Fascinating Tram Trip

[jdennis@acslink.net.au (John Dennis)]

Today I had the good fortune to travel from down St. Kilda Road into
the city of Melbourne, making a return trip by tram.  There were
number of interesting developments which I think are worthy of
dissemination.

Firstly, as I walked from the front to the middle of the tram to
purchase my ticket I noticed the validators I passed were displaying
CLOSED (for lunch? - nah, it was only morning tea time :-)

Whilst feeding money into the machine I overheard an earnest young man
espousing his theory that "we need public transport running 24 hours a
day, running every where and running every two minutes" in a monologue
with a poor unfortunate who happened to be standing nearby.

As I then moved to the back of the tram, I noticed the remaining
validators were also CLOSED.  So, there were no working validators on
the tram.

Then, at the Domain Interchange two "bluebottles" got on (can't call
them grasshoppers anymore) and our pro-public transport friend
suddenly announced "oh - got to get off the tram" and shot out the
door.  Obviously he wanted his 24-hour, everywhere, every 2-minutes
service to be free too.

When the bluebottle inspected my ticket I asked whether he knew the
validators were out of action, and he replied that "the driver had a
problem" and made a comment about "we are the biggest tram network in
the world ... what can you expect".  I expect things to work what, 3
years after originally planned, and also dispute his claim about the
biggest network.  Maybe some form of brainwashing is in place: "do you
expect everything to work when we are the biggest in the world!"

My return trip was not quite so interesting - the validators were all
working, only the ticket machine was out of service.  The same
bluebottles boarded the tram and when passengers said "couldn't buy a
ticket, machine out of service" the walked away.  I thought that a
machine out of service was not an excuse :-)

Cheers...JD
==========================================================
John Dennis                         jdennis@acslink.net.au
Melbourne                                  denjo02@cai.com
Australia               http://www.acslink.net.au/~jdennis
                Dutton Bay Tramway pages updated 1 January
DBT URL:       http://www.acslink.net.au/~jdennis/dbt.html