Since driving was not going to be option for getting into work Monday, I decided to see if CARTA was indeed carrying the community, even in the snow.
I can see the bus stop from my kitchen window, but I had not seen a bus go up or down Brainerd Road so I found the number online and called and was connected to a live person in a matter of seconds.
The operator said the buses were running, but not on a regular schedule. She asked where I lived, then she did something I was not expecting. She first tried to locate the bus via GPS and, when that failed, she got on the radio, contacting drivers along the route to see if they had seen an inbound bus.
Still unable to locate the bus, she took my name and phone number and promised to call right back. True to her word, she called a few minutes later to tell me the bus was just leaving Eastgate Town Center.
Pretty impressive.
For a variety of reasons, I didn’t take the bus on Monday, but did Tuesday. Though the buses were pretty much on schedule, my driver told me all the drivers had been given different routes because of the snow and ice.
“We can’t make it up some of the hills,” she said.
Driving on Monday was fairly treacherous, she added, and she slid around quite a bit.
She could not have been nicer. It’s been awhile since I’ve ridden the bus, so I asked her how close to the paper her route would take me. She answered that with a smile and also took the time to look up a route in answer to another question.
“You can save a lot of money riding the bus,” she said as I stepped off a block and a half from our front door. “You just come right back to this spot this evening and a bus will be by to pick you up,” she said.
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-7576354.