Public transportation fail

Because it's the kind of place where it's normal to have one television per person in a household, because perhaps the nicest restaurant in the suburban wasteland of northwest Raleigh has a television playing, I was irritated but not surprised at the news that Raleigh buses are going to have digital televisions installed.

The Raleigh bus system sucks. It just straight-up sucks. I'm not surprised that the house where I spent my adolescence was two miles from the nearest bus stop, but I am surprised that when I got an apartment in the college-student holding pen of southwest Raleigh, there were no buses I could take to get to my job downtown. Zero, not even an "I guess you could walk for two miles" option. And instead of improving the buses in any real way, they want to put televisions in? As a practical matter I'm sure that the money is coming out of two different pockets and there's not really a meaningful choice between improving the bus routes and putting TVs in, but still, it's irritating.

(And also Raleigh has so much sprawl that buses are not so practical. I know that CAT is not the proper target of my ire, but if I think about the proper target of my ire too much I'll turn on my General Misanthropy switch.)