THERE'S a Violent Femmes song that goes: "You got the mother and her kids/ You got the guy and his date/ We all get mad/ We all get late/ Looks like somebody forgot about us/ Standing on the corner/ Waiting for a bus."

It runs through my head every time I stand at a growing bus queue looking forlornly at a fictional timetable. No-one can write a good yarn like the people who write the bus timetables. They're the great fiction writers of our time . . . master architects of human drama. People to my left and right make and receive angry phone-calls as buses fail to appear.

People with places-to-be pace nervously. They look at the timetable exasperatedly. They sigh sadly.

"It's a fecking disaster that's what it is, " says Tim, who lives on the Navan Road and regularly gets the 39 to the city centre. "You can't trust the timetables at all. Say there's three buses all leaving 10 minutes apart. Well, what they do is, the first one goes late and the third one goes early, and then all three of them arrive at around the same time. It makes it easy for the drivers, the lazy p***ks."

"It's like the timetable is more a gentle suggestion than a fact, " says Kate, who treks from Blanchardstown to the IFSC twice a day.

"If I could trust the timetable I could get up half an hour later every morning!"

Of course some punters are more understanding. "Why can other cities get the buses running regularly and on time?" asks Billy, who's retired. "Because they've taken the general traffic out of other cities. It's not the bus drivers' fault really . . . it's the traffic." He's not too worried, however, and he says he never complains himself. He likes the general camaraderie of the bus drivers themselves.

"I do like their company, " he says.

This I discover is because Billy is the 'bus driver's mate'. He sits up at the top of the bus just behind the driver talking to him about God knows what. When I witness the phenomenon the topic is Israel. "They should just leave the Palestinians alone, " says Billy. The driver nods sagely.

But a large number of the people I ask about their experiences begin to complain and Dublin Bus gets all the flack. It's the poor relation of the shiny and new and perfect Luas. But some buses are better than others.

There's a website called Busrage. com where you can get a good feel for what works and what doesn't in Irish bus-land. According to the contributors on that site when queried, the worst routes are the 39, 65B, 50, 54A, 14, 14A, 17 and 75. That's some list. But every ying needs a yang and the holy grail for bus commuters is a ride on the 46A.

For those who don't travel on it regularly, the 46A has mythical status. This is because the 46A comes regularly, on time, and then glides along a quality bus corridor like a dolphin at Seaworld. On the other hand the 39 arrives late, irregularly and moves through rushhour like a consumptive through quicksand.

This unreliability is an issue for the thousands of people who depend on the bus service every day. "I'm a carpenter, " says Henry, who's waiting on the quays for the 29. "I tend to get the bus to and from jobs. But when I have a new job . . . no way. You can't trust a timetable unless you know the route really well."

And as I've noticed thus far, when one person begins to complain, it opens the flood gates for a myriad individual frustrations.

Nearby I hear a loud sigh. It's a middle-aged lady called Sile. She likes to come in to town a couple of times a week. She usually gets the Dart but occasionally gives the bus a chance.

Now she's thinking of skipping across the river and grabbing the Dart. She feels it's a bit disloyal, but she's waited long enough. "I like the bus, " she says. "It's just hard to trust it!"

I also like the bus. When it's a nice fine day and you've given yourself plenty of time, the bus is one of the best ways to travel. People are, on the whole, quite friendly. They get out of your way. They help mothers with prams and give up their seats for older people. And when the bus is late or there is some lunatic mouthing off, fellow passengers make exaggerated eye-rolling movements and pantomime glances at their watches, in a show of solidarity with their fellow commuters. The bus is the people's friend.

It can also give you a chance to eavesdrop on some of the best dialogue you're likely to encounter this side of a vintage Woody Allen film. And it can all be a bonding experience for the rest of you. There are loud obnoxious teenagers who cause world weary twentysomethings to shake their heads and lament the youth of today. There are occasional bussmokers who sit at the back and unite the rest of the bus in collective distaste . . . until once in a while someone takes a stand and challenges them, while everyone else looks away/whistles innocently/buries their head in a book. And then there's the odd incursion from someone whose car is in the garage for the day, who hasn't been on public transport in years, doesn't have change of a 20 note and tries to argue with the driver until someone does a whip round and pays their fare.

Dislike of other people brings the rest of us together. But it's not just the passengers who add colour to the daily commute. There seems to be an array of interesting and entertaining individuals who drive buses. Busrage. com features a discussion thread about "the hippy bus driver on the 46A". "He looks like he's in some 1970s' prog-rock band, " says one comment.

There are a couple of drivers on my regular route (the 145) who'll stop when "out of service" and take passengers a mile down the road free of charge to the stop where they can access the mythical 46A. On the other hand there's another guy who screeches to a halt at every stop and shouts "GET ON" like he's piloting the last helicopter out of Saigon.

Many of the people I meet on my bus journeys remember similarly memorable drivers. "Oh, some of them bark, " says Sile, the lady who eventually chose the Dart over the bus. "I've seen them stop a hundred yards from the stop.

I've seen them ignore waiting bus queues. It's unbelievable. I saw a chap refusing to put the lift down for a wheelchair once. I don't want to generalise about all of them, of course, lots of them are lovely."

"What about that driver with the French accent who sings the whole way and shouts out the names of all the stops as he goes, " says John, a careworker from Drumcondra who regularly gets a 16 to see his girlfriend in Harold's Cross, and a 46A to work in Dun Laoghaire. "He's amazing.

And there was that guy a few years ago who drove the bus that goes to Heuston. He'd take you down to the station along the quays and give a guided tour apropos of nothing."

You see, people like to take the bus. Everyone knows we need to focus on public transport in this country, because filling up the city centre with cars just doesn't work. We need more buses. We need more people to use the buses and we need people to be able to trust the service. As for me, all I know is that I much prefer being stuck in traffic in a bus to being stuck in traffic in my car. I can read, sleep, or stare out the window without endangering anyone. If only I could always get where I was going on time..