A Farewell to the OCTA: One UC Irvine student's take

Mengfei Chen, an editor at UC Irvine's New University newspaper, writes about his experience and life using OCTA at UC Irvine:

I became a bus rider out of necessity. When I arrived at UCI three years ago, I had no car, license, and no real desire to get one and I had the pinchpenny mentality of a first-generation Chinese immigrant. When I found out that UCI offered its students free bus passes, there was no question that I would milk every bit of value out of that card as possible.

Even though they appealed to my frugal side, buses also hold a certain charm for me. Because I was raised in car-obsessed Southern California, I associated buses with school field trips to New York, with a summer spent in Boston, with special events and with treats. They were romantic just like the idea of a cramped flat in Paris is romantic to the suburban bohemian – buses appealed to me because they were unfamiliar and removed from my experiences.

Over the next two and a half years, I rode the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) buses to school, work and to every other place that I couldn’t finagle a ride to. I got up early to catch the 79 in order to get to an 8 a.m. class. I spent hours waiting for the 70 and the 55 to get to my summer internship in Garden Grove and hopped on the 175 whenever I wanted to kill time and felt like winding my way past every senior center in Irvine and stopping for a milkshake at Ruby’s.

As time wore on, the bus became, in a dozen little ways, an important part of my life. It wasn’t just a way of getting from point A to point B. Its fuzzy, velour covered seating became a place for me to catch up on sleep. I downloaded music and podcasts onto my iPod and spent the time, depending on whether I was on one of my intermittent self-improvement campaigns or not, blasting either bad music or audio from the Economist magazine into my brain. I read books. I ate lunch.

Mostly, I just sat and thought about nothing in particular. It was liberating. Being able to sit somewhere for an extended period of time and not feel awkward about doing nothing is a feeling that seems to get rarer with each year. Blackberries, Facebook, Twitter — technology seems to conspire against “alone” and “off” time. I wasn’t hanging out or getting ahead. I was just vegetating. And it felt good.

I watched the scene outside the window, smugly noting my righteous use of public transportation as the bus passed alongside boat-like SUVs. I watched people and listened in on conversations. I observed tired workers (name-tags still clipped on) slumped in their seats, shoppers clutching crushed plastic bags, students focused inward after classes.

There were people engrossed in deep conversation with unseen phantoms and occasionally the — “Oh my god! I got a 770 on my SAT II, I need to take it again!” types. The OCTA doesn’t usually get a cross-dressing bunny man that my friend from Berkeley said frequents the BART, but it was no less interesting, just more subtle. In a place as blandly surfaced as Orange County, the buses seemed to offer an unpeeled look at the mundanely fascinating people living here.

This is not to say that the bus was perfect. During those years, somewhat exaggerated versions of bus-related frustrations became part of my conversational repertoire. I enjoyed complaining about the bus, probably boring people with my long rants. One time or two, I sank so low that I vented my anger at the poor person sitting on the other end of the OCTA’s customer service line. I even began to endow the bus system with anthropomorphic quirks. I was convinced that it got a kick out of making me late, that it could sense when I had a final and chose to respond by breaking down.

At some level, taking public transportation in Orange County means learning to accept, or even anticipate, the system’s inconveniences. Otherwise, a straightjacket and padded walls would likely suit riders in the near future. However, at some point, even bus lovers will attempt to seek out more convenient modes of transportation. That is exactly what is likely to happen now.

In recent months, the bus system has, like everything else in California, been hit hard by the state’s financial difficulties. In accordance with most everything else, the buses have had to cut services it couldn’t afford to cut. Services will be even less frequent and UCI students no longer get to ride for free.

For me, and I suspect for many other riders, the cuts mark the end of an era. I just can’t afford the nostalgia anymore. As much as I love bus culture, when it comes down to it, the bus is a form of transportation. When it fails at that basic task, no amount of charm can rescue it. That — especially in an era when public transportation should be growing not shrinking — is a sad thing.