public transportation.

Discussion in 'Free Thoughts' started by EmptyForceOfChi, Apr 21, 2007.

  1. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    ok just a few short problems i want to air out and bitch about quickly,

    1. why do children pay less for a ticket when they take up the same room as an adult. if you say because they havent got as much money then rich people should pay more than poor people also right?


    2 if a fat person takes up 2 peoples spaces why do they only pay for a single person when they take up 2 peoples worth of space? they should pay for 2 seats not just 1 its unfair otherwise logicaly.


    3 how are disabled people supposed to usethe trains around london when all of the main stations arent even within access to them? 70% of stations cant be used by people in wheelchairs, whats with that?

    4 ken livingstone suck my balls,

    5. why is it cheaper if i buy an oyster card than if i buy a regular ticket? ok yes i know its cheaper ken you asshole but why is it cheaper whats the difference? oh its a government scam to track people and follow them about. i understand you want us to all conform, nice,


    peace.
     
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  3. FreeThinkers Registered Senior Member

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    Oh, for God's sake, give it up, you're lucky to have public transportation.
     
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  5. Oxygen One Hissy Kitty Registered Senior Member

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    I think on airlines (at least here), exceptionally fat people are charged extra just for this reason. They scream that it's not fair, but how fair is it for people who can't get on the plane at all? When you buy a plane ticket, you're renting space on the plane, not a seat. Otherwise, you'd have to pay extra to rent the overhead compartments. If your luggage exceeds a certain amount, it costs extra for the extra space, so if your ass exceeds a certain amount, it should also have to pay extra.

    In the US, all public spaces must be equaly accessible to the handicapped. Some platforms have ramps that deploy to allow wheelchairs to roll up into the trains and lightrail, but lately in San Jose they've elevated some of the platforms to be level with the trains. No need for the ramp to deploy, which delays the train. What's funny about this solution is that it was opposed by perfectly mobile people who thought it was inconvenient to have to step up or walk up a short ramp to get onto the platform.

    Ticket costs on public transportation like buses and lightrail are based on whether or not the ride is one-way, an all-day pass, etc. I think only infants are allowed to ride for free. (There is a cheaper student pass, which is designed to help poor children get to and from school if they don't have access to a ride. It was a rich person who pushed the idea through.) I don't ride the train, so I don't know if there's a difference in that system, but the one time I did, the price was based on destination and day of the week.

    I don't know what an 'oyster' ticket is, but for the other stuff, that's how we do it across the pond in my neck of the woods.

    My gripe about mass transit in this town (Modesto, California) is that it shuts down at 6 PM, even on the weekends. Then the city complains that hardly anybody is using the clubs downtown on Friday and Saturday nights. HeLLOOOO! Cabs are too expensive, and nobody wants to get hit with a drunk driving charge! Can we please at least try to accomodate people who like to have a good time?
     
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  7. phonetic stroking my banjo Registered Senior Member

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    Public Transport is a joke. Rail privatisation was an awful idea and I think it should be nationalised again.

    Buses are reasonable, but cost a bloody fortune and if you want one after 11pm outside of major cities you've no chance.

    As a student (maybe you don't agree students should pay reduced fares, like children) I couldn't use a student pass on peaktime trains. Peaktime trains being ones that get you to uni/college for 9am and back in the afternoon when lectures/labs finish.

    To get the bus and a train to and from uni cost me £15 a day. I live about 30 miles from A-B. A 5 minute bus ride to the station and about 30 minutes on the train each way (mainly because of stupid speed restrictions - another thing that pisses me off about trains.) It was cheaper to drive there and get robbed of £5-7 by a car park (NCP). Although that will soon be changing, no doubt as cars are bad for the environment and people should be screwed into using public transport. Despite the fact the infrastructure isn't there and it really isn't set up 'for the people'. If public transport wasn't such a fucking joke, then more people would use it. The only people that do are those that have no other choice, and the elderly because they get free bus passes.
     
  8. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    Public transport is excellent in Helsinki.
     
  9. Oxygen One Hissy Kitty Registered Senior Member

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    How so in Helsinki? Do they do something different, or did they just decide "If we want to encourage people to use it we should make it cheap and convenient." (What a crazy notion, eh?)

    Cheaper student passes in San Jose were aimed at the high-school and lower crowd. College and university students were not given a break. I guess the thinking was "If you're rich enough to get into college, you can drop a few more bucks for a bus pass." Those college students who cried that 40 or 50$ monthly bus passes were too expensive were the same ones who thought nothing about dropping a couple of hundred bucks on a new cell phone just because it was more stylish than last month's model.
     
  10. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    I never said it was cheap. It's just excellent. You can get anywhere at any time in a reasonable time.

    That includes night buses in the weekend, although normal buses go until 2 in the night outside the weekend.

    Metro, tram, local trains, bus routes. All connected. You can use an electronic card to pay per ride or for a certain amount of days.

    A person with a pram travels for free on the public transport. Most buses are the low variant where you can push your pram in.
     
  11. Nickelodeon Banned Banned

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    In the UK? Seriously? I've travelled on trains in the UK a heck of a lot in the past 12-15 years, and only seen improvements. Virgin has given the rail operators a real kick up the backside, I still travel regulary around the country by train. But then again I dont know what its like further North. I agree that Peak-prices suck, but down here passenger numbers are increasing all the time. I used to remember the old rickety BR trains, I'm glad to see the back of them quite frankly. While things could be better than today, I've never had fond memories of the old days.

    I dont live in major city, but thankfully the bus services in my area are quite good, available every 15-20 mins up to midnight. For a one-off trip they are a rip-off, but with a bus pass it costs me £1 (return) a day to go to work everyday, and I work in the outskirts of town. I used to live in a big city (Birmingham) and I did the same thing there.

    At the moment I dont have a car even though I can easily afford it, but I've not really needed one. A lot of people at my workplace could easily do the same thing as me, but at the end of the day people just love their cars. We like to go exactly where we want whenever we want, not having to rely on timetables. But for routine things like work it doesnt really matter to me.

    I havent spent a lot of time travelling around London, so I dont knwo what the deal is with oyster cards.
     
  12. FreeThinkers Registered Senior Member

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    246
    Would you stop your complaining, for God's sake? I live in a town that is now officially being called a city (9987 people), and we have no public transportation at all. No buses, no trains. People without a car have to walk EVERYWHERE (and let me add that it is built on a hillside, so there is not a single straight road). An eighty year old woman who lives across the road from me has to walk 3 miles downhill every day to do her shopping and 3 miles back up. And you're whining on about fat people's fares. Get a life.
     
  13. phonetic stroking my banjo Registered Senior Member

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    2,157
    What kind of sick fucks let an 80 year old woman walk 6 miles up and down hill to get her food?

    You by the sound of it.

    If I knew of that woman, let alone lived beside her, I'd find her and give her a lift to the supermarket. Seriously. The fact that you know she has to walk up and down that hill is sickening. Fuck you. Do something about it.

    We have public transport over here. Yes. It isn't without its problems and we're entitled to bitch about them. You live in the US I assume?
     
  14. tablariddim forexU2 Valued Senior Member

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    Cars should be banned everywhere, there should be electric public transport along every street every 10 minutes and all networks should interconnect.
     
  15. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Public transportation is run by the government. Governments are the stupidest entities on earth. What's miraculous is that it works at all.

    Here in Washington they were having a problem with crowding on the subway so they just raised the price and figured people would start driving cars again. Their own employees were stealing money at the parking lot exits, so they shut down the booths and put in automated gates. The trick is, you can't use a credit card, you have to use one of their own electronic cards. Every day gates are blocked by tourists, consultants and shoppers who don't know that and are stuck there.

    And don't get me started on the buses. Being run down by a bus has become a major cause of death in D.C. The drivers are too busy talking on their cellphones and hitting on the ladies to pay attention to the road. One of them actually drove off his route so he could keep harrassing a gal.

    Civil service, The Employer Of Last Resort. Do you really want to trust your life to those people?
     
  16. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    don't generalize. Public transport is great here. Run by the government.
     
  17. Redefine91 I piss excellence Registered Senior Member

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    On a recent flight last January from Hawaii to Phoenix, I sat next to an easily 450 pound hawaiin sweaty mess. I actually hurt my back trying not to sink into him by moving to the other side. He smelled like shit, he was the ONLY one who kept his light on the whole flight (it was a red eye) and blasted his music horribly loud from his headphones, so I could hear it as if they were on my ears.

    After complaining after the flight a worker saw him and said that he "exceeds the limit" of a passenger and that he should have to have paid for 2 tickets.
     
  18. Oxygen One Hissy Kitty Registered Senior Member

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    tab I not only drive to work, I drive as part of my work. Public transportation can't get me where I need to go when I need to go there. My husband had considered taking the train instead of driving 100+ miles to work (called the Supercommute around here), but the train tickets cost more than the gas, insurance, and vehicle maintenance combined (and still do). Add to that the fact that the local public transportation once he gets to the city he works in is unreliable and assumes that everybody gets off work at 5PM with no overtime (the last run to the train station is 5:30), and the fact that on occassion he also has to drive as part of his job, well, public transportation can't quite handle that.
     
  19. valich Registered Senior Member

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    3,501
    Good point. And I agree. But how would a public transportation system check to see if a person is rich or not? Too complicated. Most children, at least the younger they are, have only a limited place to go - mostly based on their childhood needs: school (necessity), meet mom somewhere, buy clothing or eat. A public transportation official can usually accurately tell the difference between a child and an adult, but not the differnce between a rich and a poor man.
     
  20. phonetic stroking my banjo Registered Senior Member

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    Over 16's an adult fare in the UK. Up to around 18, if you push it, is a great time. You get into pubs, but you could get the bus home half price.

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    I miss being able to screw the system.

    Public Transport can never compare with a car. Most of the places I go that are about a 15 or 20 min drive away would probably take over 2 hours on 2 or 3 different buses. Even then, I dare say I'd have to walk quite far to get to the final destination.
     
  21. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    It's a lot cheaper than having a car.
     
  22. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    In India around 12 is the adult fare.
    I've never owned a car, I've walked or used public transport all my life.
     
  23. phonetic stroking my banjo Registered Senior Member

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    I don't know that it is, to be honest. It's expensive either way, but it depends where you go and how often. Maybe in Finland, but we get shafted whatever choice we make in the UK.
    Sucks for you.
     

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