This situation demonstrates the knee-jerk reaction to loss of control. First, Daniel had his choice of transportation taken away from him. Then, the people on the bus had their equilibrium taken away from them. In both cases, they reacted by trying to force the situation back into their control. Unfortunately, and although this is the most natural, primitive way to react to loss of control, it is also the most ineffective.
Daniel, you were not stuck. Yes, your first choice transportation was taken away. But you still had many options: take a cab, take a sheirut, hitchhike, stay overnight and get your bus in the morning, OR take the mehadrin bus and conform to the rules that bind the occupants of the bus. You chose the latter, whether because you ruled out the other choices as too expensive, too dangerous, too much of a schlep, etc, and yet you also chose to violate the rules of the bus that gave you the ride!? So you chose to ride mehadrin but not k’mehadrin. If you had chosen to ride an Arab bus, I’m sure your wife would have put on the burka. What you did was not fair. And not effective. Yes, you got back home at low financial cost, but now you are ranting to anyone who will listen. For how long will this event plague you, and how badly will you be disillusioned from this for the rest of your life? And how many people will you have to rally against the mehadrin busses before your angst is quieted? If you had spent the extra $50 to take a cab, you would have also gotten home but with less mental anguish – AND you could have asked Egged to reimburse you (money can be reimbursed, not discomfort).
As for the people on the bus, what they did was equally primitive. Yelling is immediate. When you take a hammer away from a 2 year old who picked it up, he yells instantly. However, that never gets the parent to give back the hammer. The yelling is a thoughtless response, an immediate protest. Which is probably the same reaction that the people on the bus gave you – an immediate protest – so that you shouldn’t even think for a second that they accept what you did. But as you know (better than anyone), that did not achieve the greater goal of actually reinstating the mehandrin standard. So they just got upset and stayed upset, while you basked in the ubiquitous anger and stayed upset too. Sadly for the bus riders, they have to deal with this type of upset frequently enough that they were probably able to forget about it right away. I know this because I haven’t seen any articles in Ma’ariv (or posters on the walls of Meah Shearim) publicizing the injustice they suffered on that night.