Blogging Pubbitch

Maybe I'm looking back at my experiences in London with rose-tinted glasses, but I can't remember the Tube back there being half as crap as CityRail is here.

Last week, nary a single train that I tried to catch actually arrived on time and about three were cancelled for no apparent reason other than the fact that they were monstrously late (hint: if they ran on time, this wouldn't be a problem) Of course, the splatter of cancellations and the general tardiness of the rest of the network means that what trains there are seem to be full to bursting. Lovely.

Having a stereotype to live down to here, Holly and I went looking for a complaints form in our local station, perhaps to gain some form of compensation for wasting an hour or two a week cooling our heels in the less than salubrious surroundings of Newtown station. Couldn't find one. Went and spoke to the bloke at the ticket desk. After carefully explaining that we weren't going to complain about him and that he was, indeed, a paragon of slightly overweight virtue, he finally and somewhat grumpily handed over a plastic wallet designed to keep tickets in and suggested that we phone the number on the back.

Oh well, obviously the bastards have an idea about how to run a mass transit system, and equally obviously the penalties for not running the service aren't steep enough. Apparently the Japanese system is that should the trains run late the person responsible writes a public apology that is printed in one of the daily newspapers in the letters page. Perhaps it's time for Michael Costa (the transport minister of NSW) to start writing. I believe we need a broadsheet newspaper alone to cover the execrable performance of public transport in this city.