Septa Inepta

As you may know, I take the bus to Drexel every day for class rather than drive or live on campus. It’s a lot cheaper, and for the most part, it’s actually quicker as the Townhouse of Doom is RIGHT across the street from the bus stop for the 9.  So the 9 takes about 22 minutes to get to Drexel, and about half of that is getting to the highway through the neighborhood. So I basically figure about half an hour to get to school, and I always get to school on time, barring some sort of SEPTA catastrophe. Catastrophe may be too strong of a word for today’s events….maybe we should call it…a retardation.

My normal commute, about 22 minutes

Ok, so as you can sort of see there….I live at A. The bus takes Ridge Avenue through the neighborhood until it gets to about where you see US 1 and I-76 meet, where it gets on I-76, the Schuykill Expressway (The Expressway or 76) and hops off 76 at Market St (which is basically the block above Chestnut there), location B. Straight shot, easy peasy, lemon squeezy. I could find my way there in my sleep. I could walk there with my eyes closed (which probably would have been a quicker trip today…). So there’s really no reason for it to ever take more than 30 minutes, unless there’s some sort of traffic nightmare, and even in bad traffic, 76 still moves except during the morning rush (and God knows if there’s anything more important than having Fridays off, it’s not having morning classes…).

Gettin' off 76, yr doin it rite!

So here’s how the bus usually gets off 76. You see the little 3 in the bubble to the left of the B? My classroom is RIGHT on the other side of those railroad tracks. Pretty good reason to take the bus to school instead of driving, huh? So 76, if you don’t know, is an interstate. It’s a pretty busy highway, nicknamed the Surekill, and unlike those rural highways where you can just turn at the next corner, only has exits every so often. Enter: our first problem.

Getin' off 76, YR DOIN IT RONG!

So I look out the window and realize that we aren’t taking the ramp. I dismiss this initially, It must be my imagination. Then the kids from Roxborough High School start yelling, I realize that he really DID not make the exit. Probably a detour, there’s a lot of construction going on down there, and I mean ALOT. No big deal….until I start to think a little bit….where is the next exit off the highway? Then I see the bus driver throw his hands up in a fit of frustration.  That’s when I really started to realize how big of a problem this was…

Where all the hippies meet, South St!

So the next exit there is the South St exit, home of the famous South St bridge.  Okay, this would be enough of an inconvenience, but he could just loop up 33rd st there, over Market…no harm, no foul. By the way, it was about 4:03 at this point. Even though the bus had picked me up about 10 minutes late, there WAS the chance to still get there on time.  This was also when my favorite part of the whole ordeal occurred. The bus driver turns to the crowded bus and yells “BEAR WITH ME HERE, I MISSED THE EXIT…” and some kid yells, “NO SHIT, DUMMY!”  I laughed pretty hard at that. The driver did not.  So we could just turn onto the South St bridge and call it a day, and this is what the driver explained he was going to do…until…someone so kindly pointed out to him that the South St bridge current looks like this:

Bridge...yr doin it rong!

So, I’m really glad someone points out to him that THERE’S NO FUCKING BRIDGE THERE ANYMORE! That exit’s been closed for like 2 months for them to rebuild it. Sigh. So then he starts soliciting advice from the passengers. We end up In Grey’s Ferry. Rather than continue to show MORE maps that won’t mean much unless you live here, suffice it to say that it simply became more and more frustrating when he KEPT making turns in the opposite direction. It was actually a little embarrassing when he pulled a u-turn in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot.

sigh.

So this here is a map of what I’m pretty sure my route was to school today. Notice where A is. Notice where B is. Explain to me how one can get lost, plz.  By the way, I got to my four o’clock class at 4:30. I didn’t even bother trying to explain it to my professor. Who would believe that a bus driver would get lost? (and who’d have thought a whale would be so heavy?)

-philamaneto!