The Last to Comment Wins
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ElijahRyne
A Hermit that’s NOT that Lazy, currentlycomplainen
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I am currently winning.
ElijahRyne
A Hermit that’s NOT that Lazy, currentlycomplainen
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2021
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I am winning currently.
Tempokai
The Overworked One
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I'm winning currently by continuing this:
If the 1990s in city were the Wild East of capitalism, then the city’s bus system was its motorized, belching outlaw posse. Picture a hundred Soviet buses, half-dead and wholly indifferent to brakes, limping alongside second-hand Korean minivans imported with more hope than horsepower. All of them racing to the next bus stop like their very licenses depended on it—which, in a delicious twist of bureaucratic irony, they often did.
Thus began the Steel Bus Run, a chaotic, diesel-smelling Olympics of greed, grit, and glorious dysfunction. There were no medals, just survival of the fittest.
The year is 1995. The Soviet Union is dead, the rules are fictional, and City’s streets are a Thunderdome for public transportation.
In theory, the city had a transport department. In practice, the “transport department” was a dusty corner in some beige building, staffed by three overworked souls, one of whom spent most of his day explaining to new depot owners why they couldn’t also just invent their own route numbers. "You can't just make up a Route 57A/2," he would say, sweating profusely. "That’s not a real designation." But by 4 PM, three new 57s would be on the road, all charging different fares and all promising, inexplicably, to get you to the Green Bazaar in 7 minutes flat.
Everyone had a route. Everyone. Retired colonels who were or weren't in Afghanistan decade ago. Suspiciously wealthy mechanics. A guy who once saw a bus. You bought a clapped-out Daewoo, or bartered your room in obshyaga for a GAZelle, gave it a hopeful mechanical job (usually fixing damned hydraulics the previous owner had wasted to potholes and adding more seats), slapped a “Межгород” sign on the windshield, and voilà—you were now the CEO of a “bus park.”
The only thing more congested than the roads was the paperwork. Or lack thereof. Licensing laws were written in a tone best described as “ambiguous optimism,” demanding that buses be “safe,” drivers be “certified,” and depots have “some kind of yard, maybe.” This left a lot of room for interpretation—especially for depot owners who considered concrete optional and drivers who learned to operate a manual gearbox yesterday.
The poor bastards behind the wheels of such buses were honest. Too honest, really. No uniforms. No salaries. No fixed schedules. These were not employees so much as fuel-sniffing gladiators trying to make rent one fare at a time. Depot owners leased buses to drivers under a contract best summarized as: “Bring money or bring the keys.”
Every morning, around 5:00 a.m., drivers gathered in a haze of cigarette smoke and dread, warming up their buses with prayers, wire hangers, and, on one occasion, an actual open flame. Their daily goal: squeeze out enough cash to cover fuel, rental fees, kickbacks, and a questionable lunch from the samosa stand near the Great Intercity Bus Station.
The real game began once they hit the roads. This was Steel Bus Run: a literal race for passengers. If you weren’t first to the stop, you were dead. Your rival’s rusted PAZik might cut you off mid-turn. A newly imported Mercedes Sprinter would swerve into your lane like a drunk goose. All the while, you had to watch out for the real threat: the transport inspectors, whose surprise raids were more feared than brake failure.
Drivers developed skills no human should possess. They could eyeball a 30-meter gap between two cars at full speed and thread through it like a seasoned F1 driver whose steering wheel was held together with duct tape and rage. They knew which potholes to avoid, which cops could be bribed with cigarettes, and how to throw exact change into a moving passenger’s lap without losing momentum. After all is done, the "racers" would gather around, roast each other, and disperse back to their own depots.
A “depot” in this golden era might have been:
All it needed was a shed with a clipboard, a mechanic who knew just enough to fake an inspection, and one harassed bookkeeper shouting, “WHO FORGOT TO FILE FORM 12B AGAIN?!”
Some depots didn’t even own buses—they owned leases on drivers who did. The economics were beautiful in the way only a collapsing state economy could be. The owner took a cut, the driver paid the difference, and if the bus exploded mid-shift, well, that was just Tuesday.
“Safety standards” were a polite fiction. Brake fluid was considered a luxury. Side mirrors were optional. One driver interviewed in 1997 proudly stated that his bus “still runs on original Soviet air.” This was not a joke.
The only maintenance strategy was cannibalism—depot mechanics stripping one dying bus to prolong the existence of another. It was like a post-apocalyptic ecosystem where only the buses with the strongest bumpers and least ethical owners survived.
You might think, seeing this "race" happening in the streets, the government would step in. Oh, ho, ho, no.
The Ministry of Transport produced some lovely charts about “Licensing Reform” while quietly admitting they hadn’t visited City since 1992. The parliament, meanwhile, was overwhelmed, underfunded, and trapped in an abusive relationship with its own regulatory agencies.
Four different departments—Transport, Sanitation, GAI, and Antimonopoly—claimed jurisdiction over buses. None communicated with the others. This meant that one day a bus could be fined for dirty upholstery, the next for running early, and the third for not having the correct shade of beige on its interior panels.
Every depot owner became a minor politician—navigating kickbacks, fines, random inspections, and the occasional ban on “excessive honking.” Some even hired ex-cops as “route negotiators” to ensure their applications for Route 51 didn’t mysteriously vanish in paperwork purgatory.
Despite everything, City moved. Somehow. Miraculously. Again.
The buses were dirty. The drivers were aggressive. The routes overlapped like spaghetti dumped on a map. But for a city rapidly outgrowing its post-Soviet trauma, the Steel Bus Run kept people moving.
It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t safe. But it was alive.
In a time when most public institutions collapsed into irrelevance, this ragtag fleet of capitalist contraptions formed a kind of demented circulatory system. They were the clanking, coughing, steel-bellied proof that necessity really is the mother of lawless invention. But that wasn't the end of the Steel Bus Run.
Back to 1995, the city's bus system had reached that special level of dysfunction where people no longer asked “Where’s my bus?” but rather “Which private warlord owns Route 52 now?” The answer, increasingly, was: someone who used to work for the city.
You see, before the chaos, before the bus drag races (yes, it happened) and the bus street duels (yes, it happened too, and it was about speed/amount of people transported), there had been order. Soviet order. Glorious, grey, centrally planned, timetable-worshipping CityGorTrans—the all-powerful state transport combine—operated eight sprawling municipal bus parks, each with their own yards, repair bays, and a man named Yuri (hello again!) who had been fixing clutches since Brezhnev.
Privatization happened, and like everything else in the post-Soviet collapse, it was done with all the grace of a blindfolded man trying to defuse a landmine using only his elbows.
Under the USSR, the parks had numbers and a mission:
Each park was a fortress of routine—thousands of mechanics, cleaners, dispatchers, and stern women with clipboards who could time a driver’s bathroom break to the second when it mattered, which oftentimes was.
When the USSR fell, all this infrastructure was still physically there—just fundingless, functionless, and full of people who were full of frenzy for competition.
In 1995, the government launched its first great privatization plan: “Programma Privatisatsii i Reorganizatsii.”
Loosely translated: “We have no money; please take this bus park off our hands.”
Here's how it went:
By 1997, all eight parks had been corporatized, stripped of subsidies, and sold off, mostly to their former directors or connected businessmen. This made perfect sense to the people in charge: after all, “who better to run Park № 3 than the man who already controls its brake fluid black market? Ivan?” No, it was Azamat.
Basically, it went like this:
Note: These transformations were often unclear, undocumented, or changed names five times by lunch.
Many privatizations took the form of “labour collectives”—groups of workers who pooled shares to buy the yard. It was socialism with just enough capitalism to ensure bitter lawsuits, unpaid wages, and arguments over who stole the carburetor from Stall #17.
But by the late 90s, most collective owners were bought out by a new class of bus entrepreneurs, men in leather jackets with mobile phones the size of bricks and business plans that read: “Step 1: Bribe inspector. Step 2: Win Route 7.”
These new depot lords had one mission: exploit the asset. That meant:
And it worked—for a while. But it also guaranteed that by 2000, City’s “bus system” was really a free market death race with 23 competing warlords, no coordination, and exactly two working fuel pumps in the entire east sector. So, by the turn of the glorious year of 2000, the old Soviet system was dead, but the new system hadn’t been born—it had squatted, uninvited, in the ruins, owned by everyone and no one at once.
Eight proud municipal parks had become twenty-something independent chaos engines, each jealously guarding its slice of the route map. The city no longer had plans. It had actual grassroots running the show, and it was glorious enough to be dubbed as a Steel Bus Run. There were no unified uniforms, no centralized schedules, and no guarantees—except for one. Tomorrow’s bus will come. It will violate traffic, violate your wallet, and violate the sense of the thing called "bus schedule", and you'll be grateful for that. With that, sobering 2000s had come.
Part 2. Steel Bus Run
If the 1990s in city were the Wild East of capitalism, then the city’s bus system was its motorized, belching outlaw posse. Picture a hundred Soviet buses, half-dead and wholly indifferent to brakes, limping alongside second-hand Korean minivans imported with more hope than horsepower. All of them racing to the next bus stop like their very licenses depended on it—which, in a delicious twist of bureaucratic irony, they often did.
Thus began the Steel Bus Run, a chaotic, diesel-smelling Olympics of greed, grit, and glorious dysfunction. There were no medals, just survival of the fittest.
The year is 1995. The Soviet Union is dead, the rules are fictional, and City’s streets are a Thunderdome for public transportation.
In theory, the city had a transport department. In practice, the “transport department” was a dusty corner in some beige building, staffed by three overworked souls, one of whom spent most of his day explaining to new depot owners why they couldn’t also just invent their own route numbers. "You can't just make up a Route 57A/2," he would say, sweating profusely. "That’s not a real designation." But by 4 PM, three new 57s would be on the road, all charging different fares and all promising, inexplicably, to get you to the Green Bazaar in 7 minutes flat.
Everyone had a route. Everyone. Retired colonels who were or weren't in Afghanistan decade ago. Suspiciously wealthy mechanics. A guy who once saw a bus. You bought a clapped-out Daewoo, or bartered your room in obshyaga for a GAZelle, gave it a hopeful mechanical job (usually fixing damned hydraulics the previous owner had wasted to potholes and adding more seats), slapped a “Межгород” sign on the windshield, and voilà—you were now the CEO of a “bus park.”
The only thing more congested than the roads was the paperwork. Or lack thereof. Licensing laws were written in a tone best described as “ambiguous optimism,” demanding that buses be “safe,” drivers be “certified,” and depots have “some kind of yard, maybe.” This left a lot of room for interpretation—especially for depot owners who considered concrete optional and drivers who learned to operate a manual gearbox yesterday.
The poor bastards behind the wheels of such buses were honest. Too honest, really. No uniforms. No salaries. No fixed schedules. These were not employees so much as fuel-sniffing gladiators trying to make rent one fare at a time. Depot owners leased buses to drivers under a contract best summarized as: “Bring money or bring the keys.”
Every morning, around 5:00 a.m., drivers gathered in a haze of cigarette smoke and dread, warming up their buses with prayers, wire hangers, and, on one occasion, an actual open flame. Their daily goal: squeeze out enough cash to cover fuel, rental fees, kickbacks, and a questionable lunch from the samosa stand near the Great Intercity Bus Station.
The real game began once they hit the roads. This was Steel Bus Run: a literal race for passengers. If you weren’t first to the stop, you were dead. Your rival’s rusted PAZik might cut you off mid-turn. A newly imported Mercedes Sprinter would swerve into your lane like a drunk goose. All the while, you had to watch out for the real threat: the transport inspectors, whose surprise raids were more feared than brake failure.
Drivers developed skills no human should possess. They could eyeball a 30-meter gap between two cars at full speed and thread through it like a seasoned F1 driver whose steering wheel was held together with duct tape and rage. They knew which potholes to avoid, which cops could be bribed with cigarettes, and how to throw exact change into a moving passenger’s lap without losing momentum. After all is done, the "racers" would gather around, roast each other, and disperse back to their own depots.
A “depot” in this golden era might have been:
- A muddy lot behind a warehouse
- A former shoe factory with a suspicious oil slick in the yard
- Someone’s cousin’s backyard in the Sleeping Suburbs
All it needed was a shed with a clipboard, a mechanic who knew just enough to fake an inspection, and one harassed bookkeeper shouting, “WHO FORGOT TO FILE FORM 12B AGAIN?!”
Some depots didn’t even own buses—they owned leases on drivers who did. The economics were beautiful in the way only a collapsing state economy could be. The owner took a cut, the driver paid the difference, and if the bus exploded mid-shift, well, that was just Tuesday.
“Safety standards” were a polite fiction. Brake fluid was considered a luxury. Side mirrors were optional. One driver interviewed in 1997 proudly stated that his bus “still runs on original Soviet air.” This was not a joke.
The only maintenance strategy was cannibalism—depot mechanics stripping one dying bus to prolong the existence of another. It was like a post-apocalyptic ecosystem where only the buses with the strongest bumpers and least ethical owners survived.
You might think, seeing this "race" happening in the streets, the government would step in. Oh, ho, ho, no.
The Ministry of Transport produced some lovely charts about “Licensing Reform” while quietly admitting they hadn’t visited City since 1992. The parliament, meanwhile, was overwhelmed, underfunded, and trapped in an abusive relationship with its own regulatory agencies.
Four different departments—Transport, Sanitation, GAI, and Antimonopoly—claimed jurisdiction over buses. None communicated with the others. This meant that one day a bus could be fined for dirty upholstery, the next for running early, and the third for not having the correct shade of beige on its interior panels.
Every depot owner became a minor politician—navigating kickbacks, fines, random inspections, and the occasional ban on “excessive honking.” Some even hired ex-cops as “route negotiators” to ensure their applications for Route 51 didn’t mysteriously vanish in paperwork purgatory.
Despite everything, City moved. Somehow. Miraculously. Again.
The buses were dirty. The drivers were aggressive. The routes overlapped like spaghetti dumped on a map. But for a city rapidly outgrowing its post-Soviet trauma, the Steel Bus Run kept people moving.
It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t safe. But it was alive.
In a time when most public institutions collapsed into irrelevance, this ragtag fleet of capitalist contraptions formed a kind of demented circulatory system. They were the clanking, coughing, steel-bellied proof that necessity really is the mother of lawless invention. But that wasn't the end of the Steel Bus Run.
Back to 1995, the city's bus system had reached that special level of dysfunction where people no longer asked “Where’s my bus?” but rather “Which private warlord owns Route 52 now?” The answer, increasingly, was: someone who used to work for the city.
You see, before the chaos, before the bus drag races (yes, it happened) and the bus street duels (yes, it happened too, and it was about speed/amount of people transported), there had been order. Soviet order. Glorious, grey, centrally planned, timetable-worshipping CityGorTrans—the all-powerful state transport combine—operated eight sprawling municipal bus parks, each with their own yards, repair bays, and a man named Yuri (hello again!) who had been fixing clutches since Brezhnev.
Privatization happened, and like everything else in the post-Soviet collapse, it was done with all the grace of a blindfolded man trying to defuse a landmine using only his elbows.
Under the USSR, the parks had numbers and a mission:
- Park № 1: Soviet buses only. No nonsense.
- Park № 2: High-volume lines. Known as “the elephants.”
- Park № 3: Suburban fringe routes—deep GAZ-53 and PAZ country.
- Park № 4: Night routes, weird hours, weirder drivers.
- Parks № 5–8: Mix of trolleys, diesel, and soul erosion.
Each park was a fortress of routine—thousands of mechanics, cleaners, dispatchers, and stern women with clipboards who could time a driver’s bathroom break to the second when it mattered, which oftentimes was.
When the USSR fell, all this infrastructure was still physically there—just fundingless, functionless, and full of people who were full of frenzy for competition.
In 1995, the government launched its first great privatization plan: “Programma Privatisatsii i Reorganizatsii.”
Loosely translated: “We have no money; please take this bus park off our hands.”
Here's how it went:
- Form an LLP from the ashes of each municipal park.
- Give shares to staff—drivers, mechanics, janitors, probably Yuri, justifiably.
- Offer the rest to “investors,” which usually meant anyone with USD and enough political cover to survive a bureaucratic knife-fight.
- Don’t ask too many questions.
By 1997, all eight parks had been corporatized, stripped of subsidies, and sold off, mostly to their former directors or connected businessmen. This made perfect sense to the people in charge: after all, “who better to run Park № 3 than the man who already controls its brake fluid black market? Ivan?” No, it was Azamat.
Basically, it went like this:
| Old Municipal Park | New Owner / Entity | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Park № 1 | Became Argymak‑Express LLP | Known for underpaying drivers and overpainting buses |
| Park № 2 | Split between Nomad City Bus LLP and Sunrise Transit LLP | Frequent route feuds, shared parking lot |
| Park № 3 | Absorbed by BlueStep Transit LLP | Suburban empire builder, occasional bus cannibal |
| Park № 4 | Became SkyPearl Transit LLP (died 2017) | Famous for never following timetables |
| Park № 5 | Private warehouse by 2000 | Became literal storage yard for used tires |
| Park № 6 | Registered as Green Wheel Operators LLP (RIP 2019) | 600 CNG buses, 0 working radios |
| Park № 7 | Unknown buyer; likely dissolved | Nothing remains but a rusty sign and bad memories |
| Park № 8 | Leased by Ala Auto Transit LLP, later folded into Park № 2 | Vanished into the mists of bureaucratic neglect |
Note: These transformations were often unclear, undocumented, or changed names five times by lunch.
Many privatizations took the form of “labour collectives”—groups of workers who pooled shares to buy the yard. It was socialism with just enough capitalism to ensure bitter lawsuits, unpaid wages, and arguments over who stole the carburetor from Stall #17.
But by the late 90s, most collective owners were bought out by a new class of bus entrepreneurs, men in leather jackets with mobile phones the size of bricks and business plans that read: “Step 1: Bribe inspector. Step 2: Win Route 7.”
These new depot lords had one mission: exploit the asset. That meant:
- Charging drivers lease fees regardless of whether the bus worked
- Subletting parking spots to other “parks”
- Avoiding taxes by pretending to be three different companies, none of which technically existed
And it worked—for a while. But it also guaranteed that by 2000, City’s “bus system” was really a free market death race with 23 competing warlords, no coordination, and exactly two working fuel pumps in the entire east sector. So, by the turn of the glorious year of 2000, the old Soviet system was dead, but the new system hadn’t been born—it had squatted, uninvited, in the ruins, owned by everyone and no one at once.
Eight proud municipal parks had become twenty-something independent chaos engines, each jealously guarding its slice of the route map. The city no longer had plans. It had actual grassroots running the show, and it was glorious enough to be dubbed as a Steel Bus Run. There were no unified uniforms, no centralized schedules, and no guarantees—except for one. Tomorrow’s bus will come. It will violate traffic, violate your wallet, and violate the sense of the thing called "bus schedule", and you'll be grateful for that. With that, sobering 2000s had come.
ElijahRyne
A Hermit that’s NOT that Lazy, currentlycomplainen
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2021
- Messages
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I am currently winning.
Anonjohn20
Pen holding member
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SmutHub might prefer if you write about bussy instead.
Tempokai
The Overworked One
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smut is temporary. The Bus System is eternal.
Phantonym
That dude that writes… AKA RepresentingAbsence
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I sure hope the smut is temporary but even then it will take a while to purge... The rot runs deep
Anonjohn20
Pen holding member
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It's self-sustaining now.
Phantonym
That dude that writes… AKA RepresentingAbsence
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I go in and out of activity and this page keeps jumping by like 20+ everytime I get back
Anonjohn20
Pen holding member
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Longer than a few seconds.You had over an hour.
Gallahart
Active member
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My mom would be proud.
VertisGuguChalimoth
RepresentingRationality
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Nah!