Geneva has a wonderful system of public transportation, an army of buses, trams, and even a boat or two that canvas the city and its suburbs. From 5 a.m. until 2 a.m., public transportation is easily available, and there are night buses for the remaining hours when the normal routes shut down. Of all of these, the trams are undoubtedly the powerhouses of the fleet. With the carrying capacity of about six regular buses, air-conditioning, and their own set of roads and traffic lights, a ride on the tram is far more relaxing than bouncing around in the bus. With a punctuality instilled, no doubt, by generations of clock makers, the trams operate with error bars of approximately a minute on their schedules. I firmly believe that Geneva has been designed that the trams are the only timely or direct way of getting anywhere in the city.
Yesterday, however, the trams of Geneva let me down.
The hub of public transport in Geneva is the main train station Gare Cornavin. Here are the main offices and here most of the buses and tram lines pass on their way across town. Here also happen to be a great many holes in the ground, and some brand of repair or construction work is taking place on a large chunk of the tram lines there. This has cut a large segment of the tram rails off from the rest of the city, and preventing the trams from running. Currently lines 13, 14, 15, and 16 have been replaced by buses.
The lines 14 and 16 share stops on the run between Gare Cornavin and Meyrin/CERN, and thus these two trams are my normal way of getting into the city. Just not last night. I left CERN shortly after 5 p.m. to go into the city for a French class. I made it to the tram stop just into time to see the 14 bus pull away. No matter, thought I, I will use the time to walk to the next stop and catch the 16. I can change buses to the 13 or 14 or 15 (the Geneva public transportation system has a great deal of redundancy built in when it comes to picking routes) to continue on my way. This was a perfectly reasonable plan, as normally these lines come to the stops every 7 to 10 minutes or so.
After 25 minutes of waiting, surrounded by people smoking cigarettes, blinking away grit the wind was throwing in my already dry and contact-abused eyes, and watching as more and more people came and the buses did not, my perfectly reasonable plan looked like reason had perhaps decided to take a holiday.
The buses (two double-sized ones, which is still smaller than a tram) did come, and were promptly filled. And kept being filled, as they picked up more and more people at the following ten stops. Each stop brought a few moments of blessed relief as two or three people left, only to be packed in tighter still as four or five got on. Soon I was wedged into a corner against a railing, again enveloped in a stifling muggy cloud, getting a pounding head-ache from it and intensely grateful the my sunglasses hid my eyes as they watered so badly I probably looked diseased.
Of course, in such situations, people are standing far, far too close for comfort or decency in any normal circumstances, and we must all make the best of this. However, I maintain the man who insisted on grasping the railing I was wedged into the corner of was not required to place his hand roughly at the small of my back.
When we reached Gare Cornavin and two-thirds the passengers disembarked without this man moving, I concluded that he was just a bit weird and betook myself across the bus to a now vacant seat. The creepy factor grew when he dropped into the seat next to me.
However, I got off at the next stop (which wasn't the stop I had planned on, as the 16 had been rerouted through the construction) and transferred to another bus, so the weirdness ended there. I successfully arrived at my destination a mere 40 minutes later than I had planned. The restoration of my faith in Geneva's trams . . . we'll see about that.
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