It is 8.15 am on a freezing Monday morning and I am contemplating various ideas that are going through my head as I stand in line and wait for my mini-bus (marshrutka). Nothing out of the ordinary you may ask, but it’s been 35 minutes already and I happen to be 18th in the queue, which has snaked down the street and disappeared behind a kiosk. When it does arrive the driver makes the fateful mistake of opening both doors a mad rush ensues. Like a piranha feeding frenzy. Within seconds the minibus is full to bursting point and if you happen to be No 18 in the queue, you’d better move quickly or you will be waiting another 30 minutes or so. What is it with these people? And why should it be this way? Can’t we do this daily drudgery in a civilized way?
Given the will I am sure we can. Take the design of the Bohdan minibus for starters. A thousand monkeys with a thousand crayons in a thousand seconds could come up with a better idea. I have a seat next to the driver and it is positioned in such a way that that the conductor has to climb over the motor housing on which a passenger is sitting on, seats that are metresmeters from the floor, one row of seats that can only accommodate 4 people and a back door that flaps too and fro like the gills of
a stranded fish.
So, let’s make the bus longer, wider and add two rows of 2 seats on each side of the corridor, making them flush with the floor, add a section where passengers can store their bags and luggage without hitting other passengers. Also, get rid of the front seat and add a double door, with a dividing rail. It would also be advisable for the rear door to open only in an emergency, not as now, hopefully through a window. Also, an engine that is flush with the cabin of the bus as are lots of other trucks and buses. This type of design has been in circulation in the United Kingdom for ages. Just see the famous red buses of London, the blue of Sheffield or the green of Nottingham.
Now, let’s educate passengers. They stand in a queue and when the bus arrives enter through the double doors on one side of the dividing rail, while any passenger who wants to get off exits through the other side of the dividing rail. In England there is also a door in the middle of the bus only for passengers to get off from. As passengers get on a bus they pay the driver the correct fare whichfare, which they already have in their hand. The driver gives them a ticket or it jumps out from a ticket machine. They take their ticket and take their seat with standing, for the sake of safety, for 5-6 people only. Simple. Gone the need for a conductor and people possibly getting away with paying and arguments over the amount of change given. No more searching for the fare in handbags and purses and pockets, no more passing of the change or the fare while you are trying to read a newspaper or on the phone to someone. So next let’s have the bus pick you up and drop off at specific points like the ones used by trolleybuses. You’ve got the absurd situation where people scream at the driver to stop anywhere along the route, whether it is on a zebra crossing or every 20 metres meters from where the bus would normally stop anyway. Most people get off at established points anyway, so let’s use them and then everyone knows where to get on and off and the extra 20 yards will be good exercise for them, at the same time preventing the screaming at the driver and giving people earache, as they say in England!
Finally, the bus company profits. With this system everyone pays and not like at present when, in some cases, people get on at the back and do not care to pay because the conductor cannot see them and other passengers are not interested in passing on the fare (like me, for example). No need for a conductor, period.
It would also avoid the current method of waiting at the route end or beginning for passengers, giving people who get on at other stops a chance of getting on. Anyone involved in public transport must have as their priority the safety and comfort of its passengers, but this is sorely lacking in KievKyiv. Change people’s mindset and passengers would find the journey to work more cosy (imagine that on a wet and windy day), more regular and frequent. But most of all, the people themselves would be given a psychological lift and when someone asks, with the first anniversary of President Yushchenko’s inauguration only last week: “Has your life changed for the better?”,” then perhaps they can point to this aspect of their lives and say, wearing a beaming smile, “Yes it has!”
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