The H4 bus passes me just as I have started to walk to the Cleveland Park Metro. Shoot, twenty minutes later to work. Part of why I drive is to save time. My world is a juggling of demands. In the more intensive world of UCSC teaching, I expect to disappoint someone every day, my family, my students, my collegues, book editors, The Public who occasionally calls on me to be an “expert.” I tend to fail one of these people – or People -- every day. In my current DC job, life is a bit easier. First, my kids are older (in fact, one is in college). My daughter is herself using public transport to get back and forth to school (or this week, just soccer tryouts before school starts). My job responsibilities (don’t tell anyone) are not as stressful, since I just don’t understand the politics behind the weekly meetings or the committee assignments. And, most importantly, I’m teaching dozens as opposed to hundred of students. But I still need time to do these things and not driving is time-consuming.
So, learning how not to drive includes learning to lose time. Now, of course, it might be interesting to see exactly how much time I’m really losing by not driving, especially not driving to Dupont Circle during rush hour and then finding a parking space or paying to park (the time vs. money question that I’ll deal with later). Maybe I’ll time it at some point. As anyone who tries to park at UCSC knows, public transport has the problem of scarce and expensive parking spaces on its side. I’ll talk more about time later. Today I want to talk about technology.
The DC Metro system does not have the benefit of the awesome technology I have, literally, at my own fingertips. This I learned during my not driving this morning.
The DC Metro has a (I thought) great system, a website where you put your starting point and your end point into the system and they tell you the best way to get there. I live in a place where, there are at least 4 different transport options to getting to my office and, from one 15-minute time period to the next, which of those options is the fastest changes. It could be the H4 bus to Cleveland Park Metro Station, or heading up to the Tenleytown Station, in the other direction, on one of the 30s, or one of the 30s in the other direction, and then a few blocks walk to my office, or the H4 all the way to Adams-Morgan and then a bus to my office from there. It all depends on the time.
So, every time I take the bus to my office (or anywhere, actually), I check the website. In fact, I check it on my phone, since I have an iPhone and I can get the website as a kind of web-based app (although not really an actual app, just the website translated to my phone, which is a bit clunky but works).
So, yesterday, I checked my phone and went out to the bus stop. Then I looked down at my legs. Stubble, and those shorter pants that tend to be cooler but you have to keep your legs shaved. Later, I’ll talk about how learning not to drive also involves learning how to dress, or the struggles over dressing and not driving. Or just the struggles over dressing because I am a slob, whether I drive or not. I decided to take the next bus and go put on a pair of jeans.
I got to the bus stop again just in time for the next bus, I thought, although a bit tight, timewise. But it didn’t show up. I thought I’d missed it and started to walk to the Cleveland Station. Luckily, it was one of those extremely rare cooler DC summer days, since walking in jeans can be a very sweaty process otherwise (hence my original choice of lighter, shorter pants). Just as I had made it halfway down the block, the bus I was waiting for went by, later than the app had told me. I wasn’t late; it was. What happened? I had assumed that the technology on the bus was as sophisticated as the technology on my iPhone. Simply, I assumed that since I had GPS on my iPhone, that could determine my location at any time, that the Metro system had installed GPS on the busses, and that, when I used my app to locate a bus, I was locating the actual bus.
In fact, as I now realize, the Metro app is just a bus schedule, translated into a website. It looks fancy, but it really isn’t. And busses are late, so the schedule is not that accurate. I was basing my transport decisions on absolute accuracy, not on the reality of a under-financed transport system that couldn’t afford the kind of technology I had in my phone.
This is what I learned by not driving today.
