Riding at the back of the bus
Jun. 30th, 2005 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienThe bus was almost half-full this morning, and all the seats in the front half of the shady side were taken, so I went to the back, and was reminded again of the strange thing about buses here. (Edit: in Tucson, AZ).
The seats at the back are never as comfortable as the seats nearer the front. On the older buses, the front seats are fully padded, the back ones metal or plastic with thin slips of padding; on the newer ones, the thin slips of colourful plush padding are at the front and the rear seats are mere black vinyl. I doubt any of these buses are more than ten or fifteen years old.
I'm probably completely wrong, but I always wonder if this is evidence of some weird cultural blind spot left over from the days of segregation -- a conviction that something inescapable about the nature of public transport requires the back half of the bus to have inferior accommodations even though there are no longer laws requiring certain people to sit there. I know, from growing up on buses in the UK, that this isn't true. Even in the days when the back half of single-decker buses was the domain of smokers, the seats were the same all the way back.
The seats at the back are never as comfortable as the seats nearer the front. On the older buses, the front seats are fully padded, the back ones metal or plastic with thin slips of padding; on the newer ones, the thin slips of colourful plush padding are at the front and the rear seats are mere black vinyl. I doubt any of these buses are more than ten or fifteen years old.
I'm probably completely wrong, but I always wonder if this is evidence of some weird cultural blind spot left over from the days of segregation -- a conviction that something inescapable about the nature of public transport requires the back half of the bus to have inferior accommodations even though there are no longer laws requiring certain people to sit there. I know, from growing up on buses in the UK, that this isn't true. Even in the days when the back half of single-decker buses was the domain of smokers, the seats were the same all the way back.
