While most people who read this blog will know that I quite often make comments against Sydney Buses & CityRail, those who know me will know that I don't do it because they're an easy target.
I do it because they never learn from their problems and treat the customers of that service with as little respect as they can muster.
Case in point: today, September 26th 2007.
Sydney Transport usually doesn't progress beyond the rank of "bad". Services rarely run anywhere near remotely on time in the mornings and the afternoon & evenings have the issues of too few train cars stuck on busy services. To put it mildly, it's not run intelligently.
Today however brings a whole new definition of the word bad. I don't even believe bad correctly covers it. I'll think up some words that I can use to describe the all-around service of both the buses and trains today.
Horrid. Disastrous. Pathetic. Awful. Pointless.
Let's start with the buses: they didn't seem remotely interested in coming today. Bondi Road has a bus schedule pretty much allowing for a bus every two to three minutes in the mornings on a weekday. Today we were lucky to get one bus in the space of ten. The buses were either using their standard pack mentality as a collective and screwing all the passengers up or they had decided that Labour Day had come a few days early and we wouldn't need to be picked up as it were a holiday (even though Labour Day is actually on a Monday).
About halfway into my wait – a 25 minute wait minimum and of which I could have done a roundtrip walk to the Junction in – I actually counted how many people were at my bus stop: around 66. So we could actually fill a bus with just the one stop.
Someone at Sydney Buses needs to seriously pay attention to problems like these. They're becoming all too frequent.
If I leave home at the same time every day then the time I hit work is random. If I leave at 7.40, I find I end up getting to work anytime between 8.15 and 9.05 which is an insane time differential.
And then there was CityRail which actually wins something today.
Yes CityRail, you have won the incredible honour of receiving the Ridiculously Below Any Form Of Sub-Standard Award for today. Congratulations CityRail.
Seriously, I have no idea how you fucked this one up so bad.
Loads of passengers waiting and waiting while an LCD display running on Windows says 3 minutes.
And then 5 minutes.
And then 4- wait, no 3 in the space of twenty seconds.
And then it hovers on 3 minutes for five more minutes while the platform gets more and more crowded.
When the train eventually comes, the people are s impatient that as you try and get on the train, you feel as if you're some poor piece of cattle in a steak mosh pit. There's nowhere to go as you get pushed into the already crammed train carriage and yet people keep pushing.
You know STA (State Transit Authority), this kind of shit wouldn't actually happen if you actually ran some inkling of a service. I could forgive minor occurrences but this sort of thing is what Sydneysiders are more or less coming to expect.
The signs on the trains might say we have one of the most complicated transit systems in the world, but I reckon the world laughs at our incompetence behind our backs.
Hell, they'd probably do it in front of us.
We'd all arrive too late to do anything about it anyway.