Is it me or is it getting kinda crowded to board NUS buses lately? From my past experience this few days of attending lessons, taking the NUS buses for my lessons in uTown have been nothing but a terrible experience for me. If I were to put it into a picture, it would be something like this:

Yeap, we're sardines alright

 

Believe when I say that the buses are that cramped. Sometimes, I even have to wait for 2 - 3 buses to pass until there's a little tiny standing space for me. It's that bad. The weird thing is that I really never encountered this problem of taking NUS buses before until this semester. Which lead me to formulate a few reasons of why NUS buses seems to be a little bit too crowded this sem.

1. The most plausible explanation that I've been hearing is that a few of A buses are shifted to become D buses this semester, which inadvertently lead to fewer buses around. But still, with the shift of a few classes to uTown, along with the students, the number of people taking buses should be around the same. So it doesn't really explain the matter. Besides, I thought NUS has always have a few D buses lying around? What happened to those?

2. The kiasu-ness is exceptionally high this year. The new batch of freshies are more afraid of doing badly this year, so they spammed all the classes that they can, attending every single lecture every day, even classes for modules they did not take, thus increasing the number of students that are at school everyday. Unlike us old birds who prefer to sleep at home and watch the webcast later rather than go to school and fall asleep in the lectures.

3. NUSSU SAVE secretly signed an agreement with NUS to cut down the number of buses in their effort to save the environment and reduce the carbon footprint of NUS.

4. Part of NUS's plan to encourage healthy lifestyle among the students. Can't take a bus? Walk yo! You can cut a few calories in the meantime, especially when you're living in Eusoff and your class is at science. I had a few friends already who walked from Eusoff all the way to science because they could not take a bus. And I must say, they're really looking great now.

5. Maybe the buses frequency has never really changed. Maybe what's changed is us students ourselves. After all those years of eating McSpicy, the effect has finally caught up on us, making us grow in size and therefore there is less space in the bus now because we're all bigger now.

6. Or perhaps in the effort to cut down the foreign talents in Singapore, a few of the PRCs bus drivers were sent back home to China. And there is no way Singaporeans would want to drive an NUS bus for living right?

 

7. The new buses are so comfortable that some NUS students would just take it over and over again just to enjoy the air cond and the journey around NUS, even skipping class to do that, thus increasing the number of people taking buses at one time.

8. Or it could just be uTown. You know, more people living there, more students, same number of buses, longer travel time? So much of wanting to make uTown the central of NUS.

But still, having to pack like sardines isn't such a bad thing after all. In fact, thanks to the increased proximity among all of us students in the bus, I actually made a few new friends while our face were like inches from each other. I mean, you don't really have a choice to be unfriendly when you're that close right? In fact, I have my standard "Wow, NUS students really love to take the buses this sem right?" line ready to start a conversation with anyone who has their face inches from me. But usually they will give a cold stare back because I realized that I just forgot to brush my teeth in my haste to catch a bus which I have a tiny space to stand on.