My family was the stereotypical suburban family: live in a relatively remote location, drive one of their two cars for virtually all trips to anywhere. I can only remember two family trips on mass transit when I was younger (7-10 years old): a planned round trip on the SP commuter rail (predecessor of CalTrain) to San Francisco, and an unexpected one-way bus trip when my mom's car broke down one afternoon while my step-dad was still at work. Something fascinated me about these trips, even though the only thing I found interesting about car travels was reading the road signs.

My curiosity with bus routes really started when I was in sixth grade. Instead of finishing elementary school at my local school in Cupertino, my parents enrolled me in a special class for intelligent students halfway across town. I noticed that, instead of using a regular school bus like I had the previous three years, I was picked up in a school van (as I called it). Soon I had memorized all the regular vehicle numbers for each of the 8-10 students in the class (3 morning van numbers, and a different 3 for the afternoon).

Then in spring semester, most of us took part in a once-per-week school district program that extended past school hours. The school district wouldn't (couldn't?) provide extra vehicles to take us home, so this was the first time I took public transit on a regular basis (the 23/24 route pair comes within a 5-10 minute walk of where the program was and a 10-15 minute walk of home). About a year earlier, I had haphazardly started getting bus schedules that I saw in local libraries (when my parents took me there for books), and these bus trips got me hooked on collecting local schedules (routes that passed within 5 miles or so of home).

For the next two years, my parents sent me to a private junior high school halfway across the county. This meant not only taking daily round trips on County Transit (as VTA was called then), but also my first experience with having to transfer between bus routes (I normally took #23 to #86, but after I found out I could also take #24 to #88, I sometimes did that just to be different). Somehow, I found out there was a transit info center at the Palo Alto CalTrain Depot (a relatively short ride on route 86 from school). This allowed me to collect not only every County Transit schedule, but also schedules for the southern half of SamTrans' service area. This slowly grew until, by the end of high school (four years at the public one close to home), I had not only visited the Downtown San Jose transit info center and SamTrans headquarters (multiple times each), but also ridden CalTrain & Muni to Muni's headquarters and BART to AC Transit's headquarters.

In my mid-twenties, I joked with some of my friends that the primary advantage of having divorced parents is the ability to learn about transit systems in two different metropolitan areas. So while most of the above was going on, I started bicycling from my dad's home in Cerritos to libraries near there (partially because I started this back when I thought libraries were the best place to get schedules, and partially because there was nothing like a transit info center within bicycling distance until OCTD put a schedule rack in the Buena Park Mall when I was halfway through high school). My dad's home is in a much better location: I quickly found more systems within two miles of his home (RTD, OCTD, and Long Beach Transit; I didn't find out about Norwalk Transit for a few months) than there were within ten miles of my mom's/step-dad's home. Despite this better location, I only took one transit round-trip by myself from my dad's home because my mom (& step-dad) had primary custody of me (I spent every second or third weekend with my dad). I had started my L.A. area schedule collection when I saw schedules for a regular RTD route on some of the several trips where my dad took me on the Long Beach route of RTD's special Hollywood Bowl express service (this route served a former Park & Ride lot at PCH & Long Beach Blvd.).

I could fill another four or five paragraphs with my transit stories while pursuing a bachelors degree, but I'll just tell two that stand out in my mind. Because of my new home location on campus at U.C. Irvine, I got a sudden interest in OCTD's south county routes. From one of OCTD's brochures, I got the phone number for the bus system in the Oceanside area. The first time I called it, I just asked for schedules of all routes, thinking it was implied that I meant NCTD. The people at what I now know as MTS were psychic (smart?) enough to send me the NCTD schedules I wanted, but I was surprised to also find each San Diego Transit schedule in the (large!) envelope.

But the most significant transit thing to happen to me while I was at college was the expansion of my interest in mass transit. Until the middle of my time there, my transit interest had been focused in two areas: (1) collecting brochures & memorizing the geographic coverage of each system, and (2) riding certain routes that I had never been on before. But I had access to the Internet as a UCI student. Some of the Usenet newsgroups that I read, as well as the Transit e-mail list (that's the only way misc.transport.urban-transit was available then), started me thinking about how transit should be, and why. Through the Transit list (and especially after I joined So.Ca.TA a couple years later), I learned that other people were also interested in bus routes, including a person who posted about his transit travels in the S.F. Bay Area named Charles Hobbs. When I had almost completed the classes for my degree, an OCTA proposal to cancel route 1's service to Downtown Long Beach prompted me to attend a transit agency meeting for the first time. I was nervous up at the microphone as I asked OCTA to keep what was its only link to Downtown Long Beach. But before I could do that, I heard a name that I recognized; I was so surprised, it took me a couple seconds to realize the other local person who regularly posted to the e-mail list was 25-30 feet from me. A year or two after Charles and I saw each other there, he told me about an organization that tries to get better public transit in the L.A. area. And you know what has happened since.