Seattle’s Bus Chick on the Rewards of the Riding Life

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Carla Saulter: [00:02] I’m Carla Saulter and I have been car free for six years.

Adam Edwards: [00:12] I’m the bus nerd and I guess that means I’m bus chick’s sidekick.

Carla Saulter: [00:21] This name is Rosa Caroline after Rosa Parks and my mother. I write a blog for the Seattle PI called “Bus Chick Transit Authority”, and I also write a column for a local street paper. I rode the bus a lot as a kid and I loved the bus but like most teenagers, as soon as I turned 16 I wanted to drive. I had a job in Redmond and commuted every single day across four freeways and I sat there everyday in traffic and just complained about how much traffic there was and how much pollution and sprawl. And then one day it just dawned on me that I was part of the problem and I was choosing my commute and the only thing I could control was my own actions, so I started taking the bus to work. You’re in this vehicle and you’re surrounded by all these people from all different walks of life. You don’t know where they’re coming from, you don’t know where they’re going. The only thing they share in common probably is this ride and, I mean, it’s just endless fodder for stories. I have lots of different categories in my blog and my favourite is the “overheard” category which is basically just random conversations I would hear on the bus. It’s not really advocating car freedom, although I would love it if everybody decided to be car free, it’s more about presenting a way of life, like you don’t… everybody doesn’t have to march down the same path, and my life is fun. I love my life. I do everything that everyone, all the middle class, married people I know do, professional people. I just do it differently.

Adam Edwards: [01:42] Well I’m certainly proud of her helping get the message out that riding a bus and taking Transit is an easy way to live one’s life, it gives you a lot of freedom. This is a bus system that it takes a lot to get used to, you have to learn how to use it. But once you know how it works, it’s kind of fun. It’s fun to figure out how to from, you know, place to place and I guess that’s part of what makes me a bus nerd.

Carla Saulter: [02:01] I’m always talking about how to market Transit. I had this idea for promotion, why I ride, and you could have like all these different people talking about, you know, I ride because it saves me money, or I ride because I can read or whatever. But Metro had this other idea where they wanted to show regular riders on the bus and they contacted me and asked if I would be on it.

Adam Edwards: [02:19] Sometimes when I’m trying to catch a bus and I just miss it and it’s pulling away and I see her on the back of the bus, and that kind of hurts a little to see her smiling face because I’m running after it.

Carla Saulter: [02:27] Used to see this guy on the bus all the time and there’s just something about him. It wasn’t as if I had a crush on him, I just really wanted to know him. We both volunteered for something where you teach high school kids about your career and he came up and introduced himself to me and said, “I’m Adam”, and I said, “oh yeah, you ride my bus, I see you all the time”. And he’s like, “oh you ride the 545”. So then after that he came and sat by me when he would see me on the bus, and basically we got to know each other. He had this friend that he used to always talk to on the phone and he was telling me all the names they had for people and I said, “so, what’s my name?” And he said, “oh, you’re bus chick”. So it just kind of stuck.

Adam Edwards: [03:00] At our wedding we did have a bus that we were using for our guests, it was a historic, an older bus painted red and white.

Carla Saulter: [03:07] Metro has employee association that restores and maintains historic vehicles, so we rented a cool vintage bus. Chicklet, I think either one of my readers or one of my co-workers suggested that and I just loved it, so… she’s actually bus chicklet, but I just call her chicklet. She gets excited when we go on the bus, she’ll say… to her going bye-bye and riding the bus are the same thing, that she sits on my lap, we look at people, we talk to people, we look out the window, we read, and I love that I don’t... if we were riding in a car I’d have to strap her in the back and just sort of ignore her while we sat in traffic. But this way we get to be together, we spend those rides together. I do hear from people who say they started trying the bus because of me or they tried riding the bus to a specific place and never tried it before. One of the things I love about my blog is it basically allows me to write about everything I like and one of my heroes is Rosa Parks and she also happens to be associated with the bus. It just seemed like a perfect name for her for many reasons.

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