As a student public transport is my number 1 way of transportation, it’s practically free, it’s relatively fast and it gets you to your destination. Perfect I’d say, and it has gone good for years, still the government believed change was needed. After all, who still works with paper tickets and ink stamps right? Such [...]
As a student public transport is my number 1 way of transportation, it’s practically free, it’s relatively fast and it gets you to your destination. Perfect I’d say, and it has gone good for years, still the government believed change was needed. After all, who still works with paper tickets and ink stamps right? Such an advanced and western country like this can’t be like that, it should be electronic and fancy!
So we’re getting those electronic gates which slam into your face if you walk through them too fast or too slow at our subways, chip cards to open the gates and soon to enter the buses as well and the great option to check your traveling online! Now, how great isn’t that all. All the millions of euros which are pumped into that project must be worth it right?
Now here comes the good part, even before the project is officially launched it’s already got a big blow since the system was cracked by a group of German hackers. We’ll probably be seeing millions more of tax money being wasted on solving that security issue and on top of that the gates haven’t become any better either because of this all.
If just a gate slamming into your face when you’re rushing through it with a ton of people already isn’t enough they decided to do things double up as well and place some men to check up on your tickets before you open the gate which does exactly the same thing. Now how redundant is that? But I suppose all those man hours must definitely be worth catching that small selective group of people which might travel for free with a cracked card.
When will the madness all come to an end though? I believe the first mentioning of the new system came like 3 years ago or even before that, about 2 years ago as a student we had to turn in an additional photograph for our cards which we didn’t receive till about 6 months ago due to massive delays on the system. Now 2008 is the year in which the subways were all supposed to have start using it at the beginning of this year? Well that got delayed as well, probably for at least another half a year I’d guess.
I highly doubt it’ll make it for the full national usage in 2009 which was the initial idea, if on such a small case it already doesn’t work how would it ever succeed on covering a full country. More money will probably have to be wasted on it, and in the end what for? To fix something which has been working perfectly for many, many years… But of course tax money is just there to waste on things like this right?
Feb 01 at 6:06 pm
Comment: #1
hi, you are correct. You cannot rely on public transports. I had many troubles using it and hence now I only use private transport. I learned a big lesson long before you and you are the one to follow me.
Feb 02 at 11:53 am
Comment: #2
On itself public transport isn’t bad, but it’s just the government once again trying to fix something which wasn’t broken. Implanting these sort of modern systems without realizing the potential failures of it.
Feb 12 at 7:59 am
Comment: #3
I had great luck with public transport in Chicago, but I currently live in St. Louis, Missouri, and the public transport is all but nonexistent. It’s a shame the options aren’t better, given how environmentally friendly mass transport can be.