I’m sitting here in
I did not experience any transportation errors (which are not well-defined in the Nick RFC) until I got on the final leg, the bus that would get from the T to the apartment. The error was largely caused by my inability to convert between cartesian and polar coordinates.
Minneapolis (and all other sane cities) operate using a grid, and public transit routes are designated as northbound, southbound, eastbound, or westbound. The only place this gets weird is in downtown Minneapolis itself, which is rotated roughly 45° to be parallel to the river (NE is N when you’re in downtown; it’s not that hard to re-orient), and moving around the various lakes, during which your bus at least continues in the same general direction.
I got on the Route 90 heading the opposite direction. It’s a circulator, so it didn’t really matter, but I felt kind of dumb. I guess I got to sit on an air conditioned bus and worry slightly for 10 minutes instead of waiting impatiently at a hot bus station for 20 minutes. Yes, I should have known the endpoints.
The bizarre part about Boston is how sometimes you need to loop around in a nearly complete circle, on side streets, just to reorient yourself roughly in the direction you want to go. I also love how very few of the streets are signed, how streets can arbitrarily change names, and how there is no block-based numbering of addresses. At least the numbers (generally) increase when traveling in one direction along (what you think is) one street.
Conclusion: backwards compatibility is THE DEVIL.
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