Mass Transit

I was in Geneva this week attending a meeting. In the baggage claim area at the Geneva airport, there is a machine that - when you press the button - will give you a free ticket for public transportation into the city. You can use it on the train - the train station is next door - or the bus. There are many trains an hour. They all stop at the Geneva station so you just get on one with your free ticket and go. Usually no one asks to see your ticket during the ten minute ride into the city.

When you check into your hotel, the hotel will give you a transit pass good for the duration of your stay. There are buses and trolleys that go throughout the Geneva area. There may be somewhere you can't get via the public transit system but there's never been anywhere I needed to go that I could figure out how to get to. The buses run frequently and although a valid ticket is required to ride the bus, I've never seen tickets checked. You just get on, your ticket in your pocket. Not having to check tickets makes boarding the bus much faster; you can board through any door, rather than having to file past the driver and present your ticket. But you are required to have a valid ticket, and if asked you have to produce it; if you don't have it, there is a stiff fine. I've never seen anyone be asked to show their ticket on a bus, but people buy tickets at the automated ticket machine at the stop, and I assume that the ones who don't have weekly or monthly transit passes. (I assume also that this is why they make such an effort to provide transit passes to visitors, who could just assume they don't need tickets and get themselves in trouble.) And I've never seen any kind of of disorderly conduct or bad behavior on public transit there. Everyone is quiet and polite.

With the parking problems at my workplace, there's been a big push for us to consider mass transit, and I have thought about riding the bus to work. But I haven't quite figured out how to do it. And how do you buy a transit card on the bus? There aren't vending machines at every bus stop like there are in Geneva. But I did ride MARTA to the airport on Sunday. Tom dropped me off at Lindburgh and I successfully put $20 on a transit card (so maybe I can ride the bus sometime). I had to carry my suitcase down the stairs - there was no "down" escalator that I saw - and I waited on the platform for the train.

A train came quickly but it was being taken out of service, so they made everyone who was on it get off. MARTA employees walked the length of the train to make sure everyone was off. Then the train left the station, empty of passengers, and we waited.

I don't know if he got off the train that was taken out of service, or if he was there when I arrived, or if he came later, but sometime after the train left, I heard him, talking loudly not clearly to anyone in particular (not that I could tell for sure, and I didn't want to look). It seemed threatening enough, this string of random obscenities, that we moved away from him. No one talked. No one wanted to make eye contact. The unstated fear of a deranged person picking someone at random off the platform and tossing them on the tracks. And the MARTA employees, who had so diligently made sure that no one stayed on the train being taken out of service, were no where to be seen.

It seemed like it took a long time for the next train to come. We breathed easier when the doors closed and the man with the loud voice wasn't in our car. There were several of us with suitcases. At some point a guy with a bicycle got on. Then - I think it was at North Avenue - two young women and a young man with numbers like they give you when you participate in a race pinned to their shirts got on the train. I figured they'd been in a 5K earlier in the day, or had walked to support finding a cure for some terrible disease. One had a clipboard, which is unusual for a 5K, and they didn't seem to be dressed for running. I thought one of them was carrying a GPS. Maybe they were geocaching? But with race numbers on their shirts?

Then one of the young women knelt down next to me and said, "I don't want to scare you, but we're on a scavenger hunt, and we need to find someone with an out-of-state driver's license." (Why she thought I would be so easily frightened I don't know, but then I *had* been frightened at the station; maybe that still showed.) I told her I couldn't help, but other passengers with suitcases spoke up, and a young man volunteered that he was from Virginia. Did he have a driver's license? They needed a photo of themselves with him, and they needed a close up of him with his Virginia driver's license. The woman sitting next to me obligingly took the group photo ("get closer together, okay, that's it"). They also needed someone wearing clothing for for a non-Atlanta professional sports team. The request got passed halfway up our car, but no one could help with that. The three of them got off somewhere downtown, but the idea of teams of people wandering around Atlanta on a scavenger hunt left me with a smile.

Monday afternoon after the long plane ride and the short train ride, I got to my hotel and I found the event on line - they were participating in the Atlanta Challenge, part of a national series of events sponsored by Challenge Nation. I'd never heard of it before, but it sounded like fun.

As the week went on, I rode the bus uneventfully to and from my meeting every day, and back to the airport early yesterday morning. On none of those rides did anything interesting happen. Nothing at all.