I am a bus rider. It is who I have become and I embrace it. Make no mistakes... I love biking and I can bike to my office in about 22 minutes. But the summertime heat is making itself known and I have little to no interest in arriving to work feeling... swampy.
So... I say again... I am a bus rider. It allows me to actively promote mass transit, leisure read, and people watch. The ladder of which will fuel the remainder of this post.
So I'm riding the bus and I am analyzing the passengers, moving about, sitting standing, old young, loud and insular, and representing every shade of brown. I'm standing near the rear exit and there is a women standing in front of me. Someone passes betwixt us to exit and as the doors are creeping to a close the standing woman leans down and tosses her crumpled bus transfer out of the bus.
I was appalled.
I did not see it coming and there it was... right in front of me. My first question to myself was why would she do that? But I then started to think that the psychological parameters of such a question were way too vast.
I needed a better question.
Did she think that littering was okay? Did she understand the consequence of her actions? Did she think that because the bus was bound for Southeast Washington, that her trash would just be one piece of many that accumulate exponentially as you journey out from the city center? Was she protesting against an archaic system of paper currency?
All fair questions, yet all are inherently subjective?
I needed a question that I can research, analyze, and get some concrete data.
Lesson: People respond to data more than they respond to personal attacks.
Then the right question hit me...
Where did the bus transfer go?
I figure that if I can follow the lifespan of a bus transfer from being ripped off the pad, to being tossed off the bus, to the sidewalk, to the storm sewer, to the watershed, to the river, etc... Then maybe I can stop the simply selfish mindless mayhem that is unleashed every time the Bus driver reaches for that pad.
This may take a while.