Special to This Crazy Train
By GO Voyageur
I
had just settled in for lunch at my desk — nothing special, just a sandwich —
and was catching up on TCT articles, when the story, A
human tragedy, scrolled into view. That triggered a bit of a panic attack,
because I was supposed to pick up some kielbasa from Costco the prior evening,
but I’d forgotten.
I
donned my coat, grabbed my keys, and raced out the door to my car. I anticipated this wouldn’t take long at all,
since Costco was only ten minutes away.
As I headed north on Lake St. and approached Dunlop Dr., I saw a GO
Transit double decker bus with its hazard flashers on and parked on the ramp for
the Niagara Falls bound QEW.
I
continued along Lake St., over the QEW, onto YMCA Dr., and into the Costco
parking lot from where I could see the ‘decker across the highway. I wondered what was amiss, but I didn’t have
time for that. My mission was kielbasa,
so I raced inside to the grocery section.
I picked up a few choice coils, paid for them, and exited the store.
Mmmmmmmm … coils of kielbasa
at Costco
Outside,
I gazed across the parking lot and the QEW — the DD was still there. I pulled out my cell phone and checked my
email, but there was no GO Transit alert about a service disruption. I navigated to gotransit.com,
which told me there were no interruptions to bus service. Well, something was up, so I
fire off a tweet to @GOtransit,
which went unanswered.
I
checked the time and realized the next Burlington bound bus would have just
left The Falls. Surely that driver would
provide the answer to why their colleague was stranded on the other side of the
highway. With twenty minutes to kill, I
zipped into Walmart for some light bulbs, exercised my scripted lines for
declining their credit card again, and popped out to the bus stop with minutes
to spare.
I
needn’t have rushed. The bus was a no-show. With Mickey’s hands approaching one o’clock,
I headed back to the office, where I
sent another query to @GOtransit. Readers should note that tweet was answered
some 50 minutes later and essentially parroted
what I had told them more than 90 minutes before in my first tweet.
Let’s
view this from another perspective, namely, the timeline given by the bus
schedule. The ill-fated bus started its
trip at 09:34 at the Burlington carpool lot.
It was scheduled to arrive in Niagara Falls at 11:19, have a one hour
layover, and then head back to Burlington at 12:22. The double-decker croaked after dropping off
passengers in St. Catharines. So, by
11:00, Operations and Hamilton supervisors knew there was a problem they had to handle. Why wasn’t a report driver dispatched from
Hamilton to at least switch off buses?
Presumably, the remaining Niagara bound passengers on the dead ‘decker
were picked up by the next bus an hour later.
Were these folks compensated for their wasted time and the
inconvenience? How long did the driver
have to sit on the side of the QEW waiting to be rescued?
Shortly
before 2:00 PM, Operations issued the following email alert:
Also, the Twitter Desk posted the following
tweet that @crash8668 latched onto like a Pitbull Terrier:
“Whether
it’s delay alerts, or information to help plan your journey better - keeping
you informed is key. Our goal is to keep you updated as soon as possible
whether it’s in person or online.”
You can also follow a link to “See how we’re doing”. Let me tell you how you did — EPIC FAIL.
The time from equipment failure until passengers were
informed of a problem was almost three
hours! What were Operations and
Twitter Desk staff doing during this time?
Celebrating their salary increases from the 5% fare increase we’re being
slapped with? “Sorry for the late
response …”. What kind of a reply is
that?
BTW, GO Transit’s real-time bus information service is
officially two years behind schedule.
