Adventures with public transit

I woke up this morning to snow on the ground. Not a dusting, but based on my vehicle, a good 1 1/2 to 2 inches worth. This is too much for me to consider riding my bike because you can't see pavement. If it's a dusting and pavement is still visible, I'll ride. But when the pavement disappears beneath white stuff...forget it. I'm not taking chances as to what's underneath that white stuff.

[Side note: Aussie loves the snow. Loves it. Attacks it, bites it, snuffles through it, and generally looks happier than happy playing in the snow. This is great, except at 6:50AM when I'm trying to get her to do her business so I can get to work.]

So I figured my best course of action would be to take the bus. Now I've taken public transit all over the world. And SEPTA has this great online trip planner so all I have to do is plug in addresses and it gives me my options. So this is what I did. Early this morning. And the online planner told me that there was a stop 1 1/2 blocks from my house for my bus. I print out the schedule the website gives me and the planned route it gives me. Great. Easy. I can do this despite the fact that I haven't had coffee yet. So I leave the house with time to spare and walk to the stop. Only to be confronted with a nice little yellow sign that says:

"THIS STOP HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY DISCONTINUED. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE STOP AT X AND Y"

This is just fabulous. So I walk to the stop it tells me. Only to be confronted with a nice little yellow sign that says:

"THIS STOP HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY DISCONTINUED. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE STOP AT X AND Y"

You have GOT to be kidding me. Having already walked a good 3 blocks in the opposite direction of work, I make the executive decision to start walking in the direction of work as opposed to following the lovely yellow signs. I eventually find a stop for the bus the lovely SEPTA website told me I should take, and lucky me, a bus is coming along at that point. So I get on. The rest of the trip in is uneventful. But I'm still seething that nowhere in all of my planning was there any indication that ALL of the stops within 6 blocks of the one closest to me (remember, the one SEPTA told me to take) are "TEMPORARILY DISCONTINUED". Nowhere. You'd think they'd post detour information like that in the trip planner. But no. I checked when I got to work. What's worse they don't even include a disclaimer to check the specific route information and schedules for potential changes and detour information. It implies that all you need is the damn trip planner.

FYI, they do list detours on a separate page, but only if you go look up the route schedules and instead of clicking on the schedule for the route, click on the little orange circle with an "i" (for information). That's it. And it doesn't even give you specifics about where the new closest stops are, just that there's a temporary detour. And you can't even get to those pages from the trip planner. There's no link from the planner to the individual route schedules. Really. No joke.

God only knows what's going to happen when I try to take the bus home. Maybe I'll just walk the 2 miles...