Public transit, cheep, convenient, eviromentally friendly, and a real pain

Now not all of you will understand this, those who have ever riden a public transit thingy, mostly a bus, will get this. There you are on a way to meet someone or catch a show or something. you look up on the internet or the little map what bus you have to take and when you have to be at the point of pick up. Of course you are either new to the area or you havn't taken that bus or left at that time. Of course the time the bus comes is a little iffy because the stop that has a recorded time is several before or after your stop. So you figure an appropriate time to get there and leave a little in good time so you won't miss it. So off you walk to your bus stop (which of course is at least a block away) and you arrive several minutes earlier than you figured the bus would show up. but no matter what time you show up, there is always that nagging feeling, "What if i missed the bus?" Then you start questioning yourself, "If the bus leaves 3 stops back at 9:43, what if it's early and has alread gone past here at 9:44 rather than the 9:47 i had planned for?" and other worrysome thought. then you start leaning out into the street looking and hoping you will see the bus. after a couple minutes it always seems that the same bus heading the opposite direction comes by, then you start thinking, "Does the bus i want come before or after the bus going the other way?" By this time you have been standing there for 5 minutes but it has seemed like 10 or 15. After you see yourself being late for about the 10th time the bus finally shows up 2 blocks down and you wait for it to get to you. Your frantic wait is over. Then there is the wierd law of bus travel. If you are on a bus, you are sure that if you got off, you could walk and get to your destination faster, but if you are trying to get on a bus that is leaving a stop half a block from you, no matter how fast you run, you will never catch up. Now that we are all fed up with the inconvenience of the bus system, I will leave you with the one thing that makes every long time bus rider laugh, because we were all a new bus rider once. there you are on the bus travelling to a major stop (like say west ed mall in edmonton) where every bus stops and sits for at least a minute. Now who out there can say that the first time they pulled into a stop like that one that they were getting off at, they didn't pull the "next stop" rope. Nothing (in the busing world) brings a smile to my face faster then when I hear that 'ding' right before a major stop and I think of the first (and second) time I did the very same thing and felt stupid afterwards.
-Ian