Would It Be Rude to Give My Bus Driver a Map?

Okay, so this isn't technically a subway story, but it is a mass transit story, so I'm going to post it anyhow. Although I live in Manhattan, I work in NJ, so I cross the George Washington Bridge by bus everyday. It is normally a lovely commute--17 min in the morning, and I always sit on the driver's side heading out in order to admire the skyline as we cross the bridge. This morning, however, was not a typical morning. There was a fatal accident on the bridge at 5:15 am, and the police closed the outbound upper deck to traffic in order to investigate. My bus normally leaves at 7:30 from the GWB Bus Terminal, and we pulled out of the station as scheduled. Buses are not allowed on the lower deck of the bridge, however, so I wasn't sure where we were going to go. Neither, however, was the bus driver. For those of you unfamiliar with NYC geography, there are three routes out of the city across the Hudson into NJ: the George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel (maybe 8 mi south of the bridge), and the Holland Tunnel (farther south than that). Once you get out of the city, the next crossing is the Tappan Zee Bridge, which is about 20 mi north of the city. So when we left the bridge, I figured that we'd either go south to the Lincoln Tunnel or north to the Tappan Zee. But no. Instead, the driver started to go east. And then continued east. And then... went even farther east. Really? Did he not realize that we were headed in the wrong direction? So rather than finding an alternate route over the Hudson, we got a tour of the Bronx. (And by a tour, I mean we sat in the incredible gridlock that paralyzed both boroughs.) I was tempted to just give up and get off the bus and hop on the subway to go home, but then I looked outside. Suffice it to say that we were not in the best of neighborhoods... Although I spent most of the time reading my book and talking on the phone with my dad, I did check Google Maps on my phone periodically to verify that yes, in fact, we had gone all the way to the Bruckner. I've included a helpful map to show our bus driver's route. The blue is the route that we took. See the yellow highway across the Hudson? Yeah, that's where we should have gone. After an hour and a half, I went up to the driver to ask what was going on and if we'd be taking either the Tappan Zee or the tunnel. He said no, we were heading back to the GWB. "Oh," I said, "have they reopened it?" His response? "I don't know." Excellent.

Fortunately, by the time we made it back through the clogged streets to the bridge, it had in fact reopened. I finally got off the bus at 10:11. My 17 min commute only took me 2 hours and 49 min. But at least I got a scenic tour of the Bronx.