A bus shelter in the middle of nowhere is worth the wait

On a lonely stretch of road on the Scottish island of Arran, between the villages of Lamlash and Whiting Bay, there is a concrete bus shelter with a wooden bench inside. Elsewhere the road is lined with yellow-flowering gorse, but here it is cut back so the shelter stands alone. In its back wall there are three narrow slots which let you look out over Kingscross Burn and the pine-clad hills beyond like a soldier in some desolate pillbox. Once, in April 2009, a Google van drove past, photographed it for Street View, and never came back. There is no phone signal. The buses are infrequent.

I’ve spent a lot of time at this bus stop and others like it. As a child I waited there for the bus into town, to school, or to meet friends. Later, on holiday after we moved south, I waited at remote bus stops to go to the hotel where I’d do my weekly email check. The shelter’s design meant you couldn’t see the road from the bench, and had to keep getting up to check whenever you heard a big engine. I also waited in glass-walled shelters for the last bus home after ceilidhs, and with friends from London after climbing a mountain. In Brighton, in the time before smartphones, I waited after my swimming teaching shifts, stinking of chlorine in the darkness, with the crashing surf behind me.

The people of Walkhampton, Devon – where buses are even rarer than on Arran – are clearly resigned to waiting. One of them has anonymously furnished their bus shelter with cushions, framed pictures, potted plants and a wicker basket full of chocolates. In Israel and India, citizens have transformed their stops into libraries. I understand the impulse, because in many ways remote bus shelters are places of boredom and frustration. But I would urge caution, because it’s exactly their inconvenience which makes them beautiful. They are among our last bastions of peace, solitude and the salutary acceptance of life’s strangeness which comes from being forced to sit in one place without anything else to distract you.

That matters especially in an age where the alliance of apps, GPS and instant taxi services such as Uber have transformed urban travel into something like a video game. This is not a bad thing: quite apart from their convenience, these tools unlock incredible feats of navigational efficiency.

I recently convinced a night bus driver to let me out at a junction, hurtled down into a Tube station, and caught the last Northern line train, knowing that it would overtake the last Victoria line train just in time for me to switch. Without my phone I would never have taken such a risk. Just as cartography and longitude measurement made once-impossible journeys routine, we can now find quick paths across moving stepping stones which we would never have seen before.

But the increasingly exhaustive colonisation of our time by goals and purposes – commonly known as “scheduling” – deprives us of something too. In a rural bus shelter there is only you, the landscape, and potentially infinite time (possibly also some sheep). You are not able to maximise the utility of every possible minute. You have to sit and tolerate the landscape, time and yourself (plus the sheep) for what they are, and only what they are. I welcome anything that makes it easier to spend more time in these places. I just hope no anonymous cyber-Samaritan installs free Wi-Fi in them.