CATA

The first public transportation I ever took was the bus system in Washington, DC in the mid-sixties with my worldly grandmother. I didn't know anything about it other than to keep a hold on her hand and ride wherever she took us, to the theatre and then back to the National Geographic building where my dad worked. Second was about forty miles and several years down the road. Having never wanted a vehicle, my first mission when I moved in 1971 from Vero Beach, Florida to Glen Burnie, Maryland was to learn the Baltimore City Bus System. My brother and his wife Liz lived in northeast Baltimore, and I visited them once a month or so. Liz was a Baltimore native who had taken city buses to school and everywhere else all of her life, so she could rattle off route numbers from anywhere to wherever. I quickly became proficient at it as well. The phone book had the system map in the front with the other maps - very handy if you could find a phone booth (remember them?) with an intact directory.

In May of '75 I flew to London, and was issued a transit system map in my tourist packet, which I used daily for the seven days of my "London Show Tour," covered in detail in my post from October 8th, 2009 entitled "Four Plays." In October of 1977 I got a job delivering new trucks all over the east. Figuring out transit systems became part of my skillset. From New York and New Jersey or Chicago or Atlanta, I'd breeze into a city, deliver my truck and then figure out how to get home to Baltimore, by bus, train or plane. In December of '82 I took my 13-year-old little buddy Heather Bowers on the "snow tour" to New York City, Buffalo and Niagara Falls, Ontario, complete with a hair-raising adventure on the New York Subway System ("Slowly I Turned" posted October 21, 2009.) Since then, I've used the Orlando LYNX system, learned Boston's MBTA better than their own information people, and put Albuquerque's buses to a lot of good use.

Then we moved to Meadville, Pennsylvania. I knew before we moved that Meadville has a bus system, the Crawford Area Transportation Authority, but I didn't pay it much attention, Meadville being so small and much as I like to walk. Then I had knee surgery. Suddenly that fifteen degree hill from Grove Street to the top of Chestnut Street became a long hard painful slog. Suddenly I was motivated to learn the system.

Three buses. That's all it is. The routes are divided into five, but it's really three. Blue Route A and Blue Route B are the same bus, same driver, A leaving the Downtown Mall on the hour and B on the half hour. Red Routes A and B are exactly the same hour and half hour schedule. Green is the long one that takes a full hour. It goes out to the Walmart, the movie theater and the Park Avenue Plaza among other attractions. That's it, the CATA bus system. Since I've been out and about after surgery, I've taken Green out and back once. Blue A, however, takes twenty-some minutes to haul my fat ass around the southeastern Meadville area from a block and a half away from work to the top of Alden Street, a block and a half from my house. It may be small, but it does the job I need it to do. That's all I can ask of it.