Metro Journal: May 6 (PM) For Safety Reasons...

By the time the 780 got to Atwater Village, I was thinking it was going to be a totally uneventful evening commute. Around that time I heard a bang in the back of the bus, but it sort of sounded like someone slamming a window closed and so I ignored it since I was close to finishing my book. At the Los Feliz/San Fernando stop, the bus actually stops, and the driver walks to the back. He then has everyone in the back couple rows move up "for safety reasons." Fortunately the bus wasn't too crowded by then so there were enough seats. I still couldn't see from where I was sitting, and there was someone in the aisle seat so I couldn't really get up and twist around, but I'm too cool for that anyway. And I was trying to finish my book.

Well, the bus stayed stopped and the driver was radioing in and everything. I thought I heard something about someone throwing a rock and some broken glass. Anyway, the next bus shows up and so we all get off -- it was only a 181 but I was close enough to home that I didn't really care -- and as I walked by the window I got a close up view. Turns out on these newer buses at least, the side windows are two panes of glass, with about 1 or 2 inches between them. Well, the outer pane was a total cobweb with a baseball-sized hole near the bottom. But whatever they had thrown had hit so hard that the inner window also had a small chunk taken out of it.

No one was hurt, but on the 181, some guy was asking the woman from my bus who had sat next to him (the 181 buses are several rows smaller than the 780 buses) why everyone had moved to that bus. She explained, and he said that must have been very traumatic for her! I don't think she was sitting anywhere near the back of the bus at the time and the most traumatic part for me was that I was stuck next to the window below the steps and I couldn't rubberneck.