There was a story in the paper yesterday about it taking 10 minutes at some train stations to buy a ticket on Monday.
Well boo-hoo. Of course Monday is going to be busy - because all the stupid wingnuts want to buy their weekly ticket on a Monday.
I used to buy a daily ticket on Monday, and another on Tuesday, and then start the cycle of buying my weekly tickets on Wednesday. There are never any queues then. A weekly ticket goes for 7 days, so you can buy it on Saturday if you like.
Trouble is, so many people don't think ahead, and they just queue up like lemmings on Monday. If 20% bought them on Tuesday, and 20% on Wednesday and 20% on Thursday etc, there would be no queues on Monday morning. As it stands however, 90% of the ticket buyers are all trying to get their ticket on Monday.
Losers. With a capital "L".
The other thing that people could do is buy a monthly ticket instead of a weekly, but it is amazing how averse people are to doing that. It's a big psychological hurdle for a lot of people to get over - buying esssentially 4 weekly tickets at the one time instead of queueing up every week.
The SMH and the usual media outlets and the unions queued up to demand that more ticket windows be opened etc, but instead of spending more money on people and infrastructure to meet a few hours of peak buying on one day of the week, why not get sensible and spread the peak out through the week? CityRail could even offer discounts for tickets bought on any day but Monday. That might encourage people to pick another day. Or they could randomly add a day or two days or three days to each weekly ticket for a while. That way, if you buy a ticket on Monday, it will last you to next Tuesday. That way, next week you are buying on Tuesday, and you are then in the Tuesday buying cycle until you do something silly like take a week off.
I hate how predictable people are when it comes to moaning about things like this. No one ever thinks of alternative solutions.
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