Tonymercury wrote:
I assume you mean Boris Constance, soon to be Foreign Minister and a candidate for PM? With a bus order cancelled after he leaves?
So we're going to have a bus known as the "AndyMaster"?
Honest, it's like watching the moment disaster struck in that "Ten seconds from disaster" TV series. Just when one had resigned oneself to the knowledge that the bus industry in NSW was never going to get any better but thought that it couldn't possibly get any worse, it got worse. I also thought I'd also never agree with anything that came out of the RTBU but there you go, something positive!
You probably saw the comment from Victoria on that other forum: "Warning, you are now entering NSW, please set your clock back 20 years. That sort of intellectual dishonesty [replacing artics with deckers because the former "take up more road space"] has, I hope, long gone down here in Victoria... anyone who describes any public transport as 'congestion-causing' may have missed the point".
I think you and I know that in NSW they haven't missed the point. The policy here is automobiles first and this proceeds unabated.
My only hope is that they're not actually going to actively sell off the artics but let them run until the end of their service lives. By that time, I hope some of the young people entering the industry with their broader knowledge and better understanding of these issues (including knowledge of appropriate engineering solutions) will be replacing the old-school stuck-in-a-ruts who have spent the last 60 years destroying any positive contribution that buses can make to growing the urban public transport task. I have much faith in the young, perhaps occasionally misplaced!
Ten years ago I was optimistically thinking that, what the heck, we'll be able to replace the worst of it with trams, but then came the dreadful realisation that the NSW government is as capable of royally stuffing tram projects as effectively as any other PT project, so we won't be seeing too many new tramways at those prices any time soon. And just when it's been found that it's too difficult to get trams back to Bondi Beach to solve that little problem, we get this. It'll be really interesting watching deckers and 12 metre buses doing that job. At my age it's "been there, done that, nah it didn't work".
If they want to get some artics out of sight there in Sydney, perhaps they could send some down here for the Gong Shuttle. Would be appreciated thanks. And some AndyMasters for the Electoral District of Bega while you're at it thanks.
Now I'll go find a wall somewhere to bang my head against.