OK, so gas prices have been plummeting lately, but they are still pretty darn high compared to this time last year, and I have no doubt they will start to climb up again as soon as people fall back into a false sense of security and start driving more again. With that in mind, I’ve been taking the bus to work. I’ve been doing park-and-ride on Chapel Hill Transit buses for a little while now, but the nearest park-and-ride lot is right on the fringe of campus, so driving to the lot is almost the same as driving to campus, which doesn’t really save much gas. So I decided to try the Triangle Transit Authority buses, which have a stop that’s five minutes from my house and don’t cost me anything because, as a UNC employee, I can get a free annual pass from the university.
I took my first ride on a TTA bus yesterday. The buses themselves were fine. They were clean, air-conditioned, and not too crowded (The 7:30 morning commute was relatively sparse, and there were only a few people who had to stand during the evening ride). The drivers were friendly. The length of the rides were basically what it says in the schedule, adding in a few extra minutes on account of rush-hour traffic. Frankly, it was the least-hurried, least-frantic commute I had in a while as I just read on the bus instead of having to maneuver through heavy traffic.
But as Tom Petty said, the wait was the hardest part. The TTA buses weren’t as punctual as the Chapel Hill Transit buses, which arrive at their destinations within a minute or two of their scheduled times (and there are real-time signs at many stops telling you how long before the next bus arrives, which the TTA doesn’t offer). Some of the TTA’s tardiness is to be expected, given that their buses cover a much larger area and have to go through more traffic on major commuter routes than the Chapel Hill Transit buses. It wasn’t so bad in the morning, as the bus was only about five minutes late to the stop where I was waiting, and it got me to my destination about 10 minutes later than the schedule says. The evening ride, however, was a whole other story. I got to the bus stop at 5:30 to catch the 5:35 bus. Thirty minutes later, still no sign of the bus, and I start to wonder if the bus was somehow extra early and I had missed it (which would be the first time a bus was ever early). Finally, I flagged down a different TTA bus and asked the driver, who told me that the 5:35 bus broke down. So I had to wait for the next bus, which finally arrived around 6:18, a good 10-12 minutes later than its scheduled time and more than 45 minutes after I had gone out to the bus stop.
That’s the main concern I have with the TTA buses. The lines I take (403 and 402) only run twice an hour, so if I miss one or a bus breaks down, it’s a half-hour wait for the next one. Nonetheless, its proximity to my house and the much less frantic commutes it offers will compel me to keep trying it, unless the breakdowns become too frequent.
P.S.: By the way, during my 45-minute wait for the evening bus, a fellow TTA rider passed along this tip: The TTA buses going between Durham and Chapel Hill take MUCH longer to make their rounds on evenings when there is a basketball game at UNC, because they have to weave through all the extra traffic coming to campus for those 7 p.m. games. So if you commute from Durham to Chapel Hill, it would be wise to do park-and-ride on the Chapel Hill Transit buses on gamedays.
