The bus has long been a place to find all sorts of people.

It's a rolling box of stereotypes -- the harried businessman, late for work; the overworked mother, headed home to fix dinner between two jobs; the test-stressed student, nose in a textbook; the weathered old man, looking for a warm place to sit.

It's loaded up, too, with those who defy classification -- the ones whose clothes don't match the neighborhood where they step off, or whose hairstyles don't seem to belong to the same people as do their knapsacks.

All have different lives, different friends, different destinations.

But for a few minutes they're all together, confined in a long, narrow room that, at least in the city during rush hour, denies the existence of personal space.

Crowded, bumpy and often inefficient, the bus is one of my favorite modes of transportation in a big city. It's a place to be in a city, with a city, instead of just driving by. It offers freedom -- hop on, hop off, don't worry if you miss your stop because it will come around again.

City Link, Garden City's new bus system, is not a whole lot different.

True, there are fewer people and cleaner buses than you'd find in most urban mass transit systems, but look past that and a ride on City Link might just feel like a quiet commute through a bustling metropolis.

But then, something happens.

People talk to each other.

As a general rule, there are a few places where eye contact is awkward and small talk is uncomfortable. The men's room is one of them, or so I hear. A typical urban bus is another.

Why is that? Maybe it's the fact that so many strangers of so many different walks of life are confined in such close proximity.

What we lack in personal space, physically, we make up in social distance.

Yet it doesn't have to be like that, as a trip on City Link proves.

My experience on the Garden City bus system is limited to two rides, but in that short time -- about 45 minutes total -- I heard several conversations between apparent strangers, or people who were only acquaintances because they happen to travel around town in the same rolling red box.

"How are you doing today?" asks one.

"Glad to get in from the weather," says the other.

"What are you doing this weekend?"

"Going to a wedding."

They talk about the kind of day they're having, the places they work, their families or how they'll get from point A to point B. The drivers are key, especially in the latter, helping travelers navigate the system and get where they need to be.

Are their conversations deep, profound or wrought with emotion? No. They're just neighborly -- and that's what we are in this tiny city, a bunch of neighbors. I'm not sure why it is that a big city is so different.

There are so many people, so many opportunities to meet friends, so many places to find someone new. The potential for relationships is almost too much, so instead of embracing it, it seems human nature to pretend it isn't there.

I'm glad, though, that not everyone pretends there's no one across the aisle or in the driver's seat.

Somewhere, in a tiny red bus, people talk like what they are -- neighbors.

Staff writer Emily Behlmann can be reached at ebehlmann@gctelegram.com.