Silly bus schedules.

[brooksmoses]

Dear Stanford Marguerite:

I can understand that it may be too much to ask that you consider, amongst your many efforts to convince us not to drive to work, scheduling the shuttle busses from the train station to central campus in such a way that they will in fact be convenient for people getting off the trains.

However, the fact that you have scheduled one of the busses such that I can reliably see it just leaving the bus stop as I walk to the stop from the train is rather a bit over-the-top, don't you think?

Comments

[leback.livejournal.com]

It might not hurt to send some version of this letter to Transportation Services...

[brooksmoses]

I did, indeed, send such a thing. Got back a reply in a couple of hours from the fellow who's updating the schedule to match the new Caltrain schedule, wanting to make sure he understood what was going on, so he could fix it.

In checking to make sure I was quoting the right things, though, I realized that I'd been misreading the schedule -- the bus that I saw leaving was supposed to leave three minutes after the train arrived. And, in an amusing coincidence, suzimoses had called me just as I was walking to the bus stop, so I could check the timestamp in my "received calls" list and confirm that the bus was leaving exactly on time. Embarassingly, this all means that I haven't reliably been missing that bus; I just mixed it up with a different bus -- I've actually caught that bus easily a few times. So I suspect that what really happened is partly Caltrain's fault for running a minute and a half late.

I did suggest to Stanford's scheduling person that this was probably evidence that three minutes is an insufficient time to allow for reliable transfers, though.