Word: bus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Houston's public bus service used to be so unreliable that a local newspaper featured front-page box scores listing the number of buses on the road, the number in the shop and the percentage of late arrivals (as high as 50%). Virtually every day some routes got no buses at all. To untangle the mess, Houston voters in 1978 approved a special 1% tax on retail sales to help pay for a modern transit system. Since then the city has spent $790 million to upgrade service, adding 789 new buses, 20 park-and-ride lots, 750 sheltered bus stops...
...this fine Saturday afternoon, no one is safe from Brown's rap: shoppers, teenagers at a bus stop, liquor-store merchants, are all peppered with requests for money, cigarettes and food. "Spare some change?" Brown cries to a man carrying groceries, who lowers his head and scuttles away. "Excuse me!" he shouts to a man in a gray Jaguar, who flashes a frozen smile but keeps his window up and roars away the minute the light turns green. "What's up, pop?" he calls to an elderly couple, who hurriedly push past him. "Just keep asking, keep asking," says Brown...
...professes faith in God, Brown will even cheat the churches: not long ago, he and a buddy collected nearly $75 when they made the rounds of local houses of worship with a former employer's business card and a tale of a job waiting if they could only get bus fare...
...come to the point where they're all pros until proved otherwise," says the Rev. Chuck Faso of St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church in Chicago. "We have been taken so many times. They come in here with tears in their eyes and ask for exactly $82.33 for bus fare because their father is dying. I automatically call the bus station and find out it's one big story. I just tell them...
Less than 72 hours earlier, in Ballygawley, 40 miles west of Belfast, another I.R.A.-triggered explosion blew up a bus filled with British servicemen returning from furloughs to duty in Northern Ireland. Eight died and 27 were injured. So far this year the I.R.A. has killed 27 British soldiers, including four in Western Europe. The total last year: three. Not since 1979, when 38 soldiers were killed in Northern Ireland, have the outlawed guerrillas been so effective...