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I rode a lot of buses in the Greater Vancouver Regional District, but I only recently started using the bus here in the Minneapolis area. Imagine my surprise, then, that not everything was intuitively the way I expected; that they do things differently in Minnesota.

There are two different kinds of “different” between the Vancouver and Minneapolis transit systems: ways in which the bus systems are different, and at least one way in which the people are different.

In Vancouver*, you can use the bus to travel around the city. Yes, I know; it’s a radical idea. You can actually get almost anywhere that you care to go, all day — throughout the suburbs, the various smaller cities around Vancouver, the less populated areas past the edge of town where there are still farms with cows and strawberries — everywhere (more or less) can be reached by bus.

Minneapolis? Minneapolis is not so kind in this respect. Much like Henry Ford’s Model-T, which came in any color you want as long as that color was black, in Minneapolis you can take the bus anywhere you want — as long as the place you want to go is Downtown. If you were really really determined to take a bus to the suburb which is only ten miles west, well, you can take a bus 16 miles south to downtown Minneapolis, and if you’re lucky find a bus going eighteen miles northwest to that suburb you were trying to get to in the first place. I’m not exaggerating (at least, not much).

So unless you are commuting downtown, the bus in the Twin Cities is pretty much not an option. I am commuting downtown, so it is actually quite convenient for me, thanks for asking.

In Vancouver, you pay for your ride when you step on the bus. This seems reasonable (or, it always has to me). Is this the way they do it in Minneapolis? Oh no! Not here.

It would be fairer to say that sometimes you pay when you step on the bus, and sometimes you don’t. In general, in the morning, you pay when you step on the bus; in the evening, you pay as you step off.

Yes, you read that right.

Don’t ask me to explain it, I still don’t understand it. My guess is that it only really works because the only people using the bus are mild-mannered commuters who will always dutifully pay their busfare as they step off the bus at the appointed place. Yeah, it’s a little weird, but it works here. Taking another guess, I suppose they want to speed the process of getting people onto the bus when they are leaving the downtown area (at the cost of slowing them down when they arrive.).

It is this second thing, this practice of paying as you leave the bus, that seems to have spawned the third thing I noticed, which was strange to me.

In Vancouver, when the bus arrives at it’s destination, you stand up, walk to the door, and get off the bus. If the person sitting in front of you does not stand up right away, you walk past them. The quickest people are off the bus first. I know, it seems like the rational way to do it — some of you are wondering if there even is any other way.

It turns out that there is.

In Minneapolis, if you are at some major stop where you are dimly aware that most of the people on the bus are all getting off at once, everyone simply stays seated and politely waits for the rows ahead of them to stand up and start moving before they stand and begin to move themselves. Oh, certainly, if you just stand up and walk forward, you can walk past all the other nice Minnesotans and be among the first batch off the bus; no one will say anything to you, though they may look at you disapprovingly and whisper to their neighbor, I don’t think they’re from around here. If you do this (I did it once… it’s what we did in Vancouver, after all), you quickly realize that you’ve somehow broken a rule of protocol. The sensation of being horribly out of place, and insensitive to your fellow passengers, is almost tangible. If you were Catholic, you would probably feel compelled to confess the action to the priest. It is, you soon see, simply wrong… no, not wrong so much as just not nice.

So those, as I see them, at the main differences between using the bus in Vancouver and Minneapolis:

• In Vancouver the bus is a full-fledged metropolitian transit service that gets you anywhere at (almost) any time, in a consistent way, with mutually self-interested passengers who will walk right past you if you are slow.
• In Minneapolis, it’s a glorified downtown shuttle service with strange, malleable rules for paying, and people who are too nice not to file out of the bus in an orderly fashion. It’s a weird city.

* — I’m referring, really, to the Greater Vancouver Regional District and the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area respectively, but to save time, space, and sanity, I’ll just say “Vancouver” and “Minneapolis”.