I don’t remember the first time I board the bus service BTC. I only remember how I feel about it: sweaty and gross. I am a Year 1 student who lives at UTown and boards at that bus stop, and the BTC bus is the axis on which my world turns.
I will eventually realise that it’s far better to make the agonizing 7 minute walk to the museum and board BTC from there. “Eventually” comes a few weeks later, after I suffer through about twelve different nauseating bus rides that take me all the way into the Kent Vale loop and think desperately that there must be a way to stop this.
Year 1 is also when I first take a picture of the bus timing schedule pinned up at the BTC bus stop. This picture will stay in my saved messages for years to come.
My life quickly becomes syncopated around the erratic whims of the BTC bus service. My friends from other faculties are never too thrilled to miss their buses, but never too upset either.
Not for me, because BTC only comes once every hour. Missing it is one of the worst things that can happen to a UTown-bound girl who recently realised that she’s no longer entitled to the student fare.
I’m not the only person whose life begins revolving around bus BTC. If you look into any Year 1 or Year 2 class, you can tell who lives on campus. Just look for the students who start getting fidgety as the end of class approaches—they’re getting ready to run down Block B and break into a dead sprint for the bus.
The adrenaline rush is immense. There’s nothing like thundering up to the bus stop just as the bus is about to pull away and mentally compelling the bus driver to open the doors for you. Correspondingly, there’s also nothing like thinking your professor will end class at 12:40 and packing your things only for them to talk for another twelve. It’s not like you can just leave. So you sit there, and think about how you’ll have to pay $2 for the MRT to Kent Ridge now, and you close your eyes.
This is the type of thing that you can only do when you’re young.
Crowd Reviews
“My friends and I nicknamed [the BTC bus] the Boneshaker! It could be totally bumpy and shaky, and the route was long and circuitous. Taking it after a heavy meal was inadvisable.
But it was endearing in its own way, and I’m grateful it got us to class free of charge and reasonably on time throughout the past year.”
—Anonymous contributor B
“I’m gonna be late I just missed the BTC bus”
—a message that appears about fifty different times in the writer’s message history
"There's something so endearing about sprinting after class for the bus because you didn't schedule your Kent Ridge mods appropriately…"
—freshly graduated Law student
The Epic Highs and Lows of the BTC Bus
At this juncture, it’s worth noting that the BTC bus—the Boneshaker, if you want to call it that—is pretty rough.
I mean, it’s not that bad, especially if you compare it to the other NUS buses. Because the bus’ route takes it out of the Kent Ridge campus and through city roads, it’s a lot smoother than the jaggedness you may have come to expect from other campus buses. Just look at some of the intense bus reviews on the NUS subreddit.
But it does get rough. If you’re a positive person, you know that this means the highs are even better.
The first BTC bus-related high I get is in Year 2, when a coach pulls up to the BTC bus stop in lieu of the usual Boneshaker. The only similarity it has with the normal vehicle is that it bears the letters “BTC” on it. Aside from that, they’re worlds apart. It’s airconditioned (and not in the patchy way where the airconditioning starts dissipating the more people get on), there are plush seats, and the engine is so smooth that I barely hear it.
I’m still not sure why these coaches are sometimes deployed instead of regular buses—the only other time I’ve taken one was on the A1 service—and I half-believe that it’s to plant the seeds of hope within the student populace.
Even now, as I near the end of my academic life and board the various campus buses with the disaffection of a withered crone, I still hold out for a coach. Deep down, there’s a young bright-eyed girl inside me who believes that I will one day get to sit on a coach again.
Hope is a dangerous thing. I’m sickened by it.
My Bus
In Year 3, I start taking non-Law modules.
Consequently, I start seeing other buses, and begin cheating on bus service BTC.
Several times during my first semester of Year 3, I’m on bus A2 when BTC passes by. I always avert my eyes.
Distance makes the heart grow fonder, though. Is it so bad that I no longer rely solely on BTC to get to class?
A2 makes me happy. It gets me where I need to go. It’s fine with me taking five more minutes to show up to the bus stop. It’s everything that I ever needed in a bus.
But it’s just not the same as BTC, my beloved, my beloathed. I’ve run so hard for BTC that I tasted blood in my throat. What’s the fun of taking a campus bus without thrills like that?
The Real Ones
If you’ve taken BTC, you know that its last two stops before it leaves the Kent Ridge campus are the Business bus stop and the PGP terminal. Those two stops are where all the non-Law students alight and you get to see the Real Ones heading to BTC.
(Oh, and also sometimes people get on the bus thinking that it goes to Kent Ridge MRT. It doesn’t, so they get trapped on a protracted 30 minute ride to the Bukit Timah campus with no stops in between. This happens so much that some of the drivers have taken to making announcements to the whole bus at the PGP terminal: “This bus does not go to Kent Ridge MRT. The next stop is Oei Tiong Ham building.”)