Tansantiago --- El Problema

So, if you didn't already know from just knowing me in general or from reading my blogs... for some reason I tend to view the world as half empty. Which I personally hate about myself. I wish that I could enjoy things to their fullest all the time and I really do try to work on this everyday... but for anyone who is the same as me, you know its not easy to change. I think it actually is something that is handed down from one side in particular of my family and is probably a mixture of good and bad, but mostly bad. This particular side of my family tends to be pretty critical of everything... which contributes to our hard work ethic and desire to change things, but also leaves us a group of glass half empty people. But this is just a side note, introduction to the real blog of the problem of the mass transit system in Santiago.

This blog, you may first think is just a rant by me of how bad the system is, but its really not just me. If you talk to ANY person who lives in Santiago they will bitch, moan, complain, throw a hissy fit, etc... about this topic for at least 15 minutes. So I am going to use this blog to explain to you why the system is so bad.

Every Monday morning, I have class at 8:30 at the Catolica Campus across town. I get up at 7am, rush through the shower, shaving, teeth, grab breakfast on my way out, and get to the bus stop around 7:40. I wait, and I wait, and sometimes when I am lucky, the bus comes in 5 minutes... but most of the time I wait until almost 8am. You are probably asking, well if the bus comes at 8am, then why don't you just come at 8am? The answer is you never know when the bus is going to come and if you miss the 7:50 bus you may not get the next bus until 8:10 OR LATER ensuring your tardiness to Chilean Geography.

When the bus finally does come, it is PACKED with people, maybe 3 people can scoot in on the bus and stand in the doorway, just allowing the bus doors to shut. You may say, well the bus is just very busy... the problem is many times the back of the bus is empty and people don't move to the back of the bus to make room for the new people getting on, or when people get off the back of the bus, they don't fill in those spots making room for more people.

Another problem with the bus system, is that many times the one bus will come and be packed, people will push and shove to get on, the whole while three empty buses have stopped behind the full bus and no people go to the empty buses where there is more room to sit. I have at times seen one full shorter bus, and three longer buses that are half full to empty in a row and where do the Chileans go, the full bus where they can have some strange man with a guitar feel them up. Its pure insanity. Both of these problems however, seem to be more about the people who get on the bus then the bus system itself... right? WRONG.

Why are there two empty buses following a full bus in the first place. Wouldn't it be smarter to have buses come every 5 minutes instead of a parade of buses (sometimes 3-4 in a pack) at once every 20-25 minutes. It seems more logical to me. If there are more than 2 buses in a pack, then that 2nd bus should wait at the bus stop for a few minutes while the bus in front of it goes ahead. It makes sense to me. The Twin Cities bus system allows people to know that the bus comes at specific times and I don't know how they do it, but the bus usually at the stop between 2 minutes before or 2 minutes after when it should be there... of course this is different during weather, but come on, Santiago only gets rain and that is rare. When I return home from school in the evenings I wait at a bus stop where they have the pay box things outside of the waiting area. You are corralled like cows into lines where you then pay for this mockery and wait in a holding cell until an empty bus comes and you fill it up from every door you possibly can get through. I believe that if the windows were big enough people would throw their small children through so they could reserve a seat for them. So, the bus is now PACKED with people and I think the guy standing next to me is either feeling me up or he just... I don't know, but I move away and bump into some old women who looks like she wants to kill me. All the while there is a man who is taking up three people's spaces with his guitar and singing some Chilean Ballad and then begs for money from the millions of passengers on board. How does he get the money you ask? He, and his guitar, push through the crowd sticking his dirty hand in front of your face until you give him 100 pesos or more. Don't worry there will be more stories about these people later.

After I had experienced this a couple of times and witnessed the 'parading' of buses around town I thought to myself: gee, if I wait in the corral a little longer, do you think another empty bus will come and I can have almost an entire bus to myself. BINGO! Every time, as soon as the packed bus leaves a bigger one comes around the corner and me and my friends (natives who have also figured this out) jump on and can literally put our feet up on the four seats we have to ourselves. CRAZINESS!

A couple other stories, guitarists are not the only people who perform a service on the bus and beg for money. No, in fact, one day I had a guitarist, a singer, and a clown get on the bus at different intervals. I only pay the musicians if I think that they are good. Clowns, people selling toothbrushes, and people selling chocolate bars don't get anything. Three pretty good stories from the buses include the Clown, the toothbrush salesman, and the really bad singer. The clown, came on the bus and was crazy. He ran up to a little girl and started speaking in Spanish and literally scared her so badly that she jumped into her mothers arms and started crying... all the while, I was laughing pretty hard in the back of the bus and everyone on the bus realized that the clown should not be paid for his bad services. The tooth brush guy came on the bus in a suit with a really weird tie, that really wasn't a tie, it was a scarf that was tied some how like a tie. He had a voice like Bob Barker and he talked about how this toothbrush was special, it was from the United States, so it must be special, it has special brush technology that massages your teeth and gums, it also has a brush on the other end for your tongue because according to this guy, the tongue has the most bacteria on it. After his explanation, I started laughing because the guy sitting next to me was making faces that went along to this guys jibberish. He and I laughed pretty hard making it obvious that we thought he was nuts, and then the guy sitting next to us, bought two of them. Not such a bad day for the toothbrush salesman. The really bad singer, was quite simply horrible. She cantered a ballad that literally made me want to change buses. A Chilean woman I was sitting by looked at me and said, laughing under her breath that she would pay this woman to stop singing and get off the bus. She said she never took public transit because she had heard so many bad stories and that after today she would never use it again.

We can also talk about how the design of the buses is nonsense. In the twin cities you must climb on to the bus to get on. Thus the bus is 3-4 feet higher then the ground. In santiago 90% of the buses are all at the same level as the ground... probably for service to handicapped personalities, but the items they have to help handicapped people are inadequate any way. Number one, the buses are usually too packed to have someone in a wheel chair on the bus anyway, and also someone has to put the ramp out and bring it back in for the person. In the twin cities the device is activated by the bus driver and is done automatically, which frees handicapped people from requiring another person to help them. Thank God for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which I know has made new construction of some things difficult, but you don't see people in wheel chairs with the freedom that you do in the USA. Now, I know, I am in Chile, South America, not as developed as the USA, however there are 8 million people who live in Santiago and the transantiago system is used by almost everyone to get around. You would think that they could figure a way out to solve some of these problems.

The system, as I have written before was recently changed--- about 2 years ago recent and they admit that they need to work out some kinks. The system was changed primarily because of issues with the environment. Santiago is usually --- especially during the weekday grey skied because of the pollution cloud over the city. The government thought that if they changed the system to make it more efficient the pollution would go down. Instead, recent studies show that the pollution has stayed pretty much the same... which could be a success because as cities develop, Santiago is developing, they tend to create more pollution and if Santiago's pollution has been kept steady, this may have made an impact, but to most of the population of Santiago, those people who don't move to the back of the bus, they get pretty pissed waiting for that next parade of buses to come. I think personally that trying to rid a city of pollution is a great and worthy goal, however cities like Mexico City and Santiago, which are surrounded by mountains and don't have winds to push the pollution else where, reducing pollution is not going to bring you the blue skies you dream of. Its a geographical thing that really can't be changed easily or at all... unless you move the entire city somewhere else... which won't be happening.

On the other hand, the METRO system or the subway is wonderful. It is always clean, tends to have room (I have only had to push myself in once), and the people are very friendly. Chileans value their metro system a lot. It has been rated one of the most clean systems in the world and they work together... all of them to make sure it stays that way. However, the buses are a different story, there is graffiti, people get mugged, etc on the bus all the time. So, word to the wise, get a hotel or hostel close to the metro stations if you visit Santiago, I promise you will be SO happy when you can avoid the buses like the plague.

Another note: my professor of spanish told our class that the correct usage of problema (problem in spanish) is el problema (the problem). Every noun is either masculine of feminine in spanish. Usually if the word ends with a its feminine and thus is la whatever word. So you would expect that problema would be la problema. But, instead its el problema. My professor said that the reason this was spelled this way is because men are the problems. The word for answer is la repuesta. So, she said women are the answers. I don't subscribe to this, but find it funny.

To end this blog I will bring up two items that I think will make you laugh:

DOGS DON'T HAVE TO PAY TO USE THE BUS! One night I was on the bus and as we were getting on the bus, this dog jumped on the bus with us. It was quite comical. He laid down, chilled for a little while and then when his time came, he got off the bus at one of the stops. I asked the guy next to me if the dog had his Bip card, the card you use to pay for the bus, and he just laughed and smiled.

WHEELS ON THE BUS! The entire time I was writing this blog, the song kept going through my head. Especially the part where the bus driver says: Move on back! Move on back! Maybe whoever wrote that book or song, needs to introduce it to Santiago bookstores or the singers on the bus need to sing it... because its advice would be very good I think.