More About Buses!

A 1915 BusThe first thing that really caught my attention in these readings was Nathan Asch’s love affair with buses. Our fellow classmate Amelia Bedelia already wrote a post about Greyhound vs Amtrak, and if you read about her personal experience and then my own stories in the comment I left on her post with the bus company, you will understand why I was almost offended when Asch insisted that the bus is the best way to travel.

I HATE the bus.

But then I thought, maybe I just hate buses of the new millennium. Maybe seventy years ago they were something to be respected and praised and enjoyed. Maybe buses used to be cleaner, and more comfortable, and safer, with politer drivers and passengers. So I looked into the history of buses.

The first public bus was started in 1662 in Paris by a man named Blaise Pascal (that’s right all you math people slash high school geometry graduates, it’s the same guy with the triangle), but it seems that this was little more than Pascal carting people around in a carriage with a lot of seats. This lasted for only a few years, and then there were no other known bus lines until the nineteenth century. Around the 1820s, “buses” started to emerge in European cities like Paris and Madrid, but they were really more like taxis—single horse-drawn stagecoaches for hire. From that, the evolution of buses took off! By the 1830s there were steam powered buses. Then the trolleybus was invented—tracks and wires were laid down in urban areas and everyone had the ability to move around cities. The first engine powered bus was built in 1895, around the same time as the automobile, and the vehicle continued to develop and evolve through the decades. There have been multi-level buses, luxury buses called “coaches,” buses with joints in the middle that allow them to be longer and fit more people, even open top buses for the tourists out there. In the 1930s, a number of multi-city bus companies started doing business, and fares ranged from 5 cents a ride within city to $49 a ride from anywhere to the Worlds Fairs in Chicago (1933) and New York (1938). Just a few years ago, the longest bus in history was built. Sure it can only go 51 miles per hour, but it can fit 300 people!

Besides the literal history of how the idea of the bus can to be and changed over time, the vehicle actually played a pretty big part in American history that really doesn’t have anything to do with transportation. Rosa Parks become a historic figure and started one of the most well-known Civil Rights campaigns in history. There were race related public high school bussing crises in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Richmond, and other cities across the country. Even today public buses in areas of the world that are engaged in violent conflicts are targets for terrorism and violence.