Is it beyond the whit of man to get London’s transport network working? Obviously.
Last night I endured what can only be described as a classic tfl cock up. There was (allegedly) a signal failure northbound at Walthamstow. For some reason this meant my southbound train was held at every single station for longer and longer and longer. In fact it took the best part of an hour to get from Oxford Circus to Vauxhall. At that point, being in the relative safety of ’south of the river’ I gave up and turned to the buses to get me home.
Ah yes, the buses. Obviously everyone else travelling south had the same idea and crammed on to the ridiculously infrequent buses. So I ended up waiting at the bus stop for a further 25 minutes as a paltry number of buses stopped, let people out but then let noone else on (nice one bus drivers sat their in your smug, over-nflated positions of power).
Then a shining beacon of hope hoved into view. A taxi - hurrah! Obviously tfl aren’t going to reimburse my taxi fare or make any compensation for the stress, pain and yukkiness of my journey (I really should live in the States, I’m sure I could sue the arse off them). But at least I got home.
I’m not sure if this has anything to do with the weather but surely someone sitting in a control room somewhere ought to think ‘ah the tube is messed up, people will be very hot, tired and irritable, let’s get some more buses out there’. Ah well, at least it wasn’t raining.
