A Damn Small Town

On my return from Tucson tonight, I walked, as usual, straight from the gate to the taxi stand, because while the 28X (see all previous grumbling about the Port Authority) is perfectly serviceable for a ride from my office (which it stops right in front of) to the airport (which it stops right in front of), it's certainly not worth waiting for at midnight for the privilege of spending an hour on the bus and forty minutes walking home.

(I shall do my best to ensure this doesn't become an "I Hate The Port Authority" blog, because that sounds way more boring even than "An American in Switzerland." Maybe once my bike's out of the shop.)

Now, I've had some interesting taxi rides before. I once caught a ride from the airport to my old apartment in the Northside from the taxi driver who lived on my street. This time, I rode in with a former geek from one of Pittsburgh's myriad boom-era-gone-bust IT startups. He'd run in exactly the same circles I had; I'd been vaguely aware of his company, he'd been aware of one or two of mine. He looked a little familiar, and said I did too. He even claimed to have heard of Leapfrog Research and Development, though given how tiny we were and our absolutely nonexistent marketing budget, I do suspect a bit that he was angling for a tip. On second thought, given how tiny Pittsburgh's geek-entrepreneurs-who-didn't-move-to-Boston-or-the-Valley community is, maybe not.

Near as I could figure out, the bust led to a divorce that went nasty (a number was mentioned with respect to his ex-wife's lawyer's bill that I would take in a minute as an offer on my house) led for unclear but probably easily guessed reasons to midnight runs to the airport in a Yellow Cab. Given "the two guns [he's] had pulled on [him] and the one junkie who nearly plunged a heroin needle into [his] neck," though, he's about done with the cabbie's life, and is hard at work in his copious free time on the next big thing for the next big mobile platform.

So that's one thing I'll both miss and not miss about Pittsburgh: how unbelievably small it is.

Bus Error

It's a good thing that Pittsburgh's hockey team is better than its public transit system, because otherwise I'd be in a mood.

Things I won't miss about the Port Authority:

• Bus trunking. I don't know if this is what this is actually called, but if you have, say, three different routes to the suburbs that share the same route through the city, each with a thirty-minute frequency, you can schedule them in a couple of different ways. The smart way would be to stagger arrivals, thereby providing a ten-minute service frequency through the common routing area (i.e., the city, which is the bit of the route that actually has the density required to support public transit). The not-smart way would be to have three buses come along one minute after each other (or, better yet, following each other), thereby providing a thirty-minute service. Ten-minute service is almost frequent enough to be dependable even without precise timing. Thirty-minute service is not. Guess which one the Port Authority uses?
• Bus packing. Yeah, thirty minute service. I suspect they do this because, at least on the 61 routes through the southern bit of the East End, they don't have enough space on the buses for all the people (largely students and staff at the Oakland universities; people like me) who want to ride them, so frequently a full bus will pass you. Then another full bus will pass you. Hopefully a third full bus won't pass you, because then you're waiting thirty minutes for another full bus. You are, anyway. I'm not. I'm walking.
• That one driver on the 67H who doesn't know where the Schenley Pool stop is and for some reason wants to fight me about it. I should not have a blogworthy feud with a bus driver. And yet I do.
  

Anyway, a lot of this is not really the Port Authority's fault. They don't have any money, because they are an American public transit authority, and we pretty much decided public transit was for other people half a century ago. Mind you, this not having any money doesn't keep them from digging a half-billion dollar tunnel under the Allegheny River to carry the seventeenth-largest light rail system in the United States the distance of a fifteen minute walk. But it does serve Heinz Field, and this town loses its senses when it comes to da Stillers, so this is two rants for a later date, and one argument I'll lose by fiat. Moving on.

Once More Onto the Blog

All right. Let's try this a fourth time then, shall we?

I've had a long and incredibly sparse career as a blogger. I was a bit late to the game, starting my first one, Elmer and Bellefonte, on the twenty-third of August, two thousand one, largely for the purpose of hearing myself rant about various topics of high geekdom. It's no longer online, which is no great loss as the only real post of any note on it was a long one, entitled Ramblings on the American Response, dated the twentieth of September of that year, in which among other things I expressed concern that "[a]s the shock of seeing New York burn wears off, authoritarian interests within our nation are scrambling to make things safer for us (because, of course, they know better) at the expense of civil liberties," and vowing without any real conviction that "[i]f we [do not resist the temptation to authoritarianism], terror wins, America becomes a third world tinpot totalitarian state, and you can reach me at my new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe."

Well. A little under seven years later, through a much more, well, ridiculously circuitous course of events in which angst about eroding civil liberties does, I must admit, play a minor supporting role, I'll have a new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe soon enough. In forty six days, five hours, my one-way flight to Zurich lands.

(As an aside for the record, there was a second blog, completely lost to the sands of time; and a third, Tales from the Centerline, which was largely concerned with the summer-long renovation of my Depression-era house atop Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill in 2005. You're not missing anything by my never mentioning either of these again.)

So, welcome to my fourth blog. I'm starting this one to keep in touch with the people I'm leaving behind here, and to have a public record of what it was like to pick up at thirty and start over (not quite from scratch, mind you) an ocean and a few mountains away. I promise I'll try to keep it from going all "an American in Switzerland" on you.