August 2004 Archives
One thing about being more or less quadriplegic and increasingly confined to a wheelchair as your neck, already bent into an S curve, decides to reshape itself into a nerve-pinching Z, is that you get to experience public transit. Yes, although you drive and are the proud owner of a wheelchair-lift-equipped van, which is actually a fairly large truck, you decide that sitting behind the wheel of this Ford thing in the limb-tensed attitude of a fighter pilot, trying to make sure you survive the lane changes approaching San Francisco on the Bayshore Freeway, isn't worth it. So, why not let someone else do the driving, someone like the masters of rail, Caltrain and BART, or on one recent occasion, suburban Contra Costa County's very special County Connection bus system.
County Connection bus #109 was waiting right where it should, outside the Pleasant Hill BART station. The bus's electronic sign says something about DVC, which is Diablo Valley College, a large community college in the middle of the affluent suburbs inland and east of San Francisco Bay. The bus driver stepped off the bus while it waited, walked around to her open window, reached in and closed the door. A few minutes later she returned, repeated the procedure and stepped aboard. With a pneumatic sigh, the bus lowered its front end, "kneeling," in the parlance of transit people. A ramp which in the old days would have slid from a Martian spacecraft, hit the sidewalk, and I hit the road, rolling up and into the bus. I headed for the wheelchair space in the back, a space defined by large metal assemblies on the floor, all clamps and hooks and straps. These metal things were too close together for my wheelchair to fit, front and back. Presumably, someone's wheelchair once fit into these things, but mine never has.
"Oh, don't bother," I told the driver who was going about the ritual of tying me down and strapping me in.
"Gotta," she said.
"Where are we going to be about 15 minutes from now?" I asked to this, because the bus schedule seemed to warp time in a way only astrophysicists could understand. My destination was about one half miles away, as the crow flies, and while County Connection was no crow, it was a bus, and travel time to my stop would take 45 minutes, according to the schedule I'd just picked up in the BART station. I needed to get somewhere at 1 PM, it was 12:45 PM, so, I figured, drop me wherever you are in a quarter of an hour, and I'll wheel it from there.
"I'm going to get you there as fast as I'm going to get you." The driver was somewhere in her thirties, quite obese, with rolls of fat hanging off the front and back of her jeans. She was a black woman. She was driving a bus up and down middle-class suburban streets, none of which she probably lived on, and she wasn't smiling. She was scowling. I wanted to tell her that I loved her. I love almost all public servants. In America, public servants and disabled people have much in common. Except for a few homeland-security exceptions, people who work for the public on the public purse are generally reviled. The whole idea of doing something public for the public has become distinctly unpopular.
I looked at the bus-route map and told her where to let me off. Once we were rolling, the route made more sense. At least, it followed the map. We went left here, right there, and left again to get out of the BART station parking lot. We headed north. Two minutes later, we headed east. Then returned South. Then we surrounded, in the sense that the Mexican army surrounded the Alamo, a housing development. We circumnavigated it on all sides, then continued east. I could see from the schedule map what I hadn't been able to see on the County Connection web site, that this bus was about to enter low-earth orbit around a second, much larger senior development, throwing a south-west-north-east lasso around the neighborhoods, before continuing on. I pulled the bell cord and got off. I headed east up a bumpy, old sidewalk, thinking I would regret this, for a bus was still faster than a wheelchair, however circuitous its route, and I probably should have stayed on board, for at any moment the bus was bound to pull out of housing-development orbit and pass me on its eastward journey up Contra Costa Blvd.. But, no, I made it across Taylor Blvd., looked behind and saw no bus following.
Rolling up Taylor, I thought of the poor students who rode this sorry bus to classes. It was the sort of bus route designed to inspire physical fitness. Walking was not only healthier, but faster. And who was this County Connection connecting? People who couldn't drive, or couldn't afford to drive. People who wouldn't complain too loud if they spent half an hour or so going in transit circles. People like me.
