Tramsformation

I don’t do well on public transport. I do especially badly on the single tram that Adelaide possesses. I’m not sure if it is the combination of a severe lack of control of anything ever coupled with extreme close proximity with many people, but even just thinking about setting foot on that demon caterpillar of terribly planned awfulness fills me with foreboding.

It hasn’t always been this way. About ten years ago the tram was maroon, squishy and arrived when it said it would. The seats weren’t arranged by a deranged person deprived of Lego as a child, instead they were most likely imagined by someone with some semblance of skill and imagination, as when the tram changed direction at the end of a trip, the conductor would merely walk down the aisle flipping the backs to the other side, and voila! All seats were now facing the other way.

The track was also shorter, ending before the city, thus avoiding the mass influx of people who were too lazy to walk the 800 metres from Chinatown into the main CBD (sometimes this was me, but back in the day there was a bus for that).

Now, track length, passenger number and inefficiency has increased resulting in a useless, expensive piece of WHY?! which has not only messed with traffic in the city, but breaks down more regularly than me watching ‘Titanic’, and even factoring in two trams as a buffer, still involves an individual embarking on a game of punctuality Russian roulette.

The seating also encourages strange social interaction. At the very front and back of the tram are the most highly prized seats. Tucked against a wall, you can hide yourself in a corner and hold the handy yellow bar which seems to serve no particular purpose other than to steady yourself in a vain attempt to avoid violently smacking your head against the front of the tram when the driver inevitably makes sudden stops to avoid hitting death-wish holding pedestrians. Behind this are the “blocks of four” which usually result in either four strangers awkwardly playing footsies, or two people trying valiantly to not stare at the overly affectionate couple sitting opposite. Sometimes the result is small-talk, or, as I once witnessed, deals to exchange cigarettes for shower time. Behind this are the guilt seats. Here you can look back at all the people standing, and enter into the unanswerable struggle of whether or not you should give up your spot. That woman isn’t pregnant, and she isn’t decisively elderly. However she’s on the threshold, so you stand to offer your seat. She gets offended, declines, and whilst you are still standing, a surly teenager plops into your place. Winning times.

Individual awesome experiences I’ve had include a woman sitting next to me filing her nails directly onto my bag, and being cornered by a woman I became eventually convinced was planning to kill and eat me. Possibly not in that order.

She didn’t.

I just don’t understand how something that is trapped on a single line, with its very own traffic lights and boom gates is capable of being so consistently infuriating, or how the injection of money and time has resulted in the deterioration of a service. Adelaide Metro: I mind this gap.