My house is convenient to four bus lines and a trolley, and I don’t have a car any more, so I don’t have to thread the neighborhood looking for parking spaces when I’m coming home any more. I also don’t have to have that anguished moment of wishing I didn’t have to move my car to run an errand. I don’t worry about coming outside to find my passenger side rear view mirror is smashed, or that I forgot to lock and someone went through the change in my console, or (once) smashed a rear window for no apparent reason.

I’ve had worse happen; I used to have a Jeep Wrangler with a soft top. A couple of times someone slashed the plastic window, as if I was going to lock a car with a fabric top. They obviously hadn’t even checked the door handles before they went at it with a knife. Once, someone climbed into the car and tried to start it with a screwdriver, which didn’t work. The Wrangler was old school; it had no electronics and it had a manual transmission. People prefer to steal cars that have remote key fobs.

I gave the Jeep up for a tiny nondescript Honda Fit after a long while. It had a remote key fob, but no thief wanted it; it got slightly dented early on, and I left the dents in, and I left it full of trash. My husband mocked me when I said the Honda was my last car; even though he had given up driving himself after a few experiences getting road rage. He was a tiny man who drove big cars.

He didn’t live to see me sell that Honda and not replace it.

The buses are frequent and relatively fast. But the transit authority is the victim of the way that a largely rural state disdains its urban areas, and so it is perpetually underfunded and not well maintained. The authority makes marvelous technological improvements — GPS, for instance, that lets you see exactly where the bus is and allows you to leave the house confident that it’s coming — and the payment system makes slow improvements (we retired tokens a long time ago, and people can finally pay with their phones).

But without maintenance, things go wrong. Buses arrive with a blacked-out destination display, or with the wrong information displayed, and the driver has to shout the number of the bus at you before you dare get on.

The system is perpetually short of drivers, too, and buses get cancelled.

I have a great phone app that tells me where the next bus is and how soon it is coming. If the bus is cancelled, or if for some reason its GPS isn’t working, the app shows it grayed out, like a ghost.

The other day, my scheduled bus was grayed out, so when it rounded the corner I (and another passenger) were taken by surprise and had to run down the block. I barely made it. I had to tap on the door, and when I got on, the driver stared at me with cold eyes and a stone face, and did not answer when I said, “Thank you. You didn’t show up on the app.” He pulled away.

Further on, another passenger was taken by surprise when he appeared, and she didn’t make it to the corner before he managed to leave her stranded. She shouted after us.

The bus was pretty empty. I think a lot of people were left behind because he wasn’t showing up on the phone app. I wondered if he was doing it on purpose. It is possible. Some drivers delight in their social interactions, and others would just as soon do their job entirely without passengers.

It was trash day, and even though he was rocketing along without picking people up, a bus can’t pass a trash truck on our one-way back streets, so he just inched along. Then he honked his horn and waved, and one of the trash guys looked up and ran up to his window. They talked excitedly. It was a buddy of his, I guess. The guy waved and went back to work, and then the trash truck pulled ahead and let us go.

So he had a social life, my driver. He just wasn’t interested in having it with passengers along for the ride. I get that. And I got to my destination eventually, early for my appointment because I always allow a lot of extra time for the bus.

The whole point of vehicles these days, it occurs to me, is to avoid interacting with any other human beings you don’t know. That poor driver hadn’t quite figured out that his bus wasn’t is car, I guess.