Mohammedia News

A bus ride in the city of Mohammedia [Part-B]

The bus tickets come out of a small machine like the one in the Costco food area. The ticket is a white piece of paper, and the quality of paper is not hard but easily foldable. It has no coloring, circles, or curved lines. Its printing is in black ink. The size of the 905 bus ticket is 7.3 cm in width and 7.9 cm in length when holding it between fingers; it surprisingly has two noticeable sections.The top and the bottom. The top section of the bus ticket is always blank and measures 3.5 cm out of 7.3, and below it all the details are printed, such as the price, the tax, the name of the bus company, the date and time, and some other codes and numbers. In Arabic at the bottom, a thank-you message was printed, and it says, “We thank you for your trust, and we wish you a happy trip.”

As I got my bus ticket, I tried to move farther inside the bus, and it was not easy, but I pushed through several riders until I reached the middle. Not many moved from the front door little area, although exiting the bus can only be at the rear door.

When riding the 905 bus, it does not rattle, although many bumps in the road are for slowing down all kinds of vehicles. The 905 bus has no bus itinerary map inside it, but it is equipped with an automatic voice announcement system that sometimes informs about upcoming bus stops and route names. However, when it plays, the announcements are playing once in Arabic and twice in French but never in English. It is also equipped with several monitoring cameras and the Wi-Fi that sometimes works and sometimes does not work, but when it does work, the Internet speed is fast and requires no password, ad watching, or extra clicking to access it.

Getting off the 905 bus, especially when it is overcrowded, can be as hard as running a marathon during the summertime. So many red buttons for requesting a bus stop are there in every corner of the 905 bus but are all useless because they never work. To exit this bus, one must do one of the three things. Either a bus rider must shout at the bus driver ahead of time, requesting a bus stop verbally, or a bus rider must ask someone near the backdoor to hardly knock the bus door for him, or a bus rider himself must knock backdoor, making sure not to break any bones of hand. Sometime this unusual mechanism of requesting a bus stop in the 905 bus does not always work; consequently, when the bus does not stop, the rider who needs to get off the bus shall shout and knock the backdoor again as hard as he can. In most cases, this comes with anger and frustration and little worries in the minds of other riders who are planning to exit the bus soon.

The 905 bus line needs more buses for sure. When I had to ride this bus from the opposite direction near the train station, a lineup of people was patiently waiting for the bus to show up before me. The lineup was rapidly growing in size as the minute went by. The number of people who were seeking to ride the 905 bus suddenly trebled the capacity of a normal bus load. And when the bus came in after a long wait, everyone started clambering into it because they were driven by fear that no other buses would come, and the time was 8:09 pm. No bus sign or person was there to inform about the 905 bus last service of the day, and not many seemed cell phone savvy to search such important detail on the Internet if it is available and up to date.

The 905 bus was full, then crowded, then overcrowded, then something else to the point that no one inside the bus could even move or breathe easily, yet still more people were trying to get into it vainly. It was no longer a happy trip but a need for many to reach home. That is it. The bus driver hardily closed the doors before moving, and with no surprise, when the bus reached the next bus stop within five minutes or so, many people were waiting; God knows for how long, it did not stop for them. Actually, it did not stop for numbers of stops unless someone wanted to get off.

Hopefully more buses will be allocated to run this bus line soon, and hopefully the level of comfort will improve a little more as well.