain as the determining factor for bus speed regardless of what happens on the occasional short wide bit. Moreover, even where the road is wide enough to do this it is almost invariably still only wide enough to do it on one side. Have they not noticed that buses go both ways? Fucking dicks.
Their other favourite method of using buses to fuck everyone else up is to fuck up the bus stops. It used to be the case, in more sensible times, that bus stops were where possible set in little laybys so the bus could stop out of the road and not be in everyone's way while it fannied about. Not any more. These days, deliberate and blatant cuntery is the order of the day. The laybys get filled in, and instead a fucking projection is built so the fucking bus can't stop out of the way, but has to stop right out in the middle of the road and block the fucking thing completely. Nor can you even get past the bastard if there's nothing coming the other way - because the fucking cunts deliberately put an island or some other divider right opposite the bus stop to make sure you can't get past. And yes, they do do this on purpose. It's not just random bleeding stupidity, it's active malice. It is official council policy to build bus stops like this specifically in order to fuck up the traffic flow and make life more shitty for people in cars. They won't admit it of course but nevertheless the beans have been spilled many times by people who have had the misfortune to work in council planning departments but now don't work there any more and are glad to be free to tell the rest of the world what a bunch of deliberate cunts the fucking shit pissarse wankstain cunthead councils are.
I said this wouldn't be an exhaustive list, and it isn't. I'm just knackered now and can't be arsed to write any more of it...
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