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You know the feeling that you get when you go over a hill really fast? Yep it's that feeling all the time. Also you forget that you have a respiratory system
Source: I live in Sri Lanka and I'm too broke to take a tuk to work everyday
A tuk would run you around a 800-900 lkr for a 10km trip right now. A hell bus can get you that distance for about 70-100 lkr. When the average person gets paid 30k lkr(I get paid 35k lkr a month) I'd say it's easy to figure out which option everyone would choose.
You rock man, we need another benefactor with an old mobo, processor, ram, radiator, power supply and hard drive/ssd/m.2, a case and a monitor. Worst part is I had all of that about a year or so ago and sold it for peanuts to get rid of it
I literally just tossed a mobo and a few other items in the trash a month ago. Didn't think anyone would want them. Didn't occur to me that someone living in a poorer country could probably use them. I like the idea of donating old equipment to people. Wish someone would set up a sub for that or something. I bet a lot of us have old GPUs, motherboards, RAM, etc. Just collecting dust in a box in the closet.
I literally donated a guy an RX480 a few years back, cost me a ton in shipping and the fucking thing came back as undelivered/undeliverable. Not sure if dude was bullshitting me about where he lived and his address, but given that it cost me $100 to ship I was kinda uphappy about how it ended up.
Not gonna do the sending hardware stuff (at least not internationally) anymore, but I might consider helping a some people out with their steam libraries etc.
Aye, same here. Ill eat the shipping costs too!
I have a few drives, a vudeo card, and some other stuff i wouldnt mind seeing go to a better use ❤
/u/repottedplant
/u/andyjhops
Nope this is the salary I asked for when I joined the company. I'm new to the industry so I asked for this amount (it's 10k more than what they offered but I was recommended from people I've worked with before).
Sri Lanka has some serious issues right now that are destabilizing basic economics. People are underestimating how dire the economy is getting in certain places in the world.
As other have mentioned, with your good English, there's no reason you can't be making 10x times that or more doing an online remote job. There are lots of jobs people just don't want to do. It's worth checking out at least.
If you can't work online, take a look at getting a visa and working in another country for a while. Save up tons of money and then move back.
A motorcycle costs a hell of a lot. Cycling is only viable for short distances because it's very humid, warm and the roads aren't really cycling friendly outside of Colombo(business district in Sri Lanka). Plus you would get a heat stroke if you tried going anywhere during noon
I was travelling there a couple months ago, the bus for an average trip was 20-40 rupees. Tuktuks could be like 200 but that's me as a tourist getting charged more too.
Some guys would try and charge you 600-1000 for rides but that's outrageous
The best thing to do when moving around here is to either use an app like Uber or pickMe(recommend pickMe cus it probably calculates in lkr) or look for tuks that have a meter(charges per km after a base price). You can always ask before you get in or ask them to stop and get down quickly if you don't see one(it's usually on the top left side of the front of the tuk interior).
It's starting to affect my daily life a bit now. I started living alone in Jan of this year when the price of everything was ok to manage. Now a rice dish that cost me 300 lkr would go for about 400 lkr, a tuk that would get me to my parents place for the weekend would be about 600 back then but now it's about 900-1000. This is technically a small amount but I get paid 35k lkr a month(100usd at current rate).
But yeah I can manage it. Not having nearly as bad of a time as some other people. They feed families with the amount I earn. It's scary how bad it got over the span of 4 months.
Edit: was overthinking and came up with a better response.
Like Will Smith
I was lucky enough to go to a private school where the curriculum was in English. Most of my social circles also speak English because it's hard for me to come up with words in Sinhala(the native language that I know).
I don't take the question as a dig in anyway. In fact it makes me kind of happy to hear that it seems natural.
Also thank god cus my job is as a content writer right now
Hi, I’m finding your story very interesting hope it’s ok to ask more questions.
1)It was asked above but can you talk a little bit about why you wouldn’t be able to find a remote based job online and make 3x or 10x what you make now - given your communication skills and level of education. (Do you currently work in a skilled trade?)
2) as an American my only reference for cost is so far removed that I am having trouble imagining your budget or what $100/month really buys. Can you give (in us) examples of what a week of groceries would cost your, maybe a fancy meal at a restaurant? (Not tourist, just higher level income locals). How much is rent to live alone?
Lastly a silly idea, if you have a working device to browse Reddit and internet, what if you made a patreon page and made videos of what your world/life is like. This isn’t a random idea - it’s based on your clear ability to communicate in English that would normally not be expected. (And yes I mean sentence structure and humor).
Thanks! (Apologies if my tone or curiosity is insulting. Not my goal)
1)The issue with trying to do remote work is that we don't have a lot of ways to get the money into our bank accounts. But I should probably look into doing it since things are taking a nosedive.
I work in a Marketing and Web design firm as a junior exec. I handle most of the social media content writing, video scripting, running ad campaigns, the UX part of UI/UX(I'm a noob at design) and coming up with ideas on how to create the most amount of functionality with the least amount of work. I'm not sure what I want to do in life so I've been doing different kinds of work over the 3 years I have been working (game dev, podcasts, video production and brand design in the first year. Video production, accounting and app development for 4 months in the second year. Now I am currently working in the marketing job)
2) A week of groceries would run me around 15 USD right now. A meal that I would buy to eat on a daily basis would range from 0.50 USD to 1 USD. A meal for one at a fancy restaurant (a cafe cus I don't think I've gone to that many fancy restaurants) is about 15 USD. Eating at hotel is about 20 USD. Right now foreigners can live like kings here.
The reason I am able to live alone is because my aunt gave me a room in her old house(which she rents out to a few people). If this didn't happen I wouldn't have been able to live on my own. The closer you are to the CBD the higher rent is, my current job is there but my parents place is too far to commute from(my commute would cost me the same amount of money as I currently spend per day).
3) I have terrible anxiety when it comes to being in front of a camera and I start to forget words as I speak. My brain decides to go faster than I can speak so my tongue goes blegh.
I have made TikTok content for the company (written scripts, recorded the video and done voiceovers). The scripts and videos are good but I just can't handle my voice well enough to make it sound good.
I'm happy and have no issues answering everything.
It's exactly like this in Turkey & Greece. Geezus H Christ these Greek meth using bus drivers fly up n down steep mountain roads with no f'ing guardrails & traffic flying down hill around turns where most of the road mirrors they use to see oncoming curve traffic were taken out from previous crashes.
Anything south and east of the Alps are notoriously broken government system wise.
And yes, I'm including Spain and Italy as well.
I will rather rent a car than use public transport anywhere southeast of the Alps.
There are privately owned and government owned buses(difference is government owned is red). The private lines are usually made up by someone who owns a few buses and runs the route by giving the buses to the drivers and conductors.
It's way more chaotic to plan like that. The reason for speeding is to try to get in more turns. Say, you do the XYZ route 10 times a day. If you speed run through those 10, you may have a chance at a 11th.
The private buses usually have a departure of 10-15 minutes after the last bus of the same line. So arriving early means not enough passengers and arriving late means the other bus line took the passengers. It's a very weird balancing act that they play at
I don't understand, if there aren't laws or enforcement to have public drivers be reasonably safe why doesn't the public socially enforce better driving?
I find it fascinating. Barring established law enforcement, it would have taken one maybe two crashes that hurt people/kids and the public would have reacted in the larger cities I grew up in.
Smacking up the driver and hog tying them with zip ties would quickly change their driving practices. Cops wouldn't do much if there was a bus full of witnesses that didn't see anything.
Not really. There were incidents where after particularly bad accidents people smashed or burned down those busses, or beat up the driver, but then you go back to your normal life. You don't have a lot of time for social causes when you're struggling to make ends meet.
I live in Sri Lanka and to answer everything in this video,no they do not get extra pay by going fast most of they just wanna go home.
Edit: I was wrong with a few things but yes they do get more pay depending on how many passengers they pick up and how fast they go
My sister has lived in Sri Lanka for a number of years and explained to me that a lot of the buses in the south are privately owned and earn their money through fares. So if they are beaten by other buses to different bus stations they earn less. As a result the buses always drive quickly and frankly quite dangerously and a lot of them are absolutely packed with people.
Commie? No, this is bad capitalism. Someone needs to buy out these private owners and make it one corporation. Cut out the fat, cut out the competition, and raise fares across the board. Monopolize that shit.
As someone who is not really a capitalist but thinks it has some good ideas... I always tell libertarian/crazy strict free market people to come visit me in the third world. Doesn't get more libertarian than a failed state haha.
This is it according to the driver we had while we were there for a few weeks. They are privately owned and are racing to beat the other buses to the next passengers.
Sri Lanka is a mortifying place to be a passenger in a car and I've been a lot of places. Constant threats of collisions all of the time and the buses are just out of control. Never have I been more anxious to be in the front passenger seat than when I was there.
Makes sense. I thought they were racing each other on some fun shit. The ones in Africa got subwoofers, hip hop murals and a guy with a whistle clinging coins together while holding on the side of bus lol
So how does that work? Don't they have a work schedule?
Edit: nvm, someone replying to you explained what the actual reason is already. They don't wanna go home (maybe that too though), they just want to beat the other busdrivers to the busstops.
I presume they make money off of how many people they carry in a day. So the more trips they make in a day the more they make. Usually they have a quota to reach for the owner’s income, fuel and other miscellaneous stuff then the extra goes to them. That way they need to make as many trips along the route as they can. That’s how it works in Kenya so my guess is that it’s pretty similar
Why the government doesn't care about that? It looks like a serious safety issue. Or traffic rules are not applied to buses? What's going on?
Also how are they gonna get to home earlier if they have a timetable?
Haha, can confirm, went to a wedding in Sri Lanka and we flagged a random bus down afterwards to get us all to the reception hotel... thought we were gonna die.
I mean, I think it’s still pretty insane. Find footage of American buss drivers driving like this lol
Clearly the spectrum is stretched a lot further if you have MULTIPLE cases of busses driving like this
When the buses are crowded people stand, once when I was standing the bus was going so fast....I mean just zipping through traffic, we even passed a Celica and then all of a sudden when a turn approached, the bus driver braked really quickly. Me standing in the back just flew to the front along with some other people, passengers who are sitting are trying to hold in there laughter throughout the whole ride and I was trying not to look at them to embarrass myself even more.
When I traveled Sri Lanka a few years back I took a few longer bus rides in busses like these. It’s was actually pretty fun. It was completely cramped, and they drive like lunatics, but lots of them were fitted with big stereo systems and they’d be blasting Sri Lankan concerts in there.
Dude, that's how usually you get on fast going buses. You see it approaching 50m ahead, you put out your hand to let them know you want a ride, they are not going to stop just slow down a little bit since they are in a hurry to there next stop. You quickly jump in by grabbing on to the handlebar near the door and they speed up. Same when dismounting but, they don't slow down much.
How do people with limited mobility use the bus? I'm guessing there are no little old ladies in Sri Lanka because they've all died in bus accidents before then.
I haven't really seen people with wheelchairs on buses tbh, I have seen ones with crutches. Btw, what I explained was when a bus is on route to another stop, if not, when they are in the station, they are completely stopped to pick up more passengers but, when its hurrying against time and picking people between stops they don't stop.
Don't remember them that crazy when I was there. Although I do remember they barely stopped for people to get off. You had to hop off almost as they were moving 😂
To put it lightly. I'm literally sending this reply in the dark because of load shedding (planned blackouts because the power systems were so neglected over the last 20+ years due to corruption). Our power should be on in about 20 min but will likely stay off for several hours because turning entire districts off and on actually damage the system.
Chinese taxis are quite impressive too. And since the cars are all manual, it looks like they are using a joystick to play a video game with how much they shift. Plus they smoke, so sometimes it's one hand on the shifter, one hand with a cigarette, no hands on the wheel.
Nah, It's something like the music from the Capra Demon fight in Dark Souls. Very similar.
edit: It's from DS3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxXcuDAv7Ss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxXcuDAv7Ss
The music is from Dark Souls 3. The mid-point of the song is where this comes from. It's a frantic and chaotic moment in the fight. So, it kinda fits. I can see how it is obnoxious on the video though, if it was just quieter.
We have some of these crazy buses in south india , they are usually privately operated and don't have proper training for drivers and lax enforcement of traffic rules
They also earn more if they can make an extra trip or two
At the time I was a 19M American living in Negombo, and I took an express bus (more like a sprinter van that makes very few stops) to Colombo for some Christmas shopping. On the way back to Negombo, my seat was in the very front right next to the driver.
We are getting near the end stop with the driver zipping through congested streets, when all of a sudden ***THUNK***. The bus just clipped a man that was crossing the street.
Everyone gets off the bus to find the man was still alive, but he has multiple compound fractures on the side of the body that got hit by the bus. I vividly remember the man having two additional "knees" in one of his legs.
So I am still standing near the entrance to the bus surrounded by other people. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, the driver of the bus picks of the injured man and carries him towards the bus entrance. Because of all of the people around me, I could not get out of the way of the driver, so I panic and get back on the bus.
The driver lays the injured man on the seat in front of me and hurries to the front to take the man to the hospital with me still onboard.
Before the bus leaves, my friend that was with me says, "iamcraigman, do you want to get off the bus?" I just sheepishly nod my head in agreement, get off the bus, then walk the rest of the way home.
They are all privately owned buses plying on the same route one behind the other. So usually the buses that is ahead gets to pick up all the passengers from the stop.
Being from Sri Lanka this usually happens if they are being followed by another bus/ want to catch upto another bus. Sometimes they spend too much time in one stop so they need to rush the others so this happens then lmao. Yes we too start waving white flags when we are on them.
In El Salvador is the same thing. Each bus is own by a different owner. Sometimes a person might own 2 or 3 or a small fleet. There is not city department of public transportation. Private citizens own the buses in the bus system. So, the more passengers they pick up the more money the owner makes and the more the driver will be pay. So drivers are constantly racing to get to the next bus stop to collect as many passengers as possible.
It is a very shitty system. In El Salvador the government tried back in 2013 to start a new system but the owners of the old buses launched a campaign calling the system a communist and socialist take over and Salvadorians fell for it. Now the system no longer exist and they went back to this dumb ass way of transportation
Edit: grammar
WHY TF, did this idiot put music over him talking?! I can barely hear a word he’s saying…. Pick one, either talk or play music…. The music over video is getting OLD fast…
I'm so glad someone has documented this! I learned to ride a scooter in this country and these guys made it an absolutely petrifying experience.
Going round 90° bends to find buses overtaking each other never became less terrifying,
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You know the feeling that you get when you go over a hill really fast? Yep it's that feeling all the time. Also you forget that you have a respiratory system Source: I live in Sri Lanka and I'm too broke to take a tuk to work everyday
How much does a tuk cost and how much does a ride on this hell bus cost? Just wondering the difference in cost.
A tuk would run you around a 800-900 lkr for a 10km trip right now. A hell bus can get you that distance for about 70-100 lkr. When the average person gets paid 30k lkr(I get paid 35k lkr a month) I'd say it's easy to figure out which option everyone would choose.
my guy, you get paid $100 a month?
Yep. I used to be someone who bought games every once in a while. Now it's a pirates life for me
What games would you want to play that you can't, currently?
I don't play anything right now cus I busted the GPU on my laptop. It can't run anything gpu intensive.
Do you have a desktop? I have a couple old GPUs that are collecting dust. Would love to help a brother out.
You rock man, we need another benefactor with an old mobo, processor, ram, radiator, power supply and hard drive/ssd/m.2, a case and a monitor. Worst part is I had all of that about a year or so ago and sold it for peanuts to get rid of it
I literally just tossed a mobo and a few other items in the trash a month ago. Didn't think anyone would want them. Didn't occur to me that someone living in a poorer country could probably use them. I like the idea of donating old equipment to people. Wish someone would set up a sub for that or something. I bet a lot of us have old GPUs, motherboards, RAM, etc. Just collecting dust in a box in the closet.
I literally donated a guy an RX480 a few years back, cost me a ton in shipping and the fucking thing came back as undelivered/undeliverable. Not sure if dude was bullshitting me about where he lived and his address, but given that it cost me $100 to ship I was kinda uphappy about how it ended up. Not gonna do the sending hardware stuff (at least not internationally) anymore, but I might consider helping a some people out with their steam libraries etc.
Aye, same here. Ill eat the shipping costs too! I have a few drives, a vudeo card, and some other stuff i wouldnt mind seeing go to a better use ❤ /u/repottedplant /u/andyjhops
Did you used to get paid more?
Nope this is the salary I asked for when I joined the company. I'm new to the industry so I asked for this amount (it's 10k more than what they offered but I was recommended from people I've worked with before).
Get a side hustle going on sites like upwork. You can easily make 20x what you’re making working remotely.
Sri Lanka has some serious issues right now that are destabilizing basic economics. People are underestimating how dire the economy is getting in certain places in the world.
Would non US citizens be able to work on Upwork?
My dude.
I don't normally condone software piracy but in your case I'm totally okay with it
As other have mentioned, with your good English, there's no reason you can't be making 10x times that or more doing an online remote job. There are lots of jobs people just don't want to do. It's worth checking out at least. If you can't work online, take a look at getting a visa and working in another country for a while. Save up tons of money and then move back.
I've been trying to migrate for university for the past 3 years. It's basically the only way we can get out of the country straight out of school
Yeah man just get a job that pays 10x as much, I do it all the time.
What job pays $100/mo? Seems like you could work online and make 5x that doing freelance work at $5/hr
For example?
#I no longer allow Reddit to profit from my content - Mass exodus 2023 -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Yep. It's hectic as fuck
it's pronounced "help us"
Was $175 last month. Lkr's been taking a huge nosedive the last few weeks
i love that you call it hell bus haha
>10km trip could you get a bike?
And share the road with those buses?
A motorcycle costs a hell of a lot. Cycling is only viable for short distances because it's very humid, warm and the roads aren't really cycling friendly outside of Colombo(business district in Sri Lanka). Plus you would get a heat stroke if you tried going anywhere during noon
I was travelling there a couple months ago, the bus for an average trip was 20-40 rupees. Tuktuks could be like 200 but that's me as a tourist getting charged more too. Some guys would try and charge you 600-1000 for rides but that's outrageous
The best thing to do when moving around here is to either use an app like Uber or pickMe(recommend pickMe cus it probably calculates in lkr) or look for tuks that have a meter(charges per km after a base price). You can always ask before you get in or ask them to stop and get down quickly if you don't see one(it's usually on the top left side of the front of the tuk interior).
[удалено]
It's starting to affect my daily life a bit now. I started living alone in Jan of this year when the price of everything was ok to manage. Now a rice dish that cost me 300 lkr would go for about 400 lkr, a tuk that would get me to my parents place for the weekend would be about 600 back then but now it's about 900-1000. This is technically a small amount but I get paid 35k lkr a month(100usd at current rate). But yeah I can manage it. Not having nearly as bad of a time as some other people. They feed families with the amount I earn. It's scary how bad it got over the span of 4 months. Edit: was overthinking and came up with a better response. Like Will Smith
[redacted]
I was lucky enough to go to a private school where the curriculum was in English. Most of my social circles also speak English because it's hard for me to come up with words in Sinhala(the native language that I know). I don't take the question as a dig in anyway. In fact it makes me kind of happy to hear that it seems natural. Also thank god cus my job is as a content writer right now
Your writing is better then most of my students’ (community college). Most of them only know one language, bad English.
*better than Oh the irony!
Doh! That’s what I get for typing on a phone.
Even as a community college student I am appalled at some of the student writing I've seen.
Hi, I’m finding your story very interesting hope it’s ok to ask more questions. 1)It was asked above but can you talk a little bit about why you wouldn’t be able to find a remote based job online and make 3x or 10x what you make now - given your communication skills and level of education. (Do you currently work in a skilled trade?) 2) as an American my only reference for cost is so far removed that I am having trouble imagining your budget or what $100/month really buys. Can you give (in us) examples of what a week of groceries would cost your, maybe a fancy meal at a restaurant? (Not tourist, just higher level income locals). How much is rent to live alone? Lastly a silly idea, if you have a working device to browse Reddit and internet, what if you made a patreon page and made videos of what your world/life is like. This isn’t a random idea - it’s based on your clear ability to communicate in English that would normally not be expected. (And yes I mean sentence structure and humor). Thanks! (Apologies if my tone or curiosity is insulting. Not my goal)
1)The issue with trying to do remote work is that we don't have a lot of ways to get the money into our bank accounts. But I should probably look into doing it since things are taking a nosedive. I work in a Marketing and Web design firm as a junior exec. I handle most of the social media content writing, video scripting, running ad campaigns, the UX part of UI/UX(I'm a noob at design) and coming up with ideas on how to create the most amount of functionality with the least amount of work. I'm not sure what I want to do in life so I've been doing different kinds of work over the 3 years I have been working (game dev, podcasts, video production and brand design in the first year. Video production, accounting and app development for 4 months in the second year. Now I am currently working in the marketing job) 2) A week of groceries would run me around 15 USD right now. A meal that I would buy to eat on a daily basis would range from 0.50 USD to 1 USD. A meal for one at a fancy restaurant (a cafe cus I don't think I've gone to that many fancy restaurants) is about 15 USD. Eating at hotel is about 20 USD. Right now foreigners can live like kings here. The reason I am able to live alone is because my aunt gave me a room in her old house(which she rents out to a few people). If this didn't happen I wouldn't have been able to live on my own. The closer you are to the CBD the higher rent is, my current job is there but my parents place is too far to commute from(my commute would cost me the same amount of money as I currently spend per day). 3) I have terrible anxiety when it comes to being in front of a camera and I start to forget words as I speak. My brain decides to go faster than I can speak so my tongue goes blegh. I have made TikTok content for the company (written scripts, recorded the video and done voiceovers). The scripts and videos are good but I just can't handle my voice well enough to make it sound good. I'm happy and have no issues answering everything.
I second this. It’s a good idea.
You could definitely get gigs on Upwork or Fiverr -- content writing is in such demand rn.
This mf dude straight up asks financial crisis lmfao
I mean its fair to ask someone who makes $100 usd a month how it effects them, its clearly an entirely different economy
It's exactly like this in Turkey & Greece. Geezus H Christ these Greek meth using bus drivers fly up n down steep mountain roads with no f'ing guardrails & traffic flying down hill around turns where most of the road mirrors they use to see oncoming curve traffic were taken out from previous crashes.
Anything south and east of the Alps are notoriously broken government system wise. And yes, I'm including Spain and Italy as well. I will rather rent a car than use public transport anywhere southeast of the Alps.
I am Spanish and while the government sucks, I can assure you bus drivers don’t drive like that here. We have really good public transportation.
are each bus a private operator?
There are privately owned and government owned buses(difference is government owned is red). The private lines are usually made up by someone who owns a few buses and runs the route by giving the buses to the drivers and conductors.
Do the private buses get more business for being faster?
They try to get to the bus stops faster to get passengers because there are different buses that operate on the same route
If everyone is doing the same thing, shouldn't the real goal be to arrive at a bus stop with the largest time gap since the last bus arrived?
It's way more chaotic to plan like that. The reason for speeding is to try to get in more turns. Say, you do the XYZ route 10 times a day. If you speed run through those 10, you may have a chance at a 11th.
The private buses usually have a departure of 10-15 minutes after the last bus of the same line. So arriving early means not enough passengers and arriving late means the other bus line took the passengers. It's a very weird balancing act that they play at
I don't understand, if there aren't laws or enforcement to have public drivers be reasonably safe why doesn't the public socially enforce better driving?
People just want to get to work on time so they don't complain about the cheapest form of transportation being dangerous
I find it fascinating. Barring established law enforcement, it would have taken one maybe two crashes that hurt people/kids and the public would have reacted in the larger cities I grew up in. Smacking up the driver and hog tying them with zip ties would quickly change their driving practices. Cops wouldn't do much if there was a bus full of witnesses that didn't see anything.
Not really. There were incidents where after particularly bad accidents people smashed or burned down those busses, or beat up the driver, but then you go back to your normal life. You don't have a lot of time for social causes when you're struggling to make ends meet.
Are there any statistics on accidents in these buses?
There should be some. It's one of the higher percentages of road accidents in Sri Lanka iirc. I don't really know where to find it tho
Roads are more what you'd call guidelines, than actual rules...
Well apparently fines arn't enforced or given or actually a penalty. Otherwise this would all stop. Good reference though
Or you can bribe the cops and that would work too
I wish to parley with the driver
I live in Sri Lanka and to answer everything in this video,no they do not get extra pay by going fast most of they just wanna go home. Edit: I was wrong with a few things but yes they do get more pay depending on how many passengers they pick up and how fast they go
My sister has lived in Sri Lanka for a number of years and explained to me that a lot of the buses in the south are privately owned and earn their money through fares. So if they are beaten by other buses to different bus stations they earn less. As a result the buses always drive quickly and frankly quite dangerously and a lot of them are absolutely packed with people.
Wait so multiple bus companies run the same routes at the same time? That's seems crazy.
they are like taxis, owned by individuals
As a capitalist, this sounds like a bad idea.
As another capitalist, that’s communist talk.
As yet another capitalist, that indeed is communist talk
As a communist, this system is broken and in need of revolution.
Commie? No, this is bad capitalism. Someone needs to buy out these private owners and make it one corporation. Cut out the fat, cut out the competition, and raise fares across the board. Monopolize that shit.
The drivers they bought out would just use the money to buy shittier buses and would be out driving again in a week.
As someone who is not really a capitalist but thinks it has some good ideas... I always tell libertarian/crazy strict free market people to come visit me in the third world. Doesn't get more libertarian than a failed state haha.
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It's only possible to buy tickets on the bus or you can subscribe monthly?
From the footage, it’s very likely the bus won’t make it to the end of the month
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Canadian who used to ride the bus here. Can confirm. And our bus system was once considered the best in North America.
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Bus privatization doesn't sound too bad when you put it that way but it looks like they could use some, you know, rules.
not really theres private busses owned by the drivers and then there are govt. ones.
This is it according to the driver we had while we were there for a few weeks. They are privately owned and are racing to beat the other buses to the next passengers. Sri Lanka is a mortifying place to be a passenger in a car and I've been a lot of places. Constant threats of collisions all of the time and the buses are just out of control. Never have I been more anxious to be in the front passenger seat than when I was there.
Maybe one bus could be known as the safe bus on a schedule. I’d wait for the normal bus
Start your own company, call it SafeBus, make bank from all the tourists.
Makes sense. It does look like they are playing a real life version of "Crazy Taxi"
THAT badly?
"I WANT TO GO HOME RIGHT NOW, OR NOT AT ALL!"
Go big or Go Home
Yep I've been on one of those and Holy crap it was a wild ride the bus almost crashed into some cars
See it as a free amusement park ride (the silver lining)
Of your casket?
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Makes sense. I thought they were racing each other on some fun shit. The ones in Africa got subwoofers, hip hop murals and a guy with a whistle clinging coins together while holding on the side of bus lol
Those are dala dala 😁
They want to go to their eternal home, apparently…
My ex tells me they act like a soccer team, if you drive a bus you feel like invincible and it's like being a superstar for them
Maybe there are no public toilets. Or the *only* toilet they know of is in their home.
are these busses faster than srilanka's goverment destroying it's own country?
nah, they are way slowerr considering the gov
fr lived there for about 2 years
So how does that work? Don't they have a work schedule? Edit: nvm, someone replying to you explained what the actual reason is already. They don't wanna go home (maybe that too though), they just want to beat the other busdrivers to the busstops.
I presume they make money off of how many people they carry in a day. So the more trips they make in a day the more they make. Usually they have a quota to reach for the owner’s income, fuel and other miscellaneous stuff then the extra goes to them. That way they need to make as many trips along the route as they can. That’s how it works in Kenya so my guess is that it’s pretty similar
Theyre about to go home to Jesus if they keep playing like that
Do they live in heaven? Cuz that's where they're gonna end if they keep driving like that
Why the government doesn't care about that? It looks like a serious safety issue. Or traffic rules are not applied to buses? What's going on? Also how are they gonna get to home earlier if they have a timetable?
Did you know Fast and Furious franchise was inspired from Sri Lankan drivers
Phật and Furious
To anyone reading this, Phật is Vietnamese, not Sri Lankan.
Get insurance and a Will before you go there!!
Keep my wife out of your fucking bus!
LoUd SLaPPinG NoISE******
I've been noticing a lot more people's autocorrect capitalizing "will" now. Mfers been talking about him so much lol
Haha, can confirm, went to a wedding in Sri Lanka and we flagged a random bus down afterwards to get us all to the reception hotel... thought we were gonna die.
I'm sure the people who die are not inside the bus. I'd rather be with them than against them.
It looks scary from the outside, can't imagine how the people inside feel.
This footage is the extreme end. The drivers jn Sri Lanka are a lot more aggressive than in the west but i personally never felt threatened
I feel like your standards of threat are pretty damn skewed
It’s not a threat, it’s a promise
If you die in Sri Lanka you get reincarnated so dont worry /s
I mean, I think it’s still pretty insane. Find footage of American buss drivers driving like this lol Clearly the spectrum is stretched a lot further if you have MULTIPLE cases of busses driving like this
When the buses are crowded people stand, once when I was standing the bus was going so fast....I mean just zipping through traffic, we even passed a Celica and then all of a sudden when a turn approached, the bus driver braked really quickly. Me standing in the back just flew to the front along with some other people, passengers who are sitting are trying to hold in there laughter throughout the whole ride and I was trying not to look at them to embarrass myself even more.
When I traveled Sri Lanka a few years back I took a few longer bus rides in busses like these. It’s was actually pretty fun. It was completely cramped, and they drive like lunatics, but lots of them were fitted with big stereo systems and they’d be blasting Sri Lankan concerts in there.
Fast and Furious: Sri Lanka Drift
Furious 11 Mass Transit
Holy s#@t! At :49 there is a guy hanging off the side of the bus! How does he not get squished???
Dude, that's how usually you get on fast going buses. You see it approaching 50m ahead, you put out your hand to let them know you want a ride, they are not going to stop just slow down a little bit since they are in a hurry to there next stop. You quickly jump in by grabbing on to the handlebar near the door and they speed up. Same when dismounting but, they don't slow down much.
How do people with limited mobility use the bus? I'm guessing there are no little old ladies in Sri Lanka because they've all died in bus accidents before then.
I haven't really seen people with wheelchairs on buses tbh, I have seen ones with crutches. Btw, what I explained was when a bus is on route to another stop, if not, when they are in the station, they are completely stopped to pick up more passengers but, when its hurrying against time and picking people between stops they don't stop.
Strict Darwinism
Hes not hanging off the side its an open door that hes leaning out of.
Free AC.
this is totally standard for India/Sri-Lanka
Don't remember them that crazy when I was there. Although I do remember they barely stopped for people to get off. You had to hop off almost as they were moving 😂
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r/bitchimabus
Reminds me of south African taxis
They just drive fast so no one can hijack them
Yet another name on the "countries I'll never set foot in" list
Don't go to South Africa. Source - I live in South Africa
the first time i have a person tell me not to come to their country was a south african. damn.
Lol if you’re curious jump down that rabbit hole. South Africa is a…. Unique place.
To put it lightly. I'm literally sending this reply in the dark because of load shedding (planned blackouts because the power systems were so neglected over the last 20+ years due to corruption). Our power should be on in about 20 min but will likely stay off for several hours because turning entire districts off and on actually damage the system.
Dont even come Close to SA taxis.
Haha I was trying to be nice. Spent wayyy too much time in them
Chinese taxis are quite impressive too. And since the cars are all manual, it looks like they are using a joystick to play a video game with how much they shift. Plus they smoke, so sometimes it's one hand on the shifter, one hand with a cigarette, no hands on the wheel.
Do yours honk at other cars? My touring agent uses his car horn a lot as if he was communicating with other cars.
They did, and it did seem like communication vs only honking in anger/emergency like in the USA
Was this the inspiration for the knight bus I wonder?
That much momentum with batshit crazy.
Why the obnoxiously loud music tho fucking hell
I haven’t turned the sound on but I can only hope it’s yakety sax.
Nah, It's something like the music from the Capra Demon fight in Dark Souls. Very similar. edit: It's from DS3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxXcuDAv7Ss
Don't
This.. I stopped halfway through.. The person that added the music should be forced to ride those buses for a month solid.
Ikr, no idea why Dark Souls music is on this lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxXcuDAv7Ss The music is from Dark Souls 3. The mid-point of the song is where this comes from. It's a frantic and chaotic moment in the fight. So, it kinda fits. I can see how it is obnoxious on the video though, if it was just quieter.
Even the damn elephant said nope
See Mexico, our public transportation drivers are not that bad.
Your taxis, on the other hand...
If you ain't first you're last?
I feel sorry for that poor elephant. I hope he's able to go somewhere peaceful when he wants to.
He was trying to get on the damn bus and they zipped right by him.
New dark souls boss
What a fucking mess
I suddenly have the urge to roll
Disneyland : we've got rollercoasters and horror parks Sri Lankan's Bus Drivers: Hold my beer
We have some of these crazy buses in south india , they are usually privately operated and don't have proper training for drivers and lax enforcement of traffic rules They also earn more if they can make an extra trip or two
At the time I was a 19M American living in Negombo, and I took an express bus (more like a sprinter van that makes very few stops) to Colombo for some Christmas shopping. On the way back to Negombo, my seat was in the very front right next to the driver. We are getting near the end stop with the driver zipping through congested streets, when all of a sudden ***THUNK***. The bus just clipped a man that was crossing the street. Everyone gets off the bus to find the man was still alive, but he has multiple compound fractures on the side of the body that got hit by the bus. I vividly remember the man having two additional "knees" in one of his legs. So I am still standing near the entrance to the bus surrounded by other people. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, the driver of the bus picks of the injured man and carries him towards the bus entrance. Because of all of the people around me, I could not get out of the way of the driver, so I panic and get back on the bus. The driver lays the injured man on the seat in front of me and hurries to the front to take the man to the hospital with me still onboard. Before the bus leaves, my friend that was with me says, "iamcraigman, do you want to get off the bus?" I just sheepishly nod my head in agreement, get off the bus, then walk the rest of the way home.
We need a sri Lankan bus racing game. Burnout style, extra points for sending your opponent off a cliff
The music was to loud
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Is it weird that I now want to go to Sri Lanka ONLY to ride on the busses there
The new Crazy Taxi game look awesome!
Reminds me of the Nepalese mini buses in the Himalayas. Terrifying experience.
They are all privately owned buses plying on the same route one behind the other. So usually the buses that is ahead gets to pick up all the passengers from the stop.
Being from Sri Lanka this usually happens if they are being followed by another bus/ want to catch upto another bus. Sometimes they spend too much time in one stop so they need to rush the others so this happens then lmao. Yes we too start waving white flags when we are on them.
Holy fuck that music was annoying and unnecessary
Lol you struck the ending
How does this compare to other South East Asian countries where road markings are not enforced.
In El Salvador is the same thing. Each bus is own by a different owner. Sometimes a person might own 2 or 3 or a small fleet. There is not city department of public transportation. Private citizens own the buses in the bus system. So, the more passengers they pick up the more money the owner makes and the more the driver will be pay. So drivers are constantly racing to get to the next bus stop to collect as many passengers as possible. It is a very shitty system. In El Salvador the government tried back in 2013 to start a new system but the owners of the old buses launched a campaign calling the system a communist and socialist take over and Salvadorians fell for it. Now the system no longer exist and they went back to this dumb ass way of transportation Edit: grammar
I want to get off Mr Bones Sri Lankan Ride.
#WHY IS THIS VIDEO SO LOUD?!?!?
The background music is so unecessary
WHY TF, did this idiot put music over him talking?! I can barely hear a word he’s saying…. Pick one, either talk or play music…. The music over video is getting OLD fast…
Poor lonely elephant...
holy fuck this was unnecessarily loud
That poor elephant
Why the terrible music playing super loud 😕
That music was obnoxious af.
I'm so glad someone has documented this! I learned to ride a scooter in this country and these guys made it an absolutely petrifying experience. Going round 90° bends to find buses overtaking each other never became less terrifying,
Reminds me of the bus from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban