"Learner! Learner!" and the Cheetah Bus

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to ride again the first bus I ever took in Amman—the Madaba Bus Company’s Cheetah Bus. It’s probably the easiest bus to describe in Amman, but people still do a bit of a confused double take when you tell them “Get on the bus with a giant cheetah on the side” because it is something of an odd description, but it makes it very easy to point out

Cheetah Bus in North Station

A cheetah’s also not a bad mascot for the Madaba Bus Company because they run a fast and reliable service—I assuming cheetahs are also reliable in addition to being fast—from Madaba to Amman’s North Station and to Raghadan. While they do not have electronic number boards like some of the other companies, they do have either Raghadan or Shamal on the front of the bus, though a number of King’s people I know have hopped on the wrong one and ended up on the other side of the Balad went they meant to go to 7^th circle.

The interesting issue that came up when I took the Cheetah bus this time is that I left from Raghadan and took the southern route out to Madaba. While going through South Amman, we were stopped at two random checkpoints by the police, and they did the usual gathering up of everyone’s IDs to run them through their system and see if there are any outstanding warrants. As a pretty obvious foreigner, they usually don’t take my ID, though on one of the stops this time an officer did collect it.

After five minutes, when the officer got back on the bus with everyone’s ID, he started calling out names to return IDs. After a few standard names—Omar, Faisal, Nader—he yelled out “Learner”. He had to repeat it twice for me to realize that he had taken my New York Learner’s Permit, and rather than seeing the Peter, he thought that my name was Learner, which is a pretty understandable mistake given the giant “Learner’s Permit” that dominates the card.

What made this trip a little out of the ordinary was that we were stopped twice in about fifteen minutes. Each stop adds five minutes to the trip since the police have to collect everyone’s IDs, run them through the system, and then redistribute them. With one stop following right on the heels of another, a few thoughts came to mind. The first would be that from an efficiency standpoint, it would probably be pretty easy for a security team to give a bus driver a time-stamped slip of paper which the driver could flash if another police officer tried to flag us down, say twice in twenty, to help us avoid an unnecessary second check. After all, it takes a few minutes for there to be substantive turnover on a bus, and in this back-to-back stop, 85% of the passengers were the same and had just been cleared.

The second thing that came to mind is that I’ll be interested to see as I keep riding routes which busses get stopped the most. There’s a checkpoint coming from Madaba towards Amman where I’ve been stopped on the Cheetah bus before, and then on this ride I just took through the south of Amman we were stopped. I don’t know if it’s because the stops tend to happen outside of the denser areas of town, or if there are reasons for these specific routes, or if it is just random, but after I get some more data I’ll see if I can get some answers to those questions.