Busing it

For the first time in my adult life, I am car-less for many months, relying exclusively on buses, trains and my feet to get around.

I like getting on a bus, or a tram, any bus or tram, when I’m in a new city, and seeing where it takes me. Try it. If you end up somewhere you don’t like, get off, cross the street, and go back where you started.

I got on a double-decker bus in front of my flat yesterday, went upstairs, and sat at the very front, further forward than the driver but on the opposite side, surrounded by panoramic windows and views of where I was going.

It was a little scary at first: I was up some 10 or 12 feet above the road and so far forward that it felt like I was lurching past other buses and trucks and whispering by buildings with barely an inch to spare.

Which I was.

Because this is narrow-road-land, with many of the roads dating back centuries; the road engineering specs probably read something like “Oy, if 2 broad shouldered men can pass, wide enough.”

This is also the place where they embraced the idea of “urban intensification” fifteen hundred years ago.

Build your building right up to the sidewalk, which is barely 2 feet wide at the best of times.

Then, build the second floor out over the sidewalk right out to the road. Why not? Why waste the space? What can happen? Is some idiot going to invent 2 storey high buses a thousand years from now?

All drivers here are masterful at squeezing through, sliding through, wafting through the smallest imaginable spaces, spaces where there is barely a paper thin clearance between them and stone walls, or other buses, or trucks.

So the added bonus in taking the bus everywhere is the constant sense of impending disaster: turning onto a narrow road brings the front of the bus within an exclamation mark of a stone wall, a bridge, a building.

Maybe that’s why the English drink more than any other country in Europe.

But more on that later.