septa sucks

and the unions aren't much better.

to the unions:

welcome to the year 2005. people with access to employer-sponsored healthcare plans usually pay something towards the cost of that healthcare for themselves and their families. even those lucky few who in the past paid nothing are experiencing changes to the system due to the rapidly rising costs. which leads me to...

if you are upset with high cost of healthcare, take your beef to the insurers. not your bosses. it's like yelling at the paper boy for the crummy article on the sports page.

now watch the insurers will blame rising costs the doctors and hospitals for ordering expensive, unnecessary procedures. doctors and hospitals will blame medical malpractice suits for why they are constantly covering their asses from the threat of a malpractice lawsuit (which also tends to make drs. insurance rates skyrocket). which makes drs want to leave the states with higher insurance rates (hello, welcome to PA?)

to septa:

snap out of it! you have proven yourself to be inept and inefficient moving people in the best of times, so in this time of crisis you are reduced to a sniveling bunch of cattle herders (without the branding irons).

septa management needs to learn their business. the best managers have an idea of what their direct employees do at their job. an informed and cross-trained management will be much more effective in a strike situation or similar work-stoppage situation.

lining up boarding passengers waiting to board the train at rush hour is a ridiculous concept. lines of people snake through the train stations with people unaware of what the hell they are waiting for. what's worse is that you fail to let people move to the platform until after the train has arrived, slowing loading times even more. countless people are not making the train because of their placement in the line... so rush hour trains are not riding at full ridership capacity.

you have dispatchers and radio systems. if conductors or engineers radio ahead, you could move the people to the platform in advance of it arriving, so at most you have 4 rail lines worth of people waiting on the platform. if only doing this a minute or two in advance, would greatly improve timelines.

i digress... and in the meantime, i'll continue to leave 20 minutes early to catch a train that will get me home a half-hour late. fire all the unions. then fire all the management and start from scratch.