so, it was pointed out to me by a friend of mine that my transportation woes for the rest of the summer (getting from kent to canton and back) could be solved by simply using public transportation. so i hopped on www.sartaonline.com and tried to work something out. unfortunately, the line that goes to akron (which would only necessitate making the akron-to-portage bus at a dead run from the station through downtown akron in 10 minutes any time of the day OR sitting for a few hours in downtown akron until the next bus comes around) starts on cherry avenue in canton, which is completely inaccessible from any of the bus lines that come anywhere within walking distance of navarre road, which is the main road off the allotment where my parents' house is.
so, unless i had a car to get me to cherry avenue (thus negating my need to take the bus in the first place), the quickest route that i've been able to find in an hour or so of looking at maps contains three separate bus lines i'd have to take around canton (which is about the size of spokane and its environs) for god knows how long (likely something like an hour, all told) to get to cherry avenue, to take that bus to akron (another 30-45 minutes), after which, assuming i make the almost-impossible conversion to the PARTA line in my alloted 10 minutes, i can take the PARTA (because people in akron and kent actually use the public transportation line and thus there are actually useful routes) straight from downtown akron to the KSU student center, where i could easily walk to the edge of town (where i need to be) in about 40 minutes.
not only is this problematic in the sense that the entire trip time would be something like 4 hours and cost something like 5-10 dollars each way every time, it also requires an incredibly intricate amount of planning each time, and there's always the element of possible catastrophe in the sense that i could miss any of these connections at any time and then just end up trapped in the middle of canton or akron, forcing either one of my friends (which i would feel bad about since the point of the bus ride is to not force them to drive me in the first place) or my parents (to whom anything unexpected at all in the universe is a massive, pulsating nuisance, provoking sighing and fury) to come rescue me.
if only there was some way to take the PARTA from my driveway to the KSU student center...
i suppose i'm not really complaining about the shitfest that is SARTA; they're consistently low on funding, nobody uses their lines, and the people who do are (95 percent of the time) just getting from the grocery to their home or vice versa. ohio public transit isn't set up for long distances; i guess i'm just spoiled by washington's public transit, which can get you from spokane to pullman or pullman to moscow in the blink of an eye for a reasonable price...but that's just as much a function of geographical arrangement of cities and roads in both places as it is funding and public support of RTA-apparatuses.
it seems like, i this part of the country, you just need to have a car to travel anywhere. and that's stupid. but i suppose that's the mentality our country is built on.
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