The everyday spaces of public transportation: the ‘driving’ case of the city bus in Hong Kong

This paper explores the idea of ‘everyday spaces of public transportation’ through the lived experiences of bus users, both drivers and passengers, while they journey through city spaces. We bring scholarship on urban bus travel and the power relations that structure this process in dialogue with an empirical case study on Hong Kong. We present an analysis of interviews supplemented with the first author’s auto-ethnographic observations as a bus driver to contribute new insights into how users experience their mundane bus journeys. This study extends existing knowledge that often focuses on quantitative metrics such as travel times, and offers a unique contribution as the first of its kind to present perspectives from the joint positionality of a bus driver and a geographical researcher. The Hong Kong government claims to prioritize so-called people-centred urban transport, but this claim is yet to receive more critical attention. Our study highlights some compelling ways in which bus users have crafted their own paths, sometimes in conflict with norms or regulations established by authorities. This study seeks to move beyond efficiency discussions in bus transportation; it shows the co-existence of multiple and sometimes ambiguous experiences that provide ‘lived’ nuances of the mutually constitutive nature of power dynamics and the everyday spaces of public bus transportation.