I am on the 15 bus, otherwise known as the G. Technically it’s a trolley route, on rails, but half the time, like now, it’s a bus.  The G runs east on Girard Avenue, through the southern end of Philadelphia’s biggest concentration of addicts, so the tooth-to-mouth ratio tends to be low and the ambience grumpy, but otherwise it’s just a transit route. 

I take this route often to go to the thrift shop. I have two tote bags full of donations.

A couple of older women are sitting in the senior citizen/handicapped seats at the front of the bus, and on the other side, a young woman sits with a little girl in a stroller, so though I’m officially old, I take a seat further back. Strollers are informally wheelchairs for purposes of bus-seat distribution, though wheelchairs have priority. The little girl is fed up and whining to her mother. Otherwise, no one is saying anything. 

It’s a normal Philly bus. The seats in the front, side-facing benches, have little yellow handles under them, and can be folded up and back out of the way for wheelchairs. So can the seats in the first row.

The bus pulls to a stop. 

The wheelchair ramp folds out, beeping. The driver doesn’t say anything.

“Wheelchair coming on board,” shouts a passenger in the back of the bus. 

The old woman in the senior citizen seats doesn’t get out of her seat, but the other woman gets up and moves farther back. Then a younger passenger leans over and folds two front-facing seats up and back, so the woman with the stroller can move across the aisle. Another passenger stands up and folds back the bench seat where the lady with the baby carriage was sitting.

The woman in the wheelchair is on board by now, and her helper parallel parks her in the space where the bench seat was. 

The driver hasn’t said a thing. 

With everyone resettled, we move on, but at the next stop, another woman is waiting, by herself, in another wheelchair. 

The driver doesn’t say anything and doesn’t fold out the ramp, just waits, with the doors open.

A young man gets up from his seat in the back and shouts out the door at the second wheelchair woman, “There’s already a wheelchair and a stroller on the bus!” I can’t hear what she’s saying, but I look up the schedule on my phone and tell him there’s another one coming in two minutes. He shouts that out at her. He repeats himself several times. 

She doesn’t care. She wants to get on this bus. 

So everyone has to shuffle around again. The old woman has to get up and move. The lady with the baby wheels the stroller back to the middle of the bus, and the little girl complains. Then the ramp finally folds out, beeping. 

Except for the guy shouting out the middle door and the fed-up little girl, nobody has said anything, including the driver.

With the new woman settled, everyone settles back into indifference and stares at their phones and out the window, and we rumble on down Girard.