Tonight my sister had an asthma attack and her inhaler ran out. It was late and the nearest open pharmacy was 3km away. Our options were:
- Walk 42 minutes to the pharmacy.
- Wait 40 minutes, walk 10 minutes to the bus station, take the hourly night bus (pray the route isn’t skipped), and walk 15 minutes to the pharmacy.
- Drive 8 minutes.
Fortunately, I have a car, so that was an option. However, tomorrow I won’t sleep at home and my sister doesn’t have a license, and maybe that happens the next time she forgets to refill… We live in Athens the capital of Greece, not a rural area, not a small town, but the fucking capital.
Car dependency sucks.
Edit: While ambulances are an option, no matter how unreliable they may be, having to escalate, when it shouldn’t be necessary, is increasing the load of an already overloaded health care sector.
I could rant for ages about the state of public health in my country, but this is not the community for that.
There are a lot of things to be improved on the area of public transportation.
The night routes are not enough, it’s not like the buses are empty. Also, if the metro operated during the night this would have been a 15min trip. Remember autopilot is a thing, night routes shouldn’t be an issue for metro lines.
The bike infrastructure is non existent, a good bike path would make the time to get there about the same as driving a car.
Last but not least, the problem still stands and escalating an issue as simple as picking up a medicine increases the burden on the already overloaded health services.