How I Came To Loathe the 455 Bus

I’m awakened by a long, low and incessant drone, like an irritated foghorn. As I blink away the remnants of a dream, I recognize the sound. “Oh no,” I groan.

“Yep,” my wife, likewise awakened, mutters. “Here we go again.” I sit up, drag myself to the window, and pull back the curtain. There it is, long and rattling, the hulking 455 MBTA bus, stuck at the intersection of Leavitt and Prince, because there are cars parked at the curb on either side of the road. Cars are already lining up behind the bus, waiting. A few are annoyed enough to beep their horns or shout out the window, but I can barely hear them because the bus driver is still leaning on the horn.

It will go on like this for twenty more minutes, the driver pausing for a bit before once again blaring the horn in prolonged, deafening intervals. My three young children will wake up and come to the window and watch as the police come to either help navigate the bus through the tight space or call a tow truck to remove one of the cars.

When it’s all over we’ll all go back to our beds and wait for the next time. There’s always a next time, as we’ve come to realize in the four years we’ve lived here. It happens every month or so.

The 455 bus has become aversive. This is how I’ve come to loathe it.

The last time it happened, the police woke my sons at 10:30pm on a school night by banging on the front door. They wanted to know if a problem car was ours. It wasn’t. In a way, I appreciated it; they wanted to give the owner a chance to move the vehicle before it was expensively and inconveniently towed away. I similarly found an odd appreciation for the ultimately futile gesture of using a loud megaphone from a cruiser to call for an owner of a car to move it.

Once, a bus came through and got stuck there, honking and waiting and billowing exhaust and radioing for the police. A line of cars built up behind them and eventually got trapped themselves when a second MBTA bus came up behind them. A traffic sandwich. They were all jammed there for a quarter of an hour, until two pedestrians stopped and guided both buses through the narrow opening.

There aren’t any parking signs. No rules about resident only, or one side of the street only, or fifteen minutes only. There is nothing preventing people from parking there, and so it happens again and again. And again. And again.

And most of the apartments here lack offstreet parking. So, like clockwork, bus horns blast in the night and cars get towed to make room for the buses. Sometimes the police are proactive: A care provider for my special needs child once got towed because she parked too far from the curb even though the street had not been fully plowed and, due to the snow bank, it was impossible to park any closer.

It’s gotten so that I’m afraid to park at that intersection. I used to intentionally pull up so that two of my tires were on the curb, just to make more room for the buses, but I got a parking ticket for doing so.

Look, I get it. Buses need to keep rolling, and even more important, if a bus can’t pass through then neither can a fire truck. The drivers and the police are just trying to do their jobs. But even if towing a car or banging on a door or leaning on that ungodly horn might resolve one particular instance, the fundamental root of the problem remains unchanged. Why is the solution always to simply wait until it happens again?