Apologies in advance for the content of this post, it’s pretty stream of consciousness, with all the accompanying spelling and grammatical errors and reflects how I view events but if you feel the same in anyway please comment.
Once again this morning I was left waiting at the bus stop whilst my bus did not arrive at the time printed on the timetable. This isn’t the first time as many of you who follow my Twitter and Facebook updates will know. This got me thinking about the legality of the timetable. In most services a provider supplies a service for a fee and there are binding agreements to ensure we get what we pay for. And if we don’t we complain and get redress for failure. But when it comes to Public Transport it appears that this is not the case.
I pay for my travel in advance by buying a monthly pass. I am therefore out of pocket for a service I have yet to receive. Surely it is not to much to ask that I am provided with a service that works as advertised. If the timetable says a bus is due at 9:55am it is not unreasonable to assume it will arrive at that time. I’m happy for it to be a few minutes either side as I can plan my journey to allow for some flexibility. More often than not I’m left waiting for 20 minutes or more for a bus to arrive. Often the reason will be that the traffic was bad or that bus that has arrived is the later bus and is in fact running to time. This all ends up in my being late for work or being late to some other event I have paid out hard cash for. If it’s work I then have to make up the time and if it’s something else I just lose out, hard luck I should have allowed for all possible eventualities and got there yesterday in order to avoid delays.
If I worked out how much of my time I have lost due to delays on public transport and the actual cost of that, I bet I could retire tomorrow quite comfortably to an island in the Caribbean. And yet the public transport companies seem to get away with it all. No refunds, no upgrades, no apologies, just the same old excuses as to why it’s not their fault. We are quick enough to get up in arms about less important things (any of the save this or that campaigns based around what at the end of the day is just entertainment) but something that actually costs us as individuals money or more importantly actual time we seem to look the other way. I’d like to see some kind of legal reparations for a failure to deliver a service as advertised. If you can’t stick to a timetable or supply us with suitable up to the minute information about delays, then we should be able to claim compensation. It is us who have to work that extra hour or write off the cost of those tickets not the public transport companies and it’s us who keeps giving them the money to keep treating us so badly.
Airlines seem to deal with this quite well and airline passengers are quick to let the airlines know when they are not happy, it even makes the news if airlines are delayed. Trains try to keep passengers informed at least even if they still can’t run on time.
But buses – buses seem to operate in a different world. A world of transport roulette. And I always bet on the wrong numbers.
