Hashmi to Sweileh and Back

Today I took a few different routes. After my English class finished at CRP, I walked up Prince Rashed Ben Al Hasan street, thinking I would find a service, but they were packed today. I just missed a large city bus, but caught the next one about half an hour later. I'm still trying to figure out if the busses that say City Bus are government or private owned. I need to start doing more driver-interviewing, but, they're pretty busy driving the bus.

A Generic City Bus

The bus dropped me off on the other side of the Raghadan bus station. The service or shared taxi system is incredibly developed here. Raghadan is really split into two sides---the side for buses, and the side for services. Here they are all lined up and going to many of the same destinations as the busses:

One of the Service Stands at the Raghadan Bus Station

I'd be interested to learn why some people take services over busses, since at least in the signs they have they list some similar places. I also had thought that services were a relatively informal system, but from the printed blue and white signs that list the destination of each, it's pretty clear they function as roots, which makes me wonder why busses don't put them out of business, unless they're servicing routes with little demand. But today, I couldn't get a service from Hashmi---they were packed. Yet the bus when it came was only half-full, and the prices are comparable. Plus in the bus you get a little more space. Then again, the next leg of the journey may show a partial answer.

The 101 Bus from Raghadan

It did take 20 minutes for the bus to Sweileh to show up, and then, like all the busses at Raghadan that I've been on so far, they waited until the bus got fairly full to leave, which took another seven minutes. That delay makes quick transfers a little difficult, so it's possible that services have significantly faster turnarounds, and that you can do a quick transfer more easily that way. Then again, usually the busses are waiting when you arrive---this 101 bus was the only empty berth around us for awhile.

After the seven minutes, the bus was had 32 of it's 45 seats filled, 33 if you count the man with the bird in a cage across the aisle from me. We took it up through the Balad and towards Jordan University, where I got off, got some food, and doubled back towards home on a new bus.

One of the cool things on this route was seeing how well these drivers know their route. When everyone else was bogged down in traffic, we took a detour that initially seemed a bit round-about, but led us onto a parallel street that was much faster.

After getting off at Diwar Dekhliyya, I took the Abdali service to the Balad, and then the Jabal Amman service on home, with those two last trips being the mapper's version of a nice dessert to end a pretty full day of riding. It's good that I got some new routes though, because I don't think I'll have time to do any new ones until Wednesday when I go out to King's Academy and get to map the first bus I ever took in Jordan, the Madaba Cheetah bus, which I now know ends up in Raghadan, as all roads seem to lead there.