Living with Transit Mobility: The Metrobus

This chapter analyzes the socio-spatial characteristics of Istanbul’s famous bus rapid transit, the metrobus, and the subjectification it constitutes on regulars. The chapter first elaborates on the metrobus as an essential aspect of Istanbul’s metropolitan mobility. Metrobuses maximize spatial-temporal consumption through the speed–distance ratio as they accommodate efficient transportation for the growing demands of rush hour in the transit route. Second, the chapter will analyze the spatial practices of the metrobus that regulars have constructed through habituation. As metrobuses have become vital means of transport, regulars’ peculiar passengering practices have been appropriated to their spatial structure. These practices have been conceptualized under strategies and tactics, the atmospheric constitution, and a counterexample displayed by the interviews for the lived in mobility, Istanbul’s ferries. Finally, like the metropolitan everydayness that abstracts and generates a rationalized and homogenized subjectification, the chapter will scrutinize the regularity of metrobus passengering and the inevitable triumph of its automatized spatial conduct productive of a pervasive abstraction, leading transit subjectification. “Becoming transit” has been one of the most thought-provoking definitions among the interlocutors. Adaptation, in the case of metrobus passengering, equivalently alters and transforms the essence of experience with the characteristics of the rapid bus transit system.