On the buses

I am the passenger. And I ride and I ride. I ride, as Iggy Pop sometimes sings on my iPod, through the city's ripped backside. I do this every morning and every evening, on the number 258 or 266 or 253 bus, up and down Dominion Rd, back and forward to work. I have done this, been the passenger, for a year now.

However, if you'd told me a year earlier that not only would I be riding a bus everyday, but I would be enjoying that ride, I'd have said you were barking. To be a working Aucklander is to be a commuter. And to be a commuter in Auckland is to drive. You do it, I've done it; more than three quarters of Auckland travels to work everyday by car, most driving a vehicle containing only themselves. And all who commute by car will surely agree it is hell.

Hell on wheels, in fact. But still we do it. However buses, I'd have said a year ago, are, well, not for me. Who in their right mind would stand at a windy, probably wet, bus stop waiting for a hulking diesel box to hove into sight when one might be seated snuggly inside one's own car, the heater warming and a few Bach variations insinuating from the CD player?

Albeit you're moving at an average of 20km/h, dealing with the insanity of other drivers and occasionally risking committing a road rage murder all while taking an hour to do what should be a 20-minute trip.

Yet even so, the very idea of taking the bus, certainly for one who had never really done it regularly seemed, well, a little too Third World compared to leather seats and a built-in electric bum-warmer.

Circumstances change. Returning to work at the Herald last year, I decided to test the city's public transport system, if only to satisfy myself that I was right about those big, stinking road hogs. That I have continued since to walk to the bus stop instead of my garage after that first morning last April has in no way been a difficult nor vexing decision. It was not an economic one - if forced to I could afford the horrendous CBD parking fees and the petrol - though certainly a $2.88 (concession) fare for a one-way trip on the bus is exceptional value.

Nor was it that after a month or two of not having to navigate through awful traffic I couldn't face returning to my car. No, something else happened to me out there on the buses. THE MOST unpopular seats on any bus are the four that face backwards. If you sit there, you will not only see the faces of your fellow travellers but they will see yours, too. Mostly these berths are the last to be taken because, well, few people like to put themselves in position where they may be stared at. Yet, for some reason, one guy on my route always sits in one of these seats, even on a half-empty bus. Why?

Observing human behaviour is an idler's habit. I am an accustomed loafer. So finding myself in close proximity to a revolving group of strangers twice a day - with all their queer, unknowable habits - is to be granted daily the material for a good deal of idle speculation. I am not, all things considered, particularly in favour of humanity and its habits. I might even say I find life something like being stuck permanently at the primates' enclosure at a zoo where, in this particular instance, one's only choice is to fill in time wondering why it is that that particular monkey always sits in the same place. But here's the thing: it is an oddly restful sort of thing to mull, to ponder or to muse about my fellow bus monkeys, if for no other reason than that I have the time and the inclination.

If I can't be bothered reading my book, or if I'm finding looking out the window a little too mesmerising, I can sit there considering the possible motivations for why one woman I regularly see wears, no matter what the weather, a strange, rather masculine but also rather jaunty straw hat with a long, red sash tied around it. All of modern life travels on my bus.

For $2.88 I can watch as vile, spotty youths make a beeline for the back seats where, surreptitiously, they will use felt-tip pens to scrawl illegible idiocies. For $2.88 I can marvel as the person next to me manages, despite the near continuous stopping and starting a bus ride entails, to spend the entire trip into town in such a deep slumber that they appear dead. For $2.88 I can marvel at the quiet, gentle dignity of old geezers lugging shopping, at the consideration of strangers (well, mostly) and at the sheer bloody rudeness of some bus drivers. But even the latter cannot disturb me once I'm on the bus.

Only on public transport can you sit back and really observe other people going quietly - and oddly - about their lives and, well, wonder what makes them tick ... Perhaps I need to get out more. But for a half hour every morning and every evening on the bus, a zen-like calm descends as someone else takes care of getting me and my fellow travellers through Auckland's mad traffic and leaves me to get on with simply being the passenger.