Saturday, December 11, 2010

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round…

These are the words of a preschool song.  They seem to fit the moment,  because sometimes, we in the Side ‘classroom’ feel like we live in a Ding Dong School world with Miss Frances bringing us new excitement day by day.

Our case in point at the moment is an article in Thursday’s Ostrich, in which we discover that “Commuter bus service (is) proposed'” running between Portland and Brunswick.

Wow!  What an idea, the sort of breakthrough that only our helpers in both federal and state government could come up with, and surely worthy of taxpayer ‘investment!’

After all, the need is immense, since all we have at the moment is privately operated bus service running between Brunswick (and points north) and Portland, and government subsidized train service between Brunswick and Portland planned for future years at an initial cost of $40 million or so.

But here’s the really exciting part: they’re talking about a “relatively new type of transit” that features rubber-tire buses!  Can you believe it?  Did you ever, in your wildest dreams, think we’d see buses with rubber tires?

While they didn’t say it in the article, we’re wondering whether those rubber tires might actually be round!  Can you imagine what a marvelous ride round, rubber tires should provide compared to the buses we’ve all ridden for so many years?

Let’s just hope that the new bus service doesn’t threaten the success of the overhead monorail system being planned by county government.

Are we losing our minds?  Have we become such worshipers of government help and intervention that we question nothing?

Or should we just sing along with Walt - “when you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are!”  And make sure to buy enough E tickets to get us back and forth to Portland as often as we need.

(More will follow soon on this story; you simply can’t make up stuff like this.)

No comments:

Post a Comment