Busology

I saw another newspaper article today about yet another attempt to bring some "order" to the city of Rio: the mayor (the same mayor who wanted to ban the coconuts) wants to paint all of Rio's buses the same color. As it stands now, Rio is served by a bewildering array of what must be hundreds of different bus lines, run by dozens of different companies, all with different colors on their buses. Sometimes it looks like a Wild West rodeo out there on the major avenues - and it feels like it, too, when you're jumping around in the street trying to flag down a particular bus out of the dozens that are roaring past.

The mayor thinks that painting all the buses the same color will help make Rio look more orderly and more attractive for the World Cup and the Olympics. However, the colors he's tentatively picked are: baby-blue and salmon-pink on top, with the Copacabana swirly sidewalk pattern of white-and-black on the bottom half of the bus (right where it will get really badly dinged up by street rubble). The sidewalk pattern actually sounds kind of cool, but... baby-blue and salmon-pink?

So far everyone seems to be 100% against this idea. A lot of Rio residents recognize the particular bus they're looking for by the color - and since the buses often go zooming by at the speed of light, if you wait till the bus is close enough so you can read the destination sign on the front, by that point it's too late to flag down the bus.

But here's what I love about the news story. It had quotes from a couple of "busologos" (bus-ologists) complaining that painting the buses the same color would "take all the fun out of busology." Busology? What?

Well, you know we humans are. Particularly the males. Give us a complicated set of hundreds of slightly different versions of some kind of fast-moving thing, different models and makes and colors, zooming by unpredictably, and you can pretty much guarantee that somebody will turn it into a hobby to "catch" and identify all of them. (It's almost always men, of course - I can only speculate that the sight of varicolored things zipping rapidly past seems to trigger some latent hunting instinct in the males of the species.) Bird-watching. Collecting model planes and model cars. Butterfly-collecting. Train-spotting. Fishing. And here, in Rio, bus-watching, I guess you could call it, or bus-spotting, or, busology.

Check out this website by one bus-ologist, a website full of pictures of various models of buses of Rio, all sporting their variously colored plumage. He knows the companies running each bus, the bus route and schedule, and the exact make and model of the bus, right down to the type of engine.

I was originally thinking this was a crazy hobby, but I began to think, really, is it any more crazier than bird-watching? (And I'm speaking as a birdwatcher.) And as I looked at picture of bus after bus, it suddenly occurred to me: the buses are rather handsome, aren't they? Huge, gleaming, beautiful....helping people get around, making the city more liveable, and keeping everybody's carbon footprint nice and low. (We certainly could use more buses and fewer cars in the US.) And I've got to admit I personally would certainly benefit if I had a better understanding of the bus routes here. There are a lot of sillier hobbies someone could engage in.... like, oh, samba, for example?