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⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-10)
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Sweden wrong-headedly uses a system where the polar opposite busses have the exact same number 🤦🏻‍♀️
Since I have really bad eyesight what has happened to me many many times is that I go to a bus stop and there’s two bus stops really far from each other on separate sides of a really dangerous and busy road and there are huge numbers saying 360 but both of the bus stops have the same number and to see which one is Röda Kvarn vs which one is Tjottahejti I need to get really really close, sometimes inside the li’l stall and maybe that’s not even possible because people are sitting there and I need to stand like 3cm from the li’l text sheet inside. The LCD display thing that they have I often can’t see at all.
It’s great that you know that “OK, I took 360 there ergo I need to take 360 home”. I for sure don’t want the buss numbers to me completely unrelated like “one way is 360 and the other is 355/113”, but I’d want one of them to be 360 A and the other to be 360 B. For example. Or some other letter pair. Or odds and evens.
Even when I’m going home I’m sometimes not sure which of the two bus stops to go to because I forgot which side of the road I got off.
Everyone I’ve always talked to about this system always gets defensive and go “I think the current system is great actually”. Not sure how they magically find the right bus (maybe they have better eyesight) but it’s happened a few times where I’m a li’l late to the bus and I see it coming from both directions and I only can run to one. Or, even if I’m not really that late but the two bus stops are super far from each other so regardless of which one I go to first, it’s a detour. And even when I can get to both bus stops we have the aforementioned issue that sometimes to see which of the busses is correct I need to crawl into the bus stops to read the mini-print schedule.
At some stations, the terminal destination is printed on the side of the stall in a somewhat readable way if I get close enough. But it has happened many many times that I don’t even know which of the two directions is the right one. Someone told me, a person or an app, that I “need to take bus 42 from stop Such-and-such and then get off at This-or-that”.
If the busses had different numbers in different directions like I wish they did, for example 42 B vs 42 A, they could’ve told me to “take bus 42 B from stop Such-and-such and then get off at This-or-that” and I would’ve been right as rain but as it is, I need to make my way and ask all the smoking teenage girls in there to lean away while I stressedly and hurriedly scan all the bus stop tables (in both of the bus stops at Such-and-such) looking for which of them is gonna go past This-or-that.
I go by bus often, and I have since late eighties, and I’ve wished for this feature for almost as long.