Theme Park at its Darkest

Tramsurance, the brain child of University of Melbourne architecture student Tom Pisel, is a public fund to compensate fare evaders when they are stung for travelling without a ticket.

Needless to say, it is not designed to encourage fare evasion; rather, it is intended as a protest against the woeful state of public transport in Victoria.

Asshole in charge, Ian Dobbs, (Head of Public Transport Victoria), is

‘very disappointed’ in news that two university students are offering a fare evasion insurance scheme.

Mr Dobbs says the scheme would disadvantage ticket-holding public transport users.

“We can’t have this, it’s not fair on the vast majority of people who are honest and pay their fares,” he says.

“They admit to being activists and I certainly wouldn’t give my money to a group who wouldn’t be able to guarantee that I’d get it back,” says Ian Dobbs.

“We all aim for a better transport system and the only way we can do that is by investing in it and if people don’t pay then we have less money and less chance of investing in it so people who cheat the system are cheating all the regular users and really making it more difficult to improve things in the future,” he says.’

http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2012/07/05/3539910.htm

Ian Dobbs says this as if ‘activists’ are some kind of socially undesirable subset, like hippies or dole bludgers.

I read all this bearing in mind the recent news story about Metro drivers being encouraged to miss platforms, inconveniencing passengers in order to arrive on time.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-19/train-drivers-ordered-to-bypass-stations/3959738

Metro Spokesman Daniel Hoare (the irony!) says it is better to inconvenience the few (hundred) – even if, presumably, they have paid for tickets.

I wouldn’t want to live in Japan, but to a Melbournian, Tokyo’s public transport is breathtaking. Efficient, logical and polite, the public transport system is amazing. The government fines them if the trains do not run on time. 

I do not engage in fare evasion. I do not need a fighting fund. However, I am sick to death of these cashed-up parasites taking the money and delivering nothing other than excuses.

It’s enough to make an ‘activist’ out of anyone.

This entry was posted on July 6, 2012 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Journalism, Observation with tags Daniel Hoare, fare evasion, Ian Dobbs, melbourne architecture, Metro, public transport system, public transport users, Public Transport Victoria, Tokyo public transport, Tom Pisel, Tramsurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.