About three weeks ago, I flew in to Keflavik at about 6 in the morning, and as I was extremely under-slept I opted not just to take the bus to the BSI terminal but the extra shuttle transfer to the hotel. It cost a little extra but that was a price I was willing to pay at that hour for the added comfort of being taken directly to my door. This would also presumably be faster than if I'd chosen to walk. Or so one could be forgiven for thinking.
When I arrived at the BSI terminal, we were informed we had to leave the bus and board another connecting bus. Fine, so far. Each of us was then assigned with a special coloured ticket for our hotel connection and told to wait for the shuttle to arrive. Now, there were eight coloured tickets, each for a separate shuttle doing a separate route. This was already a red flag (or ticket, if you will), because Reykjavik is a small city, very walkable, not the size of a London or New York where you'd need to drive a long way to get around. I know this because, over the past decade or so, I've taken Flybus on numerous occasions--indeed, sometimes with the very same hotel transfer--and back then there was no fleet of eight different colour bus lines, there was one single bus that went everywhere efficiently and that system worked just fine. But I digress.
On this occasion, a few of my fellow passengers lucked out in the ticket lottery and managed to leave on their shuttles in the first twenty minutes, though I also should add that they left on extremely empty shuttles, whole buses for 2-4 people, if even that many. Meanwhile, the rest of us waited for upwards of 45 minutes (and that is no exaggeration), as colour-coded shuttle buses came - I kid you not - found not a single passenger with the right colour ticket and left again, completely empty. I remind you that there were more than a dozen of us still standing out there in the cold! (We were told to remain outside at the stop so we wouldn't accidentally miss our shuttles, because apparently they don't wait or announce the colours indoors.)
At some point, several of us began complaining at the BSI front desk that this was not what we'd paid for. The receptionist promised to call a driver in the remaining colour schemes but no one came. (Well, one bus driver came but they were the wrong colour for any of us and left again empty, ignoring our pleas that we were cold and tired and for god's sake can you just take us to the destination we paid for...)
Finally, when the umpteenth bus driver showed up with the wrong colour for anyone who was actually waiting, several of us lost our cool and said something to the effect of "what kind of Kafka-esque nightmare is this?" and in this case, the driver was enough of a human being to take the rest of us out of our misery, even though he had the wrong colour on his bus. Within fifteen minutes, we all got to our hotels. Because, I reiterate, Reykjavik is a very small city, and you don't need twenty buses to take twenty or so passengers around the downtown core.
In 2023 where other capitals are investing in electric buses and green infrastructure, even if this weird system would work efficiently (which it doesn't!), there is absolutely no justification to operating a large fleet of gas-guzzling buses to operate as essentially private vehicles for very small numbers of passengers. I also wonder how it can financially make sense employing dozens of drivers instead of the requisite 1-2 you would actually need to do the job.
10/10 for textbook definition of "Kafkaesque nightmare."
0/10 for functioning...
Read more
Learn more insights from Wanderboat AI.
