Tram reboot
I had a physiotherapy appointment this afternoon. To get there I caught a tram down Smith Street.
A couple of young men got on the tram, tourists from the country or from an outer suburb where the trams don’t run: the experience seemed a novelty to them. Melbourne has the largest tram system in the English-speaking world (I read that somewhere), and probably the southern hemisphere as well, meaning very little. Everybody loves the trams. But the ticket system is appalling.
Both men validated their tickets by sticking them in one of the several little green ticket boxes that run the length of the tram. One of the men’s tickets didn’t come back out.
One of the other passengers was clearly a public transport worker of some kind: he had the little Yarra Trams logo on his work-shirt and he was listening to a walkie-talkie.
The guy said to him: ‘The box ate my ticket.’
The tram guy got up and looked at the box, then he started waving his arse at it. I couldn’t see quite what he was doing, but it looked like he was trying to use a key or something attached to the back of belt to open the box.
The tram, meanwhile, continued along its route. When the tram stopped at a red light I watched the tram guy walk to the front of the tram and say something to the driver. Then the lights went out and the air conditioning stopped humming. Then everything started up again. Then the ticket popped up out of the box.
The passengers who had been paying attention started laughing. The driver had restarted the entire tram to get the ticket to come out.
January 21st, 2005 at 12:29 pm
You know the yellow dots on the green boxes? They’re radio-wave detector thingies that were installed in the prototypes when the system was being developed. The idea was that you’d have little magnetic card-type tickets for your monthly and yearly tickets, and all you’d have to do is wave them at the box in the direction of the dot and your ticket would be validated. But I think there were some problems with the way the radiowaves or the circuitry worked, in terms of wiping ATM card magnetic strips, or being interfered with by mobile phones or something, and they never released it to the public. I met a guy who was testing them out once.