A Challenge to Use Only Public Transit for a Day?

Today I was on a work trip to Suining, and I decided to try a challenge: no taxis the whole way, only public transit.

Why call it a challenge? Because I used to take taxis all the time.

The reason was simple. A taxi gets me to clients faster, which makes me more efficient. But the cost is obvious too: I spend more money.

In terms of public transit, Chengdu is clearly a big city. The metro lines reach in every direction, all the way out to Ziyang, a small fifth-tier city.

But having spent years running around the prefecture-level cities of Sichuan, I often feel a bit lost once I step off the metro.

It's not that there are no buses. It's that the bus routes are planned so badly.

In some places the high-speed rail station is built far out, and there isn't even a bus line connecting it to the city center. Or you have to transfer. Or the route they give you loops around the entire city. The place I want to go is clearly on the west side, but the bus insists on taking a lap around the east side first.

That's why I don't like taking buses in prefecture-level cities. It costs a lot of efficiency.

When I'm out on the road, I always chase efficiency. I've written a post about that before, too.

Below is my schedule for today.

After a day like this, what can I learn from it?

1. Did my efficiency drop?

In the end I bought a 3:50 p.m. high-speed train ticket back to Chengdu. If I'd taken taxis around the city, how much time would I have saved?

Maybe two hours. When I came to Suining before, I'd usually buy a ticket back to Chengdu for between noon and 2 p.m. If nothing else came up, I'd get home somewhere between 2 and 4 in the afternoon.

Honestly, I'd still rather get home early, because only once I'm home does it feel like I'm off work.

But after a whole day on buses, putting up with things I didn't used to want to put up with, I found it was no big deal.

A bus ride in Suining costs just 1 yuan. Over a day I can save dozens of yuan in taxi fares, and getting home two hours earlier, those two hours of relaxing at home aren't really worth dozens of yuan.

So I might as well slow down and take my time.

2. Eating out

In the past, if I had to leave the house around seven in the morning, I probably wouldn't make breakfast at home.

My breakfast is what's written in the photo: two steamed eggs, 30 g of oats soaked in water, and a cup of unsweetened soy milk. Apart from the 15 minutes I set for the eggs, the oats and soy milk take two or three minutes, and eating it all takes under five.

This morning I chose to make breakfast at home. I got up early, put the eggs on to steam, went back to lie in bed for fifteen minutes, and got up as soon as the eggs were done.

Eating breakfast out in the morning is actually a real hassle. Apart from steamed buns and flower rolls, I find most things a bit too oily, so I think it's better to make it at home.

At lunch I usually don't watch what I eat much. Most of the time I just have a quick meal at one of those small restaurants common across Sichuan and Chongqing, like rice bowls, fried rice, or noodles.

3. Commute time

You can see from this table that most of my time actually went to getting around, and only a small share went to real work.

How to spend such long stretches in transit is something I've been thinking about and experimenting with ever since I started this job.

When I was in Shanghai, I often read a book on the train. Over time I stopped doing that and switched to my phone.

So far, with my phone on the go, I listen to music, read, watch bilibili, watch Douyin Jingxuan, watch K-dramas, and lately I've added listening to podcasts.

If I had a fixed commute to and from work every day, I don't think it would be hard at all to decide what to do with the time. But for someone like me, whose commuting each day is mixed with bits of work, it's genuinely hard to choose.

---

Back to the challenge I started with.

For now, all I can say is that getting around Suining by public transit isn't as hard as I imagined.

I think I'll try getting around other cities by public transit only, too.

---

When I left this morning, I only meant to log how long I spent on public transit. By noon I realized I'd spent most of my day on public transit anyway, so I just added everything in.

It's 7:55 p.m. now and I'm a bit tired. By the second half of this post my brain started to feel foggy, so I'll end it here.