Thursday, March 27, 2008

Openbare vervoer

Every morning and evening it takes me at least an hour on the public transport to reach work/home. 20 minutes on the tram from home to Central Station, 20 on the train to Schiphol airport and 20 on the bus from Schiphol to Schiphol-Rijk. Plus, of course, the time spent on waiting and walking to the next unit of transportation.

The dutch themselves are often annoyed at their public tramsport, mainly because of too many delays. I must say though that considering the demands and density of the people I find the public transport to be more than adequate and even though there are indeed often delays with trains, trams and buses (and, I'm sure, subway trains) it does seem to at least function regardless.

I could never really understand how all these delays come to be. But this morning on my way to Central Station, some time between 7:12 and 7:25, the tram had an accident. This white painter's van apparently didn't see or didn't turn fast enough and the tram grazed it a little bit. No one was hurt or even thrown about although it there was some hard breaking involved. However, the tram had to stay at the scene of the accident until furhter notice.

Luckily for me, this happened somewhere between the Magna Plaza and Central station so it was just a short walk. Unfortunately for the people at the complaints department of the OV, this happens to be the merging point of several tram lines and during the 3 minutes I was considering whether to stay in the tram see if it goes on or take the walk a whole 3 trams were already stuck behind the one I was in. And by the time I got to Central Station (maybe... 7 to 10 minutes later) there were a LOT of people there waiting for the trams which were all stuck. during the morning rush hour.

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There are often little screens in the trams with current news. So that people wouldn't get bored or something, I guess. And every now and then I see a news item that goes something like "man hit by tram" and I wonder... how can a person not see or hear that a tram is coming? It's big and makes noise, for heaven's sake! So for a while I assumed that maybe it's the drunk tourists, just wandering about on the streets and not paying attention to traffic. For good reason actually because once a tram I was in almost hit one of those.

But now I have a different theory: it's the dutch themselves. They do not seem to have any fear of moving vehicles if they're not bikes. It is true that the chance to be hit by a bike is higher here than the chance of being hit by anything else but that doesn't mean that people can just cross the streets wherever they want and at the tramstop when the light is red and you SEE and HEAR that the tram is about to leave but you need to catch the other tram on the other side of the street so you make a dash at it and hope that the tram driver nearer to you has awesome reflexes.

But then, I come from a country with the highest rate of death caused by car accidents in Europe (at least) so I have a right to be afraid of moving things. To me, it's only rational to assume that if it's bigger than me and hits me, it will hurt me very much.

2 comments:

antyx said...

Insert obligatory joke about stoned tourists here. ;)

Though I've had close calls with Amsterdam trams even when sober - particularly on the square in the middle of the old town, where there is no differentiation for the tram path - just tracks carved through the cobblestones. Don't expect it to turn like that.

But the Dutch public transport system is excellent, compared to Estonia's.

Doris said...

It is. With the exception of bus drivers. Dutch bus drivers seem even more bent on killing or maiming the passengers than the Estonian ones... if yo can believe it :)