Another Place
One of the great pleasures of traveling to different places is that it provides an opportunity to compare the experiences there with the situation in one’s own city and country. There is an extra dimension to the pleasure if one is going to re-visit a previous destination after an absence of some years, as it is then possible to evaluate the effect of changes in the interim.
In the last two weeks I have had occasion to journey once again to both London in the UK and San Francisco in the USA. I found the differences in both places to be intriguing.
On arrival in the British capital passage through immigration was smooth which was a pleasant surprise compared with some previous visits, as indeed was the ease and speed of retrieving checked luggage. I had booked a hotel in Paddington and intended to travel there either by the Heathrow Express which I had used previously or the relatively new Elizabeth Line about which I had heard so much. Luggage trolleys at the ready I went to the Express entrance only to find it had not opened on schedule and nobody knew when it would be in operation. Apparently overnight engineering works had not been completed on time. How about the fallback option of the Elizabeth Line? Same problem.
Luckily the established tube system was still operating normally so off to the Piccadilly line station it was, albeit quite a long route march through various tunnels. Alas on arrival the visitor centre and the ticket office were closed and the ticket machines were having an off day. A kindly staff member assured me all was not lost as one could use a credit card to pass through the turnstile at the start and end of the journey. So it was that after a rather awkward change at Earls Court (no luggage trolleys allowed on the underground) the hotel was reached. Phew!
Travel to Coventry by train the next day threw up different challenges. I should explain for the benefit of the uninitiated that rail services are organised differently in the UK. A single organisation owns and maintains the tracks, but different privately owned companies operate the actual rail services. The large information board at Euston station reflected the complicated situation rather well. To the left were a series of panels, one per operating company, which gave details of their next train service. To the right was a single panel which gave information on all the following services of all the companies, in departure time order.
I had tickets for the 9.16 service of a particular company. It appeared nowhere. There was a 9 am service displayed on the company’s left panel as its next train, and a 10 am service included in the composite of future services on the right one. But of my train there was no trace. Well faint heart never won fair lady so as the minutes passed I decided to take a chance and presented my ticket at the platform entrance for the 9 o’clock train. Success, you are in the third carriage from the front sir. All went well until I tried to take our seats as they were already occupied by other passengers with valid tickets for the earlier service. One of them examined my ticket and advised that it was for the 9.16. I fought back an overwhelming urge to shout out “What 9.16 service?” but before the explosion the young lady assured me the situation often arose, there was no need to panic I could just occupy any seat with a green light showing it had not been booked. And so on time arrival in Coventry was achieved. I never did find out what happened to the 9.16 or indeed if there ever was one.
There was a similar episode the next day, this time on the underground service, when an ordinary passenger rescued me from the vagaries of management. I boarded a train having been assured it was a Circle line one with my destination a few stops down the track. An announcement over the loudspeaker system suddenly proclaimed it was a District line one with a different destination. As I jumped to my feet and prepared to exit the carriage the lady sitting opposite interceded and assured me the announcement was wrong and I was indeed on the correct train. A second announcement a few moments later drew from her the response “also wrong” and sure enough when we got going it was the correct train.
The conclusion I drew from these episodes was that Britain’s transport infrastructure is a mess and the management is a joke. The one bright spot was the ready availability of Uber services at all hours of the day and night at reasonable rates. I wondered if there was scope for an exchange of assistance. Could we send London a brigade of transport planners, engineers and experts from the MTR to organise and run their systems. And in exchange could they send us a few administrators and politicians with the courage to regularise Uber? Just a thought.
The San Francisco situation is worth a book of its own, so I will focus on just one aspect. The Octopus equivalent is called a Clipper but there are two problems: the number of places where you can buy one is limited and can be hard to reach; you practically need one in order to get to the place where you can acquire one. And on the buses payment is effectively optional with almost zero enforcement. The service relies on the honour system to be financially viable. From my observation, almost half of the riders struggle with this concept, a sad reflection of our times, and just one example of that city’s difficulties.
By contrast with both places, we in Hong Kong have much to be grateful for.