I can pull up the exact reason a bus on my own commute is running eleven minutes behind schedule faster than most riders can find the stop on a map, a stalled left turn signal three intersections back, a wheelchair boarding that took longer than the padded time in the schedule, a driver shift change that ran two minutes over. I have access to real time vehicle location data most riders don’t know exists. And none of that knowledge makes the actual standing there, eleven real minutes, on a corner, in July heat, feel one second shorter than it would if I had no idea what was happening at all.

This bothered me for weeks after I first really noticed it, because it felt like it should be a contradiction, the whole professional promise of my job is that better information makes transit better, and here I was with more information than anyone else on that corner and it wasn’t doing a single thing for how the wait actually felt in my body. I’ve since decided it isn’t a contradiction so much as a gap between two different kinds of knowing. I know why the bus is late the way I know the plot of a book I’ve read a synopsis of. I don’t know it the way I know a book I’ve actually sat inside for three hundred pages. Understanding the delay intellectually and experiencing the delay are simply not the same kind of information, and no amount of real time data closes that gap, because the gap was never about information in the first place.

The corner I’m usually waiting on faces a laundromat with a bench out front that isn’t technically for waiting on the bus, but everyone uses it that way anyway, and over the past year I’ve started timing myself, on purpose, to see how much of an eleven minute wait I can spend actually present on that bench instead of checking the tracker app every ninety seconds like checking it will make the little dot on the map move faster. Some days I manage most of it. Most days I check the app four or five times anyway, out of pure habit, the same habit that makes me refresh a work dashboard I already know isn’t going to have new numbers on it for another hour.

I don’t have a tidy fix for this, professionally or personally. I know exactly what’s wrong with the schedule padding on that route because I helped write it, and I still stand there and feel the eleven minutes the same way anyone else would, restless, a little annoyed, checking my phone too often for information I already have. What I’ve settled on, mostly, is that the waiting itself is just a real thing that happens to a body regardless of what the mind knows, and the only real fix I’ve found is the bench, and choosing, some days more successfully than others, to actually sit on it instead of standing at the curb pretending vigilance will make the bus come faster.