Photos from a trek northwest earlier this month are online at Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. I have outed myself as a transit geek, so please don’t be surprised that twelve of the fifteen pix are of people movers. Why photograph something that yearns for meaning in life when you can point the camera at a…
All posts by Tim Adams
Transit riding tips at random
What follows are one veteran straphanger’s tips, tricks and general counsel on getting about on public transit. I don’t think they’ll amount to much, and cheerfully acknowledge that you regularly share seats with riders better qualified than me to write this post. But they didn’t write it, and I have. So: In no particular order:…
San Bruno Mountain State Park
In the first chapter of the blockbuster referred to so frequently on this blog, my protagonist confides a plan for San Bruno Mountain that probably wouldn’t plump his stock at a Department of Parks meeting. I hadn’t yet visited this mountain when Hank whispered his nefarious scheme during work on the first draft, but did…
Graffiti on the 14 bus
Two years ago in Public Transit in L.A.: an older-but-wiser look back, I grumbled that I have seen graffiti in some San Francisco buses worse than I’d expect in a public bathroom on Venice beach. Those of you lucky enough to straphang in better governed cities might have thought I was exaggerating. If only, if…
Remembering Lee Joseph
Twelve year old Lee Joseph’s father beat him until his skin was black and blue from his hips to his ankles. Lee ran away from home, was befriended by a gay male prostitute, and turned his first trick in Houston before his thirteenth birthday. This was in 1978, four years before the Center for Disease…
A Job like HM&F
I’ve never worked at a place like the HM&F factory brooded about in Brothers of the Milky Way, but did once have a job that inspired my description of Hank’s miseries there. I was just out of college, a few years younger than the artsy fellow shown with the preposterous old microbus elsewhere on this…
Back to Transitophile …
… if you’ve been rudely redirected, and are wondering why the URL in the address bar looks unfamiliar. You’re not on a Russian spam site. You didn’t swallow anything funny at lunch. This blog now lives at transitophile.com. Just like the original transitophile.blogspot.com, but without those pesky nine extra characters. No more redirects (I sincerely…
Mechanicking Memories
All I have to show today for my fifteen year career in amateur auto repair is my toolbox. I never sold it, although it has done little except take up space since the middle nineties, when I donated my old bus to a local church. The box gathered dust quietly in my apartment closet through…
A photo of Ruby, the good luck dog
One summer in my elementary school years, the dog pictured below charmed my mother and inveigled his way into a cozy sinecure of room and board in our home. This photo is the only record of him. My mother called him Rufus. He simply wandered in from the street one day, irresistibly friendly and cute…
Why I wrote Brothers of the Milky Way
Just in case you missed the 60 Minutes special or the White House press conference: I wrote a novel, Brothers of the Milky Way, about (among other things) the friendship between a car-crazed East Bay supermarket cashier and an environmentalist drifter. Blue Tower Press is where you’ll find the ebook; the price is right, as…