You're going to be late for class. The last two shuttle buses were packed to the brim and you couldn't get on. You see half a million 179s passing by and you wonder, why don't they go in the other direction? This is especially true if you live in the old halls cluster, on the wrong side of the route from CS to hall, so even if you're willing to pay you can't get to CS. You have to walk. A familiar scenario?
Here's another one. Its night. You are very sick of eating at can 1, 2, 4 and 5, and you would like to try some other canteens further off. You wait, and wait, and wait. One million 179s pass and mock you in the process. Finally, a shuttle bus comes, but you've already fainted from starvation. And when you finally finish your meal at these far off canteens, guess what? There aren't any more shuttle buses to take you back! You have to walk.
All these bring me to one question. Why do we even have a shuttle bus system? If I have to walk half the time, isn't the system redundant? The irony is, the closer you live to the school campus, the more redundant the bus system becomes. I guess its fine for those who live in the halls at the back like 11-15, because they live too far away from the school campus to really walk, and they have an added bonus of proximity to good canteens. But for those who live in the other cluster of halls, you have the option of walking, so you can still get to school, but you live far from good food, so you have to eat junk.
That's probably why hall 6 is where it is. Just close enough to walk, yet just a little too far from decent food. So since you have to exercise so much but you can't over nourish yourself, you become even fitter than you already are. As for the rest of us mere mortals, we just die of frustration waiting for buses or walking after realising they aren't coming. Or worse, we spend a long time agonising about whether we should walk because the bus could come anytime and we would miss it, compounding our agony further.
Another thing I don't understand is how one service can arrive 3 or 4 times more frequently than the other. Shouldn't there be equal numbers of buses going in both directions? And the best part is the service in question actually changes. At certain times, there are more blue buses, and other times there are more reds. But the frequency of 179s never changes, in the one aspect that it is still 3-4 times, or at night, 10 times more common than shuttle buses.
This shows us that firstly, the NTU shuttle bus system totally sucks. If anything its an abject failure because if someone were to do a calculation, one would realise that the majority of NTU students waste too much time and energy waiting for buses. However, we cannot squarely place the blame on the poor bus uncles and aunties because after all, the service is free so their pay is probably peanuts.
So what should be a solution? At this juncture, I turn to the NTUSU. I think everyone agrees more or less that they are really a useless institution. They are too far apart from the average student to do anything, and one often gets the impression that they are in their own world preening themselves, taking flashy photographs in business suits and polishing up their CVs.
I suggest that we pull funding from the NTUSU, dissolve them totally, and put the money into the shuttle bus system. We would get more buses, more drivers, and finally, the NTUSU never has to complain about the shuttle bus system again because that's really all they do isn't it? For once, rather than complaining about the problem, we solve the problem.
The NTSSU cares about your welfare? Don't kid me. The individual faculty councils are far more than adequate for such matters. 10 dollars a semester on the NTUSU is 10 dollars wasted. I'm sure if we were to do a straw poll, most would agree that we should put the money that goes into the NTUSU now into the NTUBS (NTU Bus System) instead, with the exception being the preening and posing peacock-sters in the NTUSU.
So I say NTUSU? No, I vote for the NTUBS.