- If your budget is $10 but it costs $100, that's shoestring.
- If your budget is $10 but it costs $1, that's not shoestring.
You need to know both values; shoestring is relative.
Other large cities with comparable transport infrastructure?
You, or any passing reader, can just spend 30 seconds with a search engine and find dozens of papers, reports, presentations, etc... doing this kind of financial comparison.
You might as well submit replies saying that rivers flow downhill instead of uphill.
Whether that is telling passengers that busses will be there in two hours or whatever, you work it out.
If something like this happens in a winter storm, it can become deadly.
Almost all of the time it's not a worst case scenario though. Most of the time it's just that someone has dropped their phone on the track and trains have been asked to stop so that it can be retrieved.
Worst case scenario management is expensive and dangerous (e.g. walking on tracks) because the net risk or net cost is beneficial in the face of a bad situation. It is a good thing that we don't jump straight to these sorts of solutions as it would be in general more dangerous and our services would cost even more.
Now, is 3 hours too long? Yeah probably. But these sorts of issues happen maybe once a year per line, it's hard to know when you're in one.
While this is true, this would seem to be one of those cases where the people in charge should have known it was a worst case scenario fairly early on. In which case they should have activated the worst case scenario fallback plan much earlier.
In other words, it's not a matter of treating every scenario as worst case, but of quickly spotting the ones that are so fallback plans can be activated much sooner to avoid stranding people for hours.
> It's hard to know when you're in one.
The passengers and the driver of that train obviously didn't know--but somebody knew fairly early on that this wasn't going to be a quick fix, and that somebody should be responsible for communicating that knowledge to all the affected trains and telling their drivers to evacuate because this isn't going to be fixed any time soon. The big question I would be asking is why that wasn't done and why it isn't standard operating procedure in cases like this.
Here it seems people were waiting 45 mins to an hour after that happened.
Most of the time, it's not going to be a 3-hour stop, and anyone trying to walk the tracks is likely to create a safety problem for themselves and other trains.
At the time of the stop, if nobody knows how bad the outage is likely to be, there is no point in time when making the call to have the passengers all walk out is the right thing to do.
GWML is having constant maintenance problems. I don't think this is a budget problem, I think it's NR totally dropping the ball on keeping on top of stuff. NR is extremely poorly run and wasteful; I know many people who used to work for them but left to rejoin via a subcontractor (at a hugely increased cost to NR), to do the exact same job, because NRs payscales are extremely concrete so they constantly lose vital people to this - this isn't a budget problem as they're actually paying way way more for the same staff this way.
Subcontractors are also eating them alive because they have no senior, experienced management (see above problem). You have people basically straight out of uni "project managing" subcontractors for 7 or 8 figure contracts, completely clueless.
Incidentally, I don't think NR is free to set its own pay scales, so it may well be the case that the money wastage you describe is mandated by the same government that funds it.