Missed the bus

[pne]

The bus this morning was late, and behind the driver was standing another person in uniform... perhaps the driver was being trained? He also drove rather slowly and (over-?)cautiously, I thought.

At any rate, we pulled into the bus station in Harburg just around the time my other bus was supposed to have left. I thought I might still be in luck since my connecting bus is sometimes late, but I think I saw it a bit further down the road.

My suspicions were confirmed when the bus took another 20 minutes to arrive: I had missed the first one because (a) the bus was late and (b) the (already late) bus drove more slowly than usual.

Had I known this in advance, I would have asked the bus driver to radio ahead to ask the other bus to wait in Harburg. As it is, I came to work even later than I already was.

Comments

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

Had I known this in advance, I would have asked the bus driver to radio ahead to ask the other bus to wait in Harburg.

They do that in Germany? Wow. You'd never get anything like that here. You can't even get guards at a train station to radio another to hold the train while you run across the station. Over here, busses/trains leave when they leave (mostly late). The closest you get is when I take my sister out places on the train in her wheelchair. If you're lucky, you'll see the guard and they'll ask where you are getting off - they'll then say that they'll phone through so that there's a guard waiting with a ramp. It is most rare that this actually happens, though. Whether it's because they don't phone through or because the staff at the other end just can't be bothered, I don't know - probably a mixture of the two.

Random passengers do elect to help you lift the wheelchair off the train, but you can guarantee that unless you spend 5 minute instructing them how and where to grab the chair that they will grab one of the removable parts (footrest, armrest) and act all surprised when it comes off in their hand! Fortunately, we've developed something of a technique for getting on/off trains, so unless it's a particularly large gap between train and platform, we just do it our way without help.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Well, they do that in Hamburg; I don't know about other cities.

During a customer survey, they even asked whether I had taken advantage of that service in the evenings, which sounded as if it's a semi-official service of the bus company. (Though I've had to use it more in the mornings on my way to work -- but I can see how it would be more valuable in the evening when busses are further apart and missing one might make you have to wait for 40 minutes, depending on the time of night and the bus line.)

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

Wow, so 40 minutes is a long time to wait? If you miss the bus here in Münster at night, you sometimes have to wait for two hours and if you're lucky enough to miss the last one, it can take 4 or 5 hours until the next one arrives some time in the morning.