If you prefer your reading completely without complaints about public transport, please stop reading now. I live in Sydney, Australia, who had major difficulties in getting the trains to run on time. There are a number of ways to solve this. You can fix the many trains that are out of service so that you can run more frequent services. You can buy more and newer trains to do the same thing. You can employ drivers who are not high on drugs. And so on. The Transport Services Ministry decided that none of these options were likely to resolve the core issue, so instead they changed the timetables to match the reality of the delayed trains. This, they reasoned, surely would nip the whole issue in the bud. If you change being late to being normal, then there is no issue. This didn’t solve anything at all, which didn’t come as a huge surprise. As soon as the new timetables with less services came along, the trains still managed to be late. Perhaps they should have gotten the drivers off the drugs after all… When asked what they would do about the issue, the Transport Services Ministry pointed out that there was no issue and could we all just go away and mind our own business. Late is a relative term and a train that before was ten minutes late, was now only five minutes late. According to the transportation ministry’s definition of late, five minutes was within the accepted range for normal service. It surprised me that they didn’t just solve the whole problem with redefining the word late. That way they wouldn’t have to waste taxpayer’s money to pay for the new timetables (or the millions of dollars it cost in consultancy fees to come up with the change in the first place). For anyone wanting to read more about the Sydney rail network, please check out the following link: http://www.shityrail.info/
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