Tram rage (again)
I’D have thought that Metrolink would be only too pleased to make it as easy as possible to buy tickets and passes. Of course, I’m wrong.
On Saturday I went to town to buy a new pass. I’m off in a fortnight, so I wanted two consecutive weekly passes.
I popped into Piccadilly station. I know from previous experience that to buy a tram pass there, you should not join the “tickets for future travel” queue but join the “tickets for todays [they care as much for passengers as apostrophes] travel”. I expected logic. Silly me.
When I got to the front of the queue, I was told they were going to stop doing tram passes, but they did have some left. They looked but didn’t have any of the kind I needed.
Normally, I’m a civil kind of chap. I was astonished that I wouldn’t be able to buy a ticket from a station. But at that moment I was more miffed that I’d wasted time queuing and I asked why nobody had thought to put up a notice to stop people squandering their lives.
The team leader was summoned. Steve Horsfield (it might have been Horsfeld, the red mist made it difficult for me to read his name badge) told me he was too busy to write one.
I volunteered to write one myself there and then. He declined my kind offer, disputing my assertion that I’d been waiting 20 minutes – yes, that probably was a five-minute exaggeration but there was a bigger picture here.
So I went to the GMPTE travel office in Piccadilly Gardens. The man there didn’t know anything about railway stations stopping selling Metrolink passes.
I asked for two consecutive weekly passes. But he could sell me only one. I asked why he couldn’t do another. Something to do with the Paypoint machine.
Upshot: I have to join another queue (not at a railway station or a post office, since they’ve stopped selling Metrolink passes there too) next week.
I rang Metrolink. A man there confirmed that the railway stations won’t soon sell passes. And that I cannot buy a pass more than a week in advance.
Why not? He didn’t know. Didn’t he think it was strange that he didn’t know the rationale for making it more inconvenient to buy tickets? He gave me his supervisor’s name.
He said that when I’ve bought two weekly tickets from railway stations in the past, they’d broken some rule. Probably the rule that says: “Make life easier for passengers”.
So why the change? Well, it’s all down to the stations not getting Paypoint machines. Normally I get a monthly pass (that once meant a pass for a month). But Paypoint can deal only with four-weekly passes. Result: In a year, you end up buying one pass extra – and spending a month’s worth more money.
Apologies to regular readers. You know that I regard Metrolink’s organisational ability as akin to its ability to juggle soup.
But if we really are serious about people dumping their cars (which I have done) and using public transport, someone should sort out this sort of shambles and make it easy to buy tickets.
We’ve managed for 15 years or so without Paypoint. It’s great that local shops and the internet can sell passes now too (albeit not monthly ones). But surely it’s not unreasonable to expect to be able to buy tram tickets at train stations? Or, failing that, notices to tell us it’s going to stop?