Quote:
Originally Posted by James Howard
The reason why it should be delayed six months are
1. It makes the service significantly worse for everyone except DART users
2. The only DART users who will benefit are those travelling less than about 4 stops. For all others, the increased journey time will more than absorb the reduced wait time.
3. The unions object and we can expect disruption
So what if money is lost - there is no point in spending money making the service on balance worse for everyone. If the city centre resignalling allow 10 minute DART with significantly less disruption elsewhere, then go with it when the system is ready. If not, serious questions need to be asked about the spending for 120 million of public money with no positive results on customer experience.
A cynic might suggest that the urgency is because we're in for six months of hell in putting a timetable in place that the system can't cope with and when the resignalling project is complete we'll all be so grateful for the improvement that we'll think that was money well spent and all is good.
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So therefore you'd be happy for the newly recruited DART drivers to be effectively sitting around doing damn all for six months? That's effectively what's going to happen if it's deferred again.
As a taxpayer I'm not happy with that.
Nor do I think that the completion of the city centre re-signalling project is going to make that much difference with regard to the 10 minute DART service. The entire northern half of the DART line is already re-signalled.
As I have posted before, I think the extended DART running times in the proposed timetable are in fact a reflection of the reality that the trains are actually taking longer than the current schedule allows - therefore I don't see any point in retaining a timetable that doesn't reflect reality. If the schedule can't be achieved, then it needs to be changed. Therefore people will be gaining from a more reliable timetable.
Your earlier comment about DART serving "rich areas" is really pushing things a bit. For all the so called "rich areas", there are also large working class areas along the DART line, so I really think that's a daft argument.
Quote:
Originally Posted by James Howard
Also, I fail to see why we should do stuff that they do across the water. The UK is hardly a paragon of excellence in rail operations.
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Six monthly timetable changes are actually one of the better practices - it gives certainty about when changes will happen, and it allows changes to happen at least twice a year as infrastructure/rolling stock allows, rather than wait for a single annual change.