I used to take the bus, before I discovered Lyft. The buses were a nightmare, and as soon as I started using Lyft, I stopped taking PT and never looked back. I had many, many reasons for this.

The people on the buses were horrible.

People blasting loud music without headphones was an almost daily occurrence on my commute. Despite there being signs on the bus explicitly forbidding it. If I was lucky, I'd be sitting close enough to the bus driver that I could discreetly ask the driver to ask the person blasting the music to turn it down. One time, this backfired horribly, because the driver was a racist. He pointed at the first black person he saw and told him to turn off his music. Actually, the guy blasting his music was the white dude two rows behind him, but for the next 10-15 minutes I had to hear the falsely-accused black guy loudly rant about how the driver was a racist POS (and he was right to be pissed... but that didn't help the noise much).

And then there was the time I was riding the express bus down the Tollway while the guy in front of me was violently mentally ill and off his meds. And by "violently", I mean that I tried making small talk to him about the traffic (which was especially bad that day) and he spent the rest of the ride, which ended up being a half hour, loudly threatening to beat the shit out of me, occasionally pausing to demand that someone tell him where his meds are.

Or when I rode to work one day and got to listen to the driver and the passenger sitting next to him talk loudly about how they both love to beat their kids (IIRC, this was the same racist driver from before). I wish I had the sense to use my phone to record their voices. Instead, I just took a picture of them and planned to use it against them later but forgot.

I have a few more stories of people being horrible on the bus, but I think you get the drift.

And then if not for the people, there's the fact that the buses themselves just suck.

I live in Texas. Waiting for ages in the sweltering heat was not an uncommon occurrence. You know what's even worse than that? Waiting for ages in the sweltering heat while on my way to a job interview. I'm sure there were a few jobs I failed to get solely on account of me having half-melted on the way to the interview.

Speaking of job interviews, there's the fact that the bus schedules are so awful that I'd often have a choice of getting to the interview 45 minutes early or getting there 15 minutes late. Since being late to an interview is unacceptable in any circumstance, I'd have to get there 45 minutes early. And these weren't short, breezy trips, either. No, it'd take me a good 1.5 to 2 hours between walking out my front door and getting to the office. A good chunk of that time was waiting for connecting buses. 20 minutes in the sweltering Texas heat on a street corner waiting for Bus 2 or Bus 3 to pick me up. In hindsight, I'm lucky I didn't get those jobs, because my commute would've made me suicidal. The only reasons I accepted those interviews in the first place instead of backing out was because I was unemployed and desperate (2010 and 2011 were objectively the worst years of my life).

Hey, at one job I had two connecting buses with a fairly tight gap between them. I'd get off one bus at a station and hop right on the next one. Awesome, right? No more waiting 20 minutes before my connecting bus, right? Well, that all goes away if my first bus is late. Which happened weekly. First bus being late means I miss the connecting bus, which means I'm standing around the station for an hour before the next bus going my way comes. Which means I need to either tell my boss I'll be late for work or beg one of my coworkers to come pick me up. Great way to make an impression at a new job! To be honest, if I'd been standing around at the bus stop in front of my house long enough, I eventually learned it'd be better to go back in and tell my boss I'll be working from home that day. And, you know, that was an hour commute even when the buses were on time, but it would have been 15 minutes by car. Even in this dream scenario where I don't have to wait for the connecting bus, the bus was still 3-4x slower than going there by car. The rule of thumb is that if it takes me an hour to get to a place without having to wait for a connecting bus, it would only take me 15-20 minutes by car.

Need to go to LabCorp to get my blood taken for an upcoming doctor's appointment? Well, the bus ride there isn't that bad... fairly lengthy, but hey at least it's a single air-conditioned bus from my house to the lab, and I don't have to leave my house until the bus is almost here. The ride back? Well, after I get out of the lab, I open up the bus schedule on my phone, and... it's a 45 minute wait. In the sweltering Texas heat. There's no place around to kill time. It's a medical district. There's no shopping and no places to get food. Just me and the heat and a sidewalk for 45 minutes.

Never again.