(Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop*?

A nice surprise as I walked into Chynów yesterday – a pair of nice new bus stops for the centre of the village! The first one stands where the waffle wagon stood and before it the kebab truck. Frem where will they ply their trade now?

Below: westbound stop for Drwalew, Słomczyn and Grójec. Elegant. I like the metal-framed wooden flower boxes on either side. At last, local bus travel is starting to look respectable. Easy-to-read signage.

Below: the eastbound stop for Sułkowice and Góra Kalwaria, same design.

Below: a poster informs passers-by that this green initiative (presumably intended to get people to abandon the car and go by bus for climate-change reasons) has been co-financed by the provincial authorities.

But is it enough? In my years living here, I've never once been tempted to take this bus either to Góra Kalwaria or to Grójec. The railway line, to north to Warsaw, Piaseczno or south to Warka, does me fine. A cursory look at the timetable explains why:

There are no buses at the weekend. Like, zero. There are three buses in the morning to Góra Kalwaria, four in the afternoon and none at all in the evening, the last bus leaving Chynów at ten to five. Does this service look like you can trust it? Can you buy a ticket on your phone via an PKS Grójec app, the way you can buy a Koleje Mazowieckie ticket? Outside of Poland's agglomerations, the bus as form of public transport is a hit-or-miss throwback to the bad old days. Turn up at the bus stop with some loose change (who knows what the fare will be?) and hope that a bus arrives. Not a form of transport that can persuade the rural citizen to abandon their car for. PKS (Poland's communist-era road communication enterprise) needs to be shaken up for the 21st century.

Below: the next bus stop on the route to Góra Kalwaria, on the DK50 in Nowe Grobice. Poland's rural bus stops are memetic; this old-school one is fairly typical of the genre, but not the sort that people will cycle ten miles uphill into the wind to photograph.

Below: whilst abandoned railway infrastructure evokes sentimental yearning, I can't say the same about disused bus stops. This one is in Widok, the next village south of Jakubowizna. No buses have passed this way since, well, no one can remember. And there's no longer any trace online.

And through Jakubowizna itself, buses would run. This bus stop sign, which I photographed in December 2020, was removed when a pavement was built alongside the main road.

Buses, I mourn them not. Maybe if the Warsaw agglomeration 'L' (for local) bus routes were to run, I might use them, but then the Grójec poviat is not adjacent to Warsaw, and so there's no chance of such a connection. The nearest 'L' bus route runs through Ławki, over 5km (3 miles) from my house.

* (Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop by the Fatback Band (1975)

Form a line to the front

Form a line to the back

Yeah, don't stop

Keep the groove

Don't stop, don't stop, don't stop, don't stop, don't stop

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