Bussingit - Coast to coast, mostly in a Coaster
Published:Sunday | March 4, 2012 | 12:00 AM
Today, Automotives starts a new four-week series, 'Bussing It', in which Mel Cooke uses the bus system to get around town and takes you along for the ride. Before he pays as he enters, though, he looks back at a few experiences in former years.
When I tell youngsters who are intent on rushing headlong into a car loan, relatively fresh out of university and often already carrying student loans, that now is a great time for a young person to live in Kingston without a car, I am almost invariably dismissed.
I feel like an old head as I chuckle to myself and think 'young bud no know storm' - much like those whom I considered older people when I was 20 years old would, at some youthful foolishness way back when. But they really do not know; do they?
Sure the Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) has its deficiencies, but it officially runs up to some hours unheard of in the days when the 'Quarter Million' and Encava buses were kings of the road in Kingston. Back then, after about 9 p.m., you took your chances. Then there is waiting at the bus stops. Sure, many buses are still packed, but at least they don't spend 20 minutes at the bus stop, all packed and ready to go, hoping for that one more passenger to squeeze in.
The buses are clean, the seats are not broken down and (hip hip hooray!) air-conditioned - huge difference from the late 1980s and early 1990s. I can't comment about the JOS days; I was still in 'country' at the time. But based on some old bus seats that I have seen, it was a very tough ride.
Speaking of tough rides, there were so many times when those packed Kingston buses of the '90s would go around a corner and you were not sure if they would ever recover from the lean. They felt as if they were going to go down and never come up. With JUTC, thank goodness for the stable ride.
Of course, these days I take a bus by choice and that's only occasionally. One thing I have noticed is that the JUTC buses provide a far less colourful - and contentious - ride than the system they replaced. It has to have something to do with the atmosphere. For with the chaos of yore, there was undeniably some creativity. The conversation could be at times rather stimulating, shall we say.
across the country
In even earlier days, I took the bus between Morant Bay and Kingston and Kingston and Santa Cruz fairly regularly. Later, it was between Kingston and Montego Bay. Many times the journey was on a Toyota Coaster, just about the hardiest bus to have come to Jamaica in numbers, if the time they have lasted is any indication. So I can say I have been coast to coast in Jamaica in a Coaster.
There were also those Hiace vans that, when the door was closed, were like mini-rockets in which you could hardly move a toe. I always wondered what would happen if one crashed with me in it.
So, having established my bus credentials, next week we hit the road. Waterhouse? Constitution Hill? Hall's Delight? We'll see.
- M.C.