View of the city has improved from bus
Katherine Gerdt, Charlottesville
From The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, VA, Monday, May 20, 2002
I live at the north end of Locust Avenue, on the other side of the U.S. 250 Bypass. Although I have lived in Charlottesville for more than 20 years, until recently I had never ridden a city bus. I’ve watched them rumble past my various downtown homes, but I’ve never ridden one. I could always walk or drive and, in seconds, park and then walk to wherever I was going. It was so easy, and the buses were for other people.
Lately, over the past several years, it’s become harder to do that. Sometimes I find myself driving around the downtown streets for 15 to 20 minutes, looking for a place to park, feeling more and more shark-like and watchful and tense, and thinking black thoughts about how nice this town once was.
Twice recently, though, I rode the bus downtown, and I like this town more than I ever did, because I saw it in a whole new way, through the windows of a city bus.
It was right on time, it stopped for me, and it was immaculately clean. I saw sunlight falling through the trees. I saw doctors crossing the street in front of Martha Jefferson, and young couples, and dogs on leashes. It was all so pretty, so old-fashioned, so urban in the nicest possible way.
Across the aisle, three young boys in big pants smiled warmly at the elderly lady next to me. She was telling them to be careful when they got off the bus. "Yes, ma’am," they said.
The driver stopped in front of the lady’s house on St. Clair Avenue, "because otherwise she’d have to walk all the way down to the bus stop."
As she left the bus and began walking slowly up her driveway, the lady looked back over her shoulder. "Thank you, Ann," she called. "See you tomorrow."
And thank you, Charlottesville Transit Service.
What a fine thing you do for us all.