After a pleasant week riding with Transperth and its polite, considerate drivers (private operational contracts of course), this was an oh-so-familar welcome back to Sydney last night - in Shiers Ave outside Qantas domestic at 11 pm:
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Apologies that it's a hasty shot on a mobile but I'll explain. This is a 400 stopped with its backside out blocking most of Shiers Ave. It's a 1.5 (!!!)-door Bustech that was so packed the windows were steamed up. The reason he's propped out there
loading and unloading his passengers and not pulled into the stop (the "public bus" sign) is that he was having a dummy spit with a motorist who'd quickly stopped at the tail of the bus stop to pick somebody up and was leaving just as the bus turned up. So instead of letting him go, the bus driver decides to pen him in to "teach him a lesson", never mind his passengers having to get out the back door onto the road, plus the usual achingly-slow queue of boarders at the institutionalised "front-door-only".
That's only half the story for me. We'd been waiting ages for a Blue Emu bus because, as explained previously, they get in a terrible mess with large crowds because they're all jammed into the low floor and refuse to go up the stairs to the back, so stop dwells are a seething mass of people fighting to get out with their bags, even with 3 doors. So last night, I could see on the GPS screen that, instead of a regular headway, half the buses were in a conga down at the carpark (this happens regularly) and none up at the terminals (vice versa, under Murphy's law, if you're at the carpark). So when one finally comes, it gets packed out at Virgin and we at Qantas have to fight to get on. So last night, guess what, when our bus finally came, it got stuck for ages behind this STA hero having his prolonged "revenge". The photo is taken from the Blue Emu stop at Qantas.
I assume that if this was a private operation, this sort of behaviour would be a serious disciplinary or even sacking matter - or it wouldn't happen because the drivers are properly trained. For the STA it doesn't surprise me, it's been a roughhouse like this since DGT days. Roll on privatisation is all I can say.