Something very exciting has happened this morning: I have obtained a bus pass Now I appreciate that this may not at first sight appear like the most momentous thing to have happened in the history of mankind. Nevertheless, I am confident that it is going to revolutionise my life!

Being without a car means that six days out of seven, I have to make the bus journey from my home in a south Birmingham suburb into the city centre. I am actually exceptionally lucky with where I live, a three minute walk away from a bus stop on what is purported to be the most frequent bus service in Europe, with a bus scheduled to arrive approximately every three minutes. There are actually two bus services which are legendary in Birmingham, the first being this 50 route of which I speak and the second being the number 11.

The number 11, otherwise known as the Outer Circle, is famous by virtue of the fact that pretty much wherever you want to get to in Birmingham, with the notable exception of the city centre, the number 11 will take you. On a route which takes in excess of two and a half hours and covers 27 miles, it visits every suburb in outer Birmingham before arriving back at the place at which it started. There is no terminus, just two services which run clockwise and anticlockwise respectively. Whichever version you board you will eventually arrive at your destination, but it is important to have a good understanding of the route to ensure that a ten minute journey does not take you two hours. There are plenty of horror stories of unsuspecting school girls such as my aunt getting on the bus in the wrong direction and suddenly finding herself marooned in deepest, darkest Handsworth where the driver has suddenly decided to terminate the service. The fact that there is no official terminus means that you are never sure where the 11 is going to stop. Obviously it has to stop somewhere because the driver needs to go home and have his tea, but you often get the impression that they terminate the bus arbitrarily whenever they feel like a piss. The number 11 is said to be the longest urban bus route in Europe. It is also the longest circular bus route, a fact that appears in literature produced by the Birmingham tourist information office just below the fact that Birmingham has more miles of canal that Venice and the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art which anyone has ever had the misfortune to assemble in one place. There is, however, a long running joke on the internet which suggests that only in Birmingham would people think that a bus which takes three hours to travel thirty miles only to end up where it started is a good idea

The number 50 is perhaps not so famous, as unlike the number 11 it doesn’t have a book of poetry dedicated to it. It does, however, has legendary queues so extensive that they now have their own queue marshall to manage them. It is also periodically raided by the police on those occasions when they are told by the local top brass that they need to increase their conviction rates. In collaboration with the local transport company and under the guise of inspecting tickets, the police run a couple of Crime Weeks ever year where they board the 50 bus in groups of eight and arrest substantial quantities of wanted suspects whom they have been searching without success for ages. It is not unknown for murders to be cleared up in this manner

Why the 50 should be the busiest bus route in Europe is something of a mystery to be, as it doesn’t go anywhere terribly exciting. Only to a council estate called Druids Heath, half of whose population may or may not have been conceived on the bus itself. But in any case, it is a very useful public service which does its best to negate the inconvenience caused by the city council deciding to close our local railway station in the 1970s and doggedly ignoring the best efforts of the Liberal Democrats to get it reopened. The problem I have with it is not that it can conceivably take it 50 minutes to travel 5 miles but that it charges £1.50 a trip for the privilege

Birmingham appears to be unique among other British cities I have visited in two respects. Firstly, that it is not possible to buy a return bus ticket. It had never actually entered my head that such an item as a return bus ticket might exist until I was 20 and caught a bus in Derby, but having now been introduced to the concept I think it is a remarkably useful one. The other uniqueness consists of the fact that Birmingham bus drivers do not give change. Now to me this always used to seem eminently reasonable. The bus drivers can not give change, because in order to do so they would have to have access to a considerable supply of cash. To give a bus driver access to a considerable amount of cash would be tantamount to manslaughter. Clearly, that is just giving people an invitation to stab him, and I’m fairly certain that no self respecting Birmingham bus driver would agree to work under such circumstances. In fact, I suspect most of them would refuse to work if the perspex sheet which currently separates them from the general public were to be removed.

So, imagine my surprise when I go to Leicester and find a bus driver prepared to give me change from a five pound note I can’t logically imagine why Leicester should be any safer than Birmingham. Perhaps Birmingham is not as dangerous as we all assume, I don’t know. But in any case, the lack of change on buses in this city is highly inconvenient because it obviously means you have to have the correct change about your person at all times.

It might not sound terribly difficult, but keeping three pounds a day in cash has turned into a bit of nightmare. It amounts to having twelve pound coins and twelve fifty pence pieces in my purse every week. When I first started work, the problem was solved by my mother going to the bank every week and changing a twenty pound note. I was quite a fan of this arrangement because it meant that whilst I might be paying an extortionate amount of rent to my parents for the inconvenience of living in their home, I was at least getting nearly eighty quid a month of it back in bus fare Unfortunately my mother eventually cottoned on to the fact that she was losing out with this arrangement and one day announced that her days of providing bus fare were over I was then obliged to fend for myself, which proved more complicated than I had anticipated. Working means I rarely have the opportunity to physically visit a bank to obtain change, and so the only way to get coins is to buy things from notes. The problem is that I very rarely want to buy anything! I mean, to get enough bus fare I need to make a purchase every other day, and so I am generally reduced to buying a bar of chocolate. Now for a while, buying a bar of chocolate every day had a certain novelty value, but pretty soon the initial excitement wore off and I realised I didn’t actually *want* to eat a bar of chocolate every day of the week. Firstly I’m sure it has been making me put on weight and secondly it feels like an entirely pointless waste of money

So, a few weeks ago I had a lightbulb moment and decided to look into the possibility of buying a bus pass. I had always imagined that this was not something which would be cost effective for me, because I can be sent to work on the far ends of the country at a moment’s notice with the result that I will unexpectedly not be in Birmingham and catching buses for weeks at a time. I also thought it would be a tremendous hassle trying to get myself to the correct sort of newsagent every week in order to acquire a pass. However, upon visiting a Travel West Midlands Information Centre I was rather pleasantly surprised to find a leaflet describing a new direct debit scheme. In what seems like an uncharacteristically efficient piece of organisation, it is possible to pay £38 a month by direct debit and in return obtain a monthly bus pass posted to your home I was very impressed. £38 equates to only twenty six bus journeys, which I can pretty much accomplish within two weeks. So, even if I have to spent two weeks out of every four working away from home, I’m still pretty much guaranteed to get my money back Plus I have the obvious convenience of never needing any change ever again!

Anyway, this post is prompted by the fact that my bus pass arrived in the post this morning. I was further impressed by the fact that it comes complete with a nice little leather case which looks far more hard wearing that the cheap plastic ones we used to be issued with at school, and the photo of me isn’t even too bad I don’t think I’m technically supposed to be using it yet, because they haven’t taken the money out of my account yet and the letter they sent me this morning said that the direct debit was due to start on March 22nd. However, the same letter also said that as soon as I received the pass, which came disguised in a separate envelope, I could start to use it. So, I had my first tentative go on the bus into town this morning and got away with it I have the letter in my handbag, however, so if I do happen to get pulled up by an Inspector I can feign confusion and point to the bit which tells me to start using it.

In other transport related news, I am currently sitting on the slowest rail replacement bus in the history of the world. They are doing works between Nuneaton and Hinckley this weekend, with the implication that there are no trains between Birmingham and Leicester I’m not a fan of rail replacement buses in general because of their slowness and because I can’t read on them without feeling unwell. They are, however, generally a lot quicker than they purport to be on the timetable, especially the ones which go direct from Birmingham to Leicester without stopping in Nuneaton. There’s this really clever motorway thing which enables traffic to go at a decent pace.

But this bus… Crikey… For reasons which are not apparent to me, this bus decided it was going to go from Birmingham to Leicester via Coleshill Parkway. Now let’s get this straight: no one ever gets on or off the train at Coleshill Parkway. For a start, they only reopened it pretty recently so most people probably don’t even know it exists, and secondly who the hell lives in Coleshill anyway and why would anyone assume that large swathes of the population of this insignificant village want to spent their time travelling to Leicester by rail?! Getting to Coleshill in itself wasn’t too much of an ordeal, but getting from there to Nuneaton was a complete nightmare The route lay down tiny country lanes and little village high streets which were far too narrow to comfortably accommodate the width of our bus. We had to reverse and go back several times, and the entire journey has so far been conducted at a snail’s pace. I have currently been on this bus for in excess of ninety minutes, and the last road sign I saw cheerfully informed me that I was still FIFTEEN miles away from my destination

Tags: Birmingham, buses

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Random rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.