Some interesting experience I had on taking buses
Singapore Vs New Zealand
On average, Singapore buses will arrived at a frequency of 15 mins, either they arrived every 1 other minutes, or they arrived every 30 minutes.
In New Zealand, average waiting time for buses are 30 minutes…. In Auckland city, most of the bus stop will have a time alert board that inform you the bus waiting time, but same as Singapore, it’s only 80% accurate.
New Zealand bus ride experience #1
Silly mistake not to repeat after me:
There once I rushed to a bus stop to find my bus left 1 minute prior, so after waiting for the bus for 20+ minutes, I decided to go to toilet after a cold 20 minutes wait at night, believing that I have at least 8 minutes before the bus will come….
After 4 minutes toilet break, I went back to the bus stop…. happily believing the bus will arrived in 4 minutes… but I was wrong! 4 minutes later, the bus vanish from the bus arriving estimation board, this means I had missed my 2nd bus while I was in the toilet! Now I need to wait for another 30 minutes!
End up I took 1.5hrs to get home – 1 hour waiting time, and 30 minutes bus ride… =.=”
Facts:
- Driving from bus stop to my house is actually just a short 12 minutes drive
- Walking from the bus stop to my house is actually slight more than 1 hour…
- The bus fare costs me NZD$6.80
New Zealand bus ride experience #2
I was taking a bus from City back to the small town in the evening… the bus waiting time is a painful 40 minutes, luckily a few students from the nearby University managed to keep me well entertained with the topic of “Is that a star or aeroplane?” referring to the bright objects in the sky which been staying the the same position for like almost 20 minutes…
After boarding the bus in an extremely hungry mode, the bus travelled for 45 minutes and suddenly turned into a bus interchange… the bus driver slower walked down the bus, and after few minutes another driver slowly walked up and continue driving the bus the rest of the journey
@_@
My wild guess is, the drivers are changing shift for the bus when the passengers are still on board. Can’t imagine if Singapore bus drivers do this to us… Luckily it’s in New Zealand, generally people have more patience towards almost everything.
But it’s still an eye opener for CF 🙂