No good in England.
This is a Welsh Concessionary Travel Pass, or to put it an other way a Cerdyn Teithio Rhatach and it can only be used in England provided it is used where bus services make cross border trips into England from the Land of Their Fathers and the local authorities have come to an arrangement to accept these pass on such trips. By no stretch of the imagination can Devon be said to have a border with Wales and I am sure without even asking that neither Torbay nor Devon County Council have any cross border arrangements with the Welsh Assembly.
I make this statement because yesterday on the radio there were several calls from drivers asking if the Welsh Bus Pass can be used on our buses here in Devon. The answer was always NO. Now it wasn't as if these drivers didn't know the answer but sometimes when you tell someone they can not use a pass or ticket the passenger doesn't believe you, or to be more blunt, hopes you wont be bothered trying the radio and will let them travel. Or mabe has never heard of radios. So time has to be spent contacting control and asking them a question we all know the answer to just so some doubting Dylan can hear a voice of authority coming out of a loud speaker telling them exactly what the poor bus driver has probably told them twice already and almost certainly the passenger knew also.
The other thing that happened yesterday was that British Telecom are yet again spending time down a hole in the road in Churston and temporary traffic lights were once again in place. The hole in the road is full of Hi Tech Telecom equipment (or maybe a couple of computer games) and the engineers have been playing down there for about 6 weeks now, seems to be taking them a long time to get it right. I hope you haven't been trying to make a phone call in the Churston area. Information I have received suggests at least an other two weeks will be required before they move somewhere else and make lots of other drivers' lives a misery. Going into Brixham the queue at the lights is 100 yards long, coming out it can be a mile long. You know, the usual arrangment at temporary traffic lights. No attempt has ever been made to even things up a little. So buses run late through no fault of our's and we get shouted at, people would think we like running late. Well we don't, it makes life harder for us and we, like our passengers end up getting home late to dinners that have spent an hour going round in a microwave in a sad attempt to keep them warm and edible.
2 comments:
Where I am, we have a very disruptive (but very short-term) set of roadworks just outside the city centre...the other day was market day and our numpty management-child decided that it was a good day to do timekeeping surveys...
He then spent all afternoon/evening working himself into a panic-stricken lather because our planning department, (twenty miles away but clearly better informed on local conditons than he was) just laughed off his observations (on the basis of one days checking) that he had serious reservations about summer timekeeping on all our local routes...
Where DO they get them from?
I've always liked that phrase "telecom engineer". In Australia, you need a degree to be called an engineer. With my qualifications I'd be a telecom engineer in the UK.
My aunt in Poole always thinks it's funny that we refer to Mt Cootha, the big hill near brisbane as a mountain.
It's all semantics really. I don't mind being called an engineer, as long as no-one laughs at me. In a couple of months time when the company I work for makes me redundant I'll probably become a bus captain.
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