Adelaide Independent Taxis

Douglasac

That's certainly a good picture to use, because in that one you can clearly see that you don't need 10 minutes to check. You just have the conductor lean out the doors, look both ways, conclude that the other doors are closed, whistle and off the driver goes while the conductor closes the last few doors. That's how they've been doing it here for ages.

Conductors haven't been on Adelaide trains for years, and they're phasing them out on the trams now (I think they're up to the "no conductors on the trams in the city" stage), so for us that would be kind of pointless.

Also, all the Adelaide trains have recessed doors that slide into the body, so even if they did still have conductors on the trains, they could hardly stick their head out the door and see if all the others were closed... see here:

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/AdelaideRail_9.jpg/795px-AdelaideRail_9.jpg[/img]

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/AdelaideRail_4.jpg/800px-AdelaideRail_4.jpg[/img]

Douglasac

@Someone You Know said:

That'll happen either way. On most buses I've driven, the driver opening the rear doors effectively engages the parking brake. That linkage is prone to failures and does causes buses to get stuck when the brake doesn't disengage upon closing the doors.

The newer buses have a "Door Fail" light, and I was on a bus that had issues with one side of the rear doors not wanting to close, but I don't know if the park brake and the doors are linked. It wouldn't surprise me if they were.
@Someone You Know said:

Oh, of course not. I mean, they let me do it when I was eighteen, but I knew everything then, so I obviously wasn't an idiot.

Provided you aren't as incompetent as some of the drivers I've had (one seemed to not be able to stop at the kerb, instead preferring to just stop the bus in the left lane and open the doors, I had one today who had a bad case of road rage and was rude to some passengers, and the aforementioned driver who didn't know what way to turn... all from the one new incompetent company, funnily enough, who recently got fined $100k for having about one in three bus services running late)

toon

@Douglasac said:

see here:

Yeah, I can see how the Dutch approach wouldn't work over there. They are a looooong way from conductorless trains over here. That's a bunch of WTFs in and of itself.

Someone_You_Know

@Douglasac said:

The newer buses have a "Door Fail" light, and I was on a bus that had issues with one side of the rear doors not wanting to close, but I don't know if the park brake and the doors are linked. It wouldn't surprise me if they were.

Back in my day, we would've considered it a luxury to have a light that lit up to tell us what the problem was...

@Douglasac said:

one seemed to not be able to stop at the kerb

Is "kerb" an Australian thing? We call it the "curb".

morbiuswilters

@Someone You Know said:

@Douglasac said:
one seemed to not be able to stop at the kerb

Is "kerb" an Australian thing? We call it the "curb".

It's a rest-of-the-world thing. The stupid mud people need to learn to speak proper English.

Douglasac

@Someone You Know said:

Back in my day, we would've considered it a luxury to have a light that lit up to tell us what the problem was...

These shiny new buses they're buying have almost everything... I'm reasonably sure that, for some reason, the newest buses they're buying have Bluetooth as well... no idea why they would need it, but there you go.
@Someone You Know said:

Is "kerb" an Australian thing? We call it the "curb".

It's an Australian thing at the very least. Curb is "curb your enthusiasm" for us.

Cassidy

@Douglasac said:

@Someone You Know said:
Is "kerb" an Australian thing? We call it the "curb".
It's an Australian thing at the very least. Curb is "curb your enthusiasm" for us.

Ditto pommies: although they are pronounced the same, we write "kerb" as a noun and "curb" as a verb.

Zemm

Sorry to interrupt the conversion about public transport, but did someone break the OP's site? The Estimator is 500 Internal Server Error for me.

Also, this is the root of the estimator iframe. It took me almost 5 seconds to download the 180KB "welcome" IIS7 image. It appears to be hosted on someone's BigPond ADSL!

Douglasac

@Zemm said:

Sorry to interrupt the conversion about public transport, but did someone break the OP's site? The Estimator is 500 Internal Server Error for me.

Perhaps they've noticed and are now fixing it. Or their server is just broken.

oheso

@morbiuswilters said:

That seems silly; a failure in the sensor would make it impossible to move. Why don't your drivers just handle the doors themselves? That works perfectly fine for us.

Japan here. We do public transportation a lot. We also have very crowded trains. (Not as bad as those images you've seen from India, but plenty bad enough.) Crowded enough that's it not unusual for someone to get something caught in a closing train door. Bag, hand, coattail, boob, what-have-you.

The doors have sensors. Either the conductor or engineer gets a signal if there's a door not closed, and the train don't go. In addition, there are lights on the exterior of the car, above each door, which indicate if it's not closed fully. The platform worker looks up and down the length of the train (sometimes multiple workers are employed where crowding or curvature makes things challenging) and checks the lights, and then raises his light in signal that it's OK to go. The conductor (at the rear of the train) steps out of his compartment onto the platform to check the doors, the signal from the platform guy, and well-placed TV monitors, before giving the engineer the go-ahead. Then steps into his compartment and stands, looking out the open window, as the train starts up to make sure no one stumbles into the side of the train as it's pulling out.

There are variations, of course. You get into the sticks, up in the hills, and you get two-car trains that (seemingly) antedate the war. There are four doors on the train, each side, in total and a whole lot less in terms of automation.

There are also trains (in wealthier remote areas such as tourist/resort areas) where the door won't open unless a passenger (inside or out) pushes a button. As Douglasac described, the button does nothing unless the driver/conductor has already unlocked the doors, and the driver/conductor verifies that the doors are shut (with the assistance of the platform workers) before the train departs. Why have the doors remain shut unless a passenger pushes a button: I can only conjecture. It keeps the hot/cold air in where there's no one getting on or off; keeps the noise and wind down.

Some of the newer trains are "one-man driver" trains. There's an engineer/conductor, in the front of the train, and no one at the back. All announcements (next stop, etc.) are typically automated. And there are still platform workers, video cameras and signal lights to verify that all the doors are closed before the train departs.

One of the more amusing systems to me is the buses in the sticks where you board at the rear door and take a ticket as you board. You pay when you disembark, via the front door (where the driver can watch you/make change) based on the distance from whence you boarded. The fares are shown on a lighted sign at the front of the bus and increment as the stops go by. And the signs clearly state that if you haven't got a ticket when you get off, then you pay the fair from the beginning of the route to that point.

Douglasac

@oheso said:

One of the more amusing systems to me is the buses in the sticks where you board at the rear door and take a ticket as you board. You pay when you disembark, via the front door (where the driver can watch you/make change) based on the distance from whence you boarded. The fares are shown on a lighted sign at the front of the bus and increment as the stops go by. And the signs clearly state that if you haven't got a ticket when you get off, then you pay the fair from the beginning of the route to that point.

That's essentially how Melbourne's Myki works, except instead of taking a ticket as you board, you tap a smartcard on a reader when you get on, and tap when you get off. If you fail to do either, tough luck, full fare for you. It's quite clever, really, if not insanely expensive (they've spent close to $2 billion on it and they're not done spending yet - in comparison, Adelaide budgeted under a billion for it (half a million? I can't remember off the top of my head) and our system appears to actually work... so far).

da_Doctah

@Douglasac said:

instead of taking a ticket as you board, you tap a smartcard on a reader when you get on, and tap when you get off. If you fail to do either, tough luck, full fare for you.

I'm now trying to remember how that old dodge worked where you use two cards: one to get you on at point A and off at point B, and another on the return trip to get on a short distance upstream from point B and off a bit shy of point A. Then you swap cards between the two trips and only get charged for the parts where the two trips don't overlap. If memory serves, it works better if you've got an accomplice and not only change cards but swap with each other en route.

Douglasac

@da Doctah said:

I'm now trying to remember how that old dodge worked where you use two cards: one to get you on at point A and off at point B, and another on the return trip to get on a short distance upstream from point B and off a bit shy of point A. Then you swap cards between the two trips and only get charged for the parts where the two trips don't overlap. If memory serves, it works better if you've got an accomplice and not only change cards but swap with each other en route.

I get my Adelaide Metrocard beta test smart card tomorrow, and they work differently: load money on, tap on on the vehicle, and if it is between 9:01am and 3pm Monday to Friday you are charged $0.81 and at all other times it's $1.53 (or whatever). No need to tap off unless you want to be boinged at.

oheso

@Douglasac said:

I get my Adelaide Metrocard beta test smart card tomorrow, and they work differently: load money on, tap on on the vehicle, and if it is between 9:01am and 3pm Monday to Friday you are charged $0.81 and at all other times it's $1.53 (or whatever). No need to tap off unless you want to be boinged at.

All those things cost a gazillion dollars (for no good reason, really). How much do you figure post-war Japanese bus companies paid to come up with this? It helps that it's not worth massively defrauding the system. The most you're likely to benefit from a forged paper ticket is a bus ride worth less than $5.

Apart from the ticket dispenser there's the electrical sign showing the fares. Coupla hundred US in today's dollars, I'll bet.

OTOH, I have no idea how much they spent coming up with the Pasmo card, which we can use on the bus, the public trains and the private trains (at least in the vicinity of Tokyo). The JR trains have their own card (the watermelon), but I don't know of any advantage to using that if you've got a Pasmo. (Might be some percentage deal which makes it worthwhile if you ride the JR a lot, which I do not -- the wife would know.) Separate question how much they've spent on the Pasmo minus the advertising ....