On Disagreement and Urban Life
Living in a city has turned me into a somewhat more vocal member of society. For instance, at college, I never found myself getting into heated cursing matches with firemen over who gets the right of way in bicycle-vs-firetruck situations. (Hint: no matter how obvious it appears that you can easily get past the truck, it turns out that not only is the truck many times larger than you, but so are the firemen.)
Right or wrong, the thing is, every time you get cut off in traffic, or someone opens a car door into your handlebars, you begin to appreciate opportunities to deliver constructive feedback to others.
So tonight I was riding the 86th Street crosstown in Manhattan. The buses they have now are these leviathan, two-part extended deals with an accordion-style joint in the middle -- for the first time in NYC history, you can now walk an entire avenue block without ever leaving the bus.
Anyways, I'm sitting in the middle of the bus across from a couple with a baby. They're chatting in sign language with each other (the woman, I think, is hearing- or speech-impaired, and the guy is a monolingual Spanish speaker). When the bus pulls up to the first stop after Central Park, all three of us get up to leave -- but just as we make it to the back door (roughly 100 yards from our seats), the bus driver is already pulling away.
So now people are shouting "Back door, back door!", the woman starts pounding on the side of the bus (carrying the baby with her other hand), and the guy is yelling "Estupido, estupido!" back at the driver -- who, with either great oblivion or deliberate malice, drives right on to the next stop. While the bus is in transit, I march up to the driver and suggest to him that since there is a mirror for him to see the rear of the bus, he might make sure there's no one waiting to exit before he leaves a stop.
"Excuse me?", he says. So I repeat myself. Now he's angry. He actually goes so far as to tell me that there was nobody waiting to get off the bus. I explain that, as exactly such a person, I found myself strongly inclined to disagree with him. The bus driver falls into sullen silence. Having said my piece, I trek to the rear again and hop off with the couple and their baby.
In spite of having to backtrack from the wrong stop, I got a minor buzz seeing the gratified smiles of the other passengers as I left the bus.