Mini Metro Buses

This doesn't really fit into what I normally write about on this blog, but who's to define normal when I don't write here enough to define normality.

Here we have a three mini-Metro Buses that I made this afternoon. They're about 3 inches long (there's nothing in there for scale, sorry). They're made out of sheets of paper, folded together and glued with an archival quality glue stick. The colored ones are Sharpie and/or colored pencil.

Why put these on here? These are objects that I made myself. With my own hands, inspired by the Metro-produced folding train banks (one of which floats above my desk). These objects serve no particular purpose, but as a trinket they are effective for one purpose for me — reminding other people about the bus and it's struggles here in St. Louis. I'm going to use these buses to film some little videos to help publicize an event I'm putting together, and hopefully we'll have a little army of them made for the even itself, so everyone can take home their own favorite bus.

These little trinkets won't last long (especially when I light them on fire!), but they put some DIY fun into a transit system that's pretty inaccessible. Is having a paper bus on your desk going to remind you to ride the bus and vote for transit initiatives? Probably not. But it could become a conversation piece about why we should support and value transit, and that could lead to something good.