Discontinued Buses Are On Time: THE VOTER
It’s so much easier to come close to or even meet your targets when you can take a whole lot of OC Transpo buses out of service first.
That 4:25 bus that never showed? It wasn’t late or anything that might have a negative connotation. It just doesn’t exist if there’s a storm.
It might be racked up as a success by OC Transpo general manager Renee Amilcar but for the people who travel regularly or even irregularly on the disappeared service, it can mean a much longer trip and possibly missed connections along the way.
There’s a trip I make that requires three buses which are on different timing. They come at intervals of 15; 20 and 30 minutes during the day and, by planning carefully, it’s possible to arrange my timing so as to make the journey with relatively little waiting between buses.
If, however, the middle bus is pulled from service, it means that the last one will come after a wait of almost half an hour. If the first bus is pulled, I will wait about 15 minutes for the next one and it will be jam-packed. I’ll then have a wait for each of bus two and three so that a trip that should take less than an hour can take more than an hour-and-a-half and includes longer periods waiting outside at the two transfer points and potentially at the first stop. And I don’t have kids in tow or little ones to pick up or drop off at daycare along my journey.
But the bus system had a good day if they are to be believed. Too bad about the passengers.
The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.
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What gets measured gets managed. Dysfunctional organizations allow managers to manipulate the metric to demonstrate success. In this case, a cancelled bus is removed from the data set, which removes it from the metric = success! Imagine the bonuses for key managers if they just cancelled OC Transpo.
Ron:
I feel the same way about the climate newsletter.
What does it accomplish … nothing. Who pays for it … us.
cheers
kgray
Be careful, Ron! Don’t say that too loud – if they hear you, they might just think it was a good idea and adopt it. I remember all the accident-free days they managed to rack up when the O-Train was out of service. Let’s not encourage them to do the same with the buses.
I guess this demonstrates that “success” can mean very different things to different people.
The results are only as good as the information entered.
Garbage in Garbage out.