So the other day I was in the city running some errands including returning a novel that was missing 50 pages (weird!). I was kind of bored after achieving my weak ass goals, but not ready to return home yet. For some reason unbeknownst to me, I decided that I would take a tram ride from the city all the way to the end of the route and back again. Choosing route 59 to Airport West seemed like a good way to check out parts of the city I have never seen. Here's how it unfolded.
Once I boarded the tram at Elizabeth and Collins Streets, I was surprised at how full it was at about 3pm. Also I noticed that from the half of the tram I could see, I was a about a 3:1 chance to win a game of spot the round eye. Now I'm just making an observation, not insinuating anything here. This was not a persistent feature of the passenger mix across the whole journey. Other passenger types I got to enjoy was the girl who talks the entire tram ride to her non-replying boyfriend (she had a large coffee in hand), schoolboys (they reek like the dog pound) and the smart arse schoolboy who has to try and piss the driver off by pressing the door buzzer as many times as possible at each stop to the point where the doors freeze. No crazies or drunks. First time for everything on a full tram!
It was nice to ride past Victoria Market and realise that not very far out of the CBD, most of the buildings were only two or three stories tall. Looks like a good area to maybe live in as the tram heads along Flemington Road toward the hospital precinct. Nice old houses, wide streets. Probably costs a mint. Further out I got to see what Essendon, Niddrie and Moonee Ponds look like. Finally they stopped being fantastical places that exist only in conversations. Essendon and Moonee Ponds looked like fairly nice places. Niddrie looks like a bucket of shit - maybe it will be the next Brunswick in the property game? Oh and what you see of Airport West also looks like a bucket of shit. I can't even recommend it as a parking destination.
My favourite part of the day was on the way back into town when five ticket inspectors got on board. Why five? Are they expecting to have some dance crew step to them like in the movies? At this point there were more Yarra Trams employees on board than passengers. Anyway, once I pulled my earphones out and realised the guy wanted to see a ticket, I opened my wallet and started to pull out my myki. Inspector man didn't even wait to see the whole card before saying, "that's fine" and wandering off. No way to check that it wasn't validated. Who pays for trams, honestly? So the lesson of the day was that five gestapo can't even check if you've voluntarily activated your myki on a tram. The combination of myki and ticket inspectors seems to be an absolute winner for freeriders like me. It's disturbing that $1.3billion buys such a retarded system.
Don't ever feel guilty about not paying for tram rides! It's not your fault it's so easy.
Personally I think Yarra Trams accruing large losses will be the only way to remedy the system.
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