Mass Transit Adventures

So this summer I ended up living in Provo and working for Salt Lake County. It’s about an 80 mile round trip and I calculated the cost of driving to be about $15 a day. (This was when a gallon of gas cost about $3.30 and assuming that my Explorer was getting 20mpg, which it does more often than you think.) I started the summer getting up early every day and driving an hour each way all by myself in my “gas guzzling SUV.” Take that Al Gore.

Well, $15 a day added up quicker than I thought. And before I knew it, I had racked up a gas bill of over $400 for the month of May. Ouch. I quickly realized that driving every day wasn’t going to be viable; I would have to seek an alternative. After looking into vanpools and carpools, I decided to buy a student bus pass from BYU that I could use for the remainder of the summer that cost a mere $30.

After consulting the UTA website and a fellow bus riding friend, not to mention a little trial and error, I ended up riding “The 801,” an express bus that works it’s way through Provo and Orem, then jumps on the freeway and doesn’t stop until it gets to downtown Salt Lake City. From there I catch “The Sate Street Bus” or “200” down to 2100 South where I work. And therein lies the adventure.

“The 801” is made up of an interesting demographic. First there are all of the church employees. They are quite distinguishable due to the Church Office Building ID tags clipped to their belts and their clean cut, “going to High Council meeting” appearance and demeanor.

The next main group to call “The 801” their ride are the law school interns. They are always well dressed but, unlike their church employed busmates, they tend to wear colored dress shirts. They can be spotted updating resumes and cover letters on their laptops or researching potential employers on the internet (since “The 801” has wi-fi). They converse amongst themselves in law school speak and are often overheard saying things like, “I would have gone to Harvard/Vanderbilt/Georgetown but BYU is such a deal and my wife really likes it here so…” They are bright, hardworking, and have only one thing on their minds: Making partner.

The rest of the bus is made up of a smattering of other interns, secretaries, various businesspersons and a few other characters.

“The 200” is made up of people of all shapes and sizes, literally. The 60’s were not kind to most of these people. The characters on this bus are so varied that it would be nigh impossible to generalize them in any way. I will have to follow up with a post about some of the individual characters I’ve encountered on my mass transit adventures.