Sunday Story: Almaty Buses

Last Saturday was my “public transit day.”  It was actually my “figure out how to get to work without a car” day.  The buses here are wild.  They run often (as often as one every 3-6 minutes) and are usually driven by a middle aged man who uses one hand to hold his cell phone and the other to steer, honk, and  make rude gestures at other drivers.

In general, the buses are in bad shape.  Brakes howl like a tortured beast as the buses stop at traffic lights.  One bus I rode yesterday had a disintegrating floorboard and I could see the wheels turning through a large crack in the floor under my seat.  One route I sometimes ride isn't a bus at all, but a cargo van with bench seats with thirty people crammed inside.  Most of the buses have no heating or air conditioning, so the drivers will drive with the doors open when it gets warm in the afternoons.

There are no maps for the bus system and different private operators run different routes.  While this might seem to be a recipe for transit chaos, it actually works pretty well.  Each bus has a route number issued by the city and posted on the front and side of the bus along with the destination and intervening points for each direction.  There are no overlaps (bus 118 follows route 118 and there is only one route 118), and to put the icing on the cake, the fare is only 50 Tenge per ride (about 33 cents) collected by a conductor as you exit through the back door.  In addition to collecting the fares, the conductor is also responsible shouting out the route direction at stops, for announcing the next stop, and for making sure that he or she is back inside the bus before it takes off after a stop.

On one bus, the teenager who was our conductor was helping an old lady off the bus with her cart of groceries.  Just as they reached the curb, the driver takes off leaving the conductor behind. The conductor sprints down the street after the bus and finally manages to leap in.  In general, the Kazakh people are pretty stoic.  Smiles are rare – even in everyday conversation.  This kid, though, was grinning when he got back on the bus – clearly he enjoyed the joke.

While the picture I painted above is true of most of the buses in Almaty, I should note that there is a fleet of brand new European style buses (made in china, of course) operating within this system. Unfortunately, I never get to take those routes.