RonPrice

RonPrice
2013-11-25 01:19:24 (UTC)

TAKING BUSES OVER FOUR EPOCHS

TAKING BUSES OVER FOUR EPOCHS
“It’s now one world of buses”

Part 1:

As spring was about to burst or, rather, insensibly arrive in northern Tasmania where I live, and have lived for the last 14 years, I took a bus from George Town to Launceston and back. As I sat and gazed-out at the scenery I reflected on ‘my life with buses.’ On arrival home from my 30 hour overnight stay in Launceston with my son, his wife and one daughter, I gathered my thoughts: thus.

Bus, I am informed by Wikipedia, is a clipped form of the Latin word omnibus. This road vehicle, which is designed to carry passengers, appeared in Paris in 1819–20, and in London in 1829. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker-rigid bus, often called a coach. It is this type of bus I have taken now for more than 50 years. There are larger double-decker buses and articulated buses, but I have never travelled on such buses. There are also buses which carry smaller loads: mini-buses and midi-buses, buses I have often travelled on here in northern Tasmania.

Part 2:

Bus manufacturing is increasingly globalised with the same design appearing around the world in the more than 200 countries.Buses may be used for scheduled bus transport, scheduled coach transport, school transport, private hire, and tourism. Horse-drawn buses were used from the 1820s, followed by steam-buses in the 1830s, and electric trolley-buses in 1882. The first buses powered by internal combustion engines were used in 1895and this is still the most common power source.

I first recall taking buses on a regular basis in about 1960 to 1962. I travelled from my home town in Burlington to Toronto to attend Baha’i firesides for youth in a suburb of Toronto known as Etobicoke. At the time I was in grade 11 and 12. These were the years which immediately preceded my travelling-pioneering life in and for the Canadian Baha’i community. I was the only youth in the Toronto hinterland who came to these meetings of the Baha’i youth in Toronto.

Part 3:

It is not my intention to outline the details of my travelling by bus over the last half century: 1963 to 2013. This prose-poem is a simple reflection over those 50 years of this form of travelling ending this weekend with the arrival of spring in Australia.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 21/9/’13.

This little prose-poem is
not going to deal with a
history of buses back to
the birth of two god-men
in the 2nd decade of that
19th century. Nor am I(1)
going to write about the
many types of buses or of
the towns in which I took
buses due to my job, and
my faith, my family-life
or my many bits of leisure.

The bus-as-a-business has gone
global & the same sort of buses
are virtually in all countries
of the world-as planetary travel
is taking on similarities that
are making of this world: one!

1 The first buses appeared just at the time that the prophet-founders of the Babi-Baha’i Faiths, the Bab and Baha’u’llah, were born in Iran.

Ron Price
21/9/’13.




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