Woes of public transportation

I feel like I should write an apology letter to SEPTA and MBTA for all of the times I complained about them: their price, their cleanliness, their timeliness.  Moving to Atlanta without a car was a rude awakening; MARTA has left me stranded for long periods of time more than a few times.  And now that I'm in El Paso, I've already been stranded by the Sun Metro twice.  There's probably a reason that the MARTA and Sun Metro are about 1/4 the price of SEPTA and the MBTA.

Yesterday morning I had a prenatal care visit to observe and interview to conduct exactly 2.1 miles from my office.  I left a few minutes early to catch a bus that would get me to the 9:30 appointment by 9:08.  The bus was supposed to come at 8:54, and I waited at the stop from 8:50 to 9:00.  When it didn't come, I power-walked up the one ridiculous hill I've encountered here (not including the mountains, of course) to arrive at the appointment at exactly 9:30.  It was already over 90 degrees out, and I was drenched in sweat and my feet were bleeding from my new flats that aren't meant to be worn as running shoes.  The woman I was meeting there was super nice, and the observation and interview went really well, so at least it worked out.  I just don't quite know what to do; that was the second time in 8 days that the bus didn't come, causing me to nearly miss an appointment.  I love not having a car, but I'm starting to think that after I graduate next May I might have to get one unless I move to NYC or DC or a city that's known for having reliable public transit.

The other bummer about not having a car here is that public transportation doesn't go to many of the tourist attractions.  I guess I should use that term lightly; what I really mean is that public transportation doesn't go to any of the hiking trails here.  The only other "attractions" in El Paso are the museums that are across the street from my office building that I've yet to check out.  And there's a zoo here, but you couldn't pay me all the money in the world to walk around outside in crazy heat to look at animals.  Whenever I ask the women in my study about what to do in El Paso (which is a really good way to break the ice while we sit in the doctor's waiting room together), they laugh and tell me that this is the most boring city on earth.  I've heard there are some cool things to do in New Mexico, like go to White Sands.  And I still need to do a better border tour.  Hopefully this summer I can keep myself entertained on weekends by wandering around downtown and exploring new churches (and by making friends with cars?!), but if anyone has suggestions, please let me know!

Today was pretty exhausting.  I transcribed all morning and then entered hospital-level data about c-sections and VBACs for the state of Texas into an Excel spreadsheet all afternoon.  I hate when people publish public data in locked PDFs that don't allow copy/paste!  But at least now I'm in a good place to start some quantitative data analysis next week.