Minibus Madness.

Miniature versions of things are often better, cuter or sexier than full-size versions. Examples include teddy bears, miniskirts and bikinis. Unfortunately, this is not a universal rule. Tiny flat-screen TVs are not better than huge flat screen TVs, and I've never received an email asking if I wished my penis was smaller.

Another example of things that get worse as they get smaller is buses: minibuses are much, much worse than normal-size buses. A bus, by definition, is a vehicle for transporting a large number of people along roads. Replacing buses with minibuses is about as sensible as replacing your stairs with an ice-covered slope.

All over Poland, buses are disappearing and thousands of minibuses are taking their place. It's like the end of the Jurassic Era. The huge, lumbering beasts that have ruled the land for millennia are rapidly becoming extinct and quick, brightly coloured creatures are springing up to fill the space.

Like Velociraptors, these newcomers work in packs are unpredictable, and extremely dangerous. You never know when are where they are going to appear, and when they do it's a good idea to stay as far away from them as possible if you don't want to end up dead or missing limbs.

I try to avoid leaving the city as much as possible but sometimes I am forced to visit those big, green empty spaces on the map. Until recently, the areas around cities were served by old-fashioned PKS bus companies. Some of their vehicles looked like they had been in service since the Polish-Swedish War, but at least they had timetables and drivers who understood the fundamental differences between a 14-ton bus and a Fiat 125.

I miss timetables. The timetables of old-style bus companies were sparse and often included inexplicable annotations (**-except Thursdays in March, ***-except when Pawel is driving because he has a phobia of turning left), but at least they gave you some idea of where a bus might be at any given time of the day.

Minibuses don't have timetables. Actually some of them do have timetables, but they are about as close to reality as a Toy Story script. Minibuses operate on the principle that they leave when they have enough passengers to make the journey worthwhile. I refused to believe this until I actually saw it. It's not a principle I can see working with any other form of transport: "Yes sir, the train will be leaving from platform 7, just as soon as we can find 900 people who want to go to Katowice."

Minibuses go where they want, when they want and by whichever route they prefer. They will stop and pick you up in desolate locations miles from civilisation if the driver sees you waving like a maniac and feels like stopping. In other words, travelling by minibus is exactly the same as hitchhiking except that you have to pay from it and you’re much slightly more likely to end up sitting next to a drunk.

Whose idea was this?

Jamie Stokes