About six months ago I had a day off from work, and took advantage of the free time to go downtown and run the errands I’d been putting off for months. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant day, so I didn’t feel like walking downtown. Therefore, I parked myself with my umbrella at the corner of 22nd (formerly Brown) street and St. Paul, and waited for the first #3 or #61 car that happened along.

Baltimore’s bus system is less than a shadow of the glorious streetcar system we had once upon a time, when you could board the car and look up the street to see the next one trailing along about three minutes behind. The buses tend to travel in inconvenient packs; you can wait fifteen minutes and then three buses show up all at once. I was lucky that day, though. I stood at the corner for about forty seconds and a #61 pulled up, piloted by an operator I know well, and with a couple of friends already aboard headed downtown for some shopping and banking.

The bus lines on Charles and St. Paul streets also serve the last remaining railroad station in full operation, the Pennsylvania station. (There were five stations once; the B&O had the Camden and Mount Royal stations, the Pennsylvania RR had—what else, the Pennsylvania station, the Western Maryland had its ugly little Victorian Hillen Street Station, and the Pennsylvania and the Northern Central both operated the Calvert street station, which was roundly ignored by both railroads and left to die a dusty, uncelebrated death.) If the decline of railroads has ruined American transit, it has at least consolidated Baltimore’s deranged long-distance transportation into one building (I do wish, though, that they’d picked the frumpy and pleasant Mount Royal station, though, instead of the Pennsylvania’s sterile and bland Beaux-Arts edifice).

And so there I was, chattering away with Mrs. Simpson and speculating on the price of rotkohl (red cabbage, for the Auslander) when the car stopped at the train station. As usual, a crowd boarded the downtown car. A nice-looking, but flustered, gentleman sat down next to me and, interrupting my dissertation on the virtues of Huber’s cakes over Muhly’s, tapped me on the shoulder and said “Is this safe?”

I was entirely confused, only partially because I was really thinking about Huber’s lovely peach cakes and how much I wanted one even though I’d already planned to bake a Prince of Wales cake for my dinner party. He was evidently surprised when I turned around and begged his pardon. The man repeated, “Is this safe? You know, the bus?”

I was still entirely confused. “What are you talking about—the BUS?” I finally realized that the poor soul was one of those deluded suburbanites who believes that city buses are inhabited by drug fiends, muggers, hookers bearing knives, and possibly Iraqi terrorists—although these last would have to be very seriously lost if they ended up on one of Baltimore’s #3 downtown-bound cars.

My inherent rah-rah local pride was severely compromised by the desire to beat the living crap out of somebody who not only deserved it but expected it. I was tempted, as well, to give him an obscene leer and demand his wallet and various physical submissions.

Fortunately, whatever coolness of mind I have prevailed, and I merely told him that yes, city buses are dangerous, because you might meet people that are trying to get downtown and you never know what they’ll do.

Really now—what mugger in his right mind would attack somebody right on a city bus? You’re guaranteed to have witnesses, and you’re stuck on the bus until the next stop.

Now, the Jones Falls Expressway and the suburbanites careening along it in their Ford Expeditions (driver alone with no passengers, thanks, in a vehicle that could carry ten) at seventy miles an hour? That scares the crap out of me.