IT's always amazing how we have such fond memories of our buses and trains back in the halcyon days of either the 50s, 60s or 70s and yet we always feel a twinge of sadness and/or anger at what happened to everything from the mid-80s onwards - to the current stilted mess that we have now. In many cases there is absolutely no sentimentailty reserved for buses or trains post-1986 or rail-privatisation of 1996.
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I am one of the fiercest critics of this so-called 'modern way' of public transport where cluelessness, incompetence and obsession with 'targets' will seemingly forever reign supreme. Too much technology hasn't helped either - it's made everything more stressful, and in some cases, slower and less efficient. How some of us hanker for the days when things were just a little less convoluted than they are now, and no, it's not the rose tinted spectacles speaking either. One of my relatives worked on the buses AND the railways until his retirement in the early 90s and he too could vouch for the system being a lot more coherent without question. Part of the problem also is communication - or rather lack of it - in this day and age. Too much passing the buck too methinks. I think its got something to do with the fact that back in the day it was considered a respectable job to be working on the railways or buses. Unlike now where it's far too politicised for it to ever be fair or just - not to mention, reliable and punctual. Just how did things go so spectacuarly wrong? To think Britain once prided itself on its public transport system until the new generation of academic ignoramuses came along and dismantled everything......and we all think the NHS was/is bad!!!
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