Worst public transport you've used

Stephen15

Whats the worst public transport system people on this thread have used outside of Ireland obivously we all how bad public transport is in Irish cities. I decided to make this thread since people are always going on about how good public transport is in forgein countries but we never hear of any cities with bad public transport and I'm not talking about third world cities.

L1011

Northern Rail in the UK - rattly antiques, poor timetabling. Staff are better than Irish Rail though

strandroad

Rome: suburban trains and underground are shockingly dirty. As in ripped out seats, graffiti inside, years of caked on soil grim. Stations are extremely run down too.

devnull

L1011 wrote: »

Northern Rail in the UK - rattly antiques, poor timetabling. Staff are better than Irish Rail though

To be fair though, that was pretty much dictated to them since the government let the franchise on the basis of zero growth and not much more than that in investment.

LXFlyer

devnull wrote: »

To be fair though, that was pretty much dictated to them since the government let the franchise on the basis of zero growth and not much more than that in investment.

And will change completely over the next four years.

Jamie2k9

Gatwick Express, charged the premium ticket by staff who were fully aware the next 6 services were cancelled. Got regular Southern service and it was only 3 minutes slower and £6 cheaper had staff been doing their job.

They are looking for drivers for anybody interested

26000 Elephants

Many moons ago I had to take a rural bus in Guatemala. It was all your stereotypical ideas of the area rolled into one. There was a goat in the seat in front of me who stared at me for a solid hour. But at least it took your mind off the fact that the area was so dangerous that we had two armed 'guards' on the roof throughout the journey. Or at least the first 10km, at which point one of them fell off, and had to be helped into the bus. I hoped the lady with the goat might offer him the goats seat, but no such luck.

I cant even smell goats cheese without reliving that time.

mansize

Bus in SF - ghetto

anothernight

Took the train into Poland while interrailing, about five years ago. That train couldn't have been built originally for humans. The walls were made of dirty-looking wood or something and the train didn't even have curtains or individual seats for that matter, just these hard benches covered in tattered leather. The lack of air conditioning in the middle of a heatwave didn't help. It got so hot that after a while my friends and I started to feel like we might faint, but we couldn't even buy a drink because we only had euro and of course they only took zloty. It was awful.

On the other hand, the airport train service in Krakow was excellent. Cheap, clean, modern, fast and reliable.

Bray Head

Urban or inter-urban?

I've never been on a worse urban bus system than Dublin's.

Even in Colombia (at the time 1/3 the GDP per head as Ireland) cities had a nice system where the driver drove the bus and a teenager collected the fare.

Like Dublin, there were no reliable maps of the routes, but the staff had no problem telling you what routes to take to get to where you wanted to.

BonnieSituation

Jamie2k9 wrote: »

Gatwick Express, charged the premium ticket by staff who were fully aware the next 6 services were cancelled. Got regular Southern service and it was only 3 minutes slower and £6 cheaper had staff been doing their job.

They are looking for drivers for anybody interested

I've never gotten the Gatwick Express and I never understood why people did. That is until the recent malaise at Southern.

anothernight wrote: »

Took the train into Poland while interrailing, about five years ago. That train couldn't have been built originally for humans. The walls were made of dirty-looking wood or something and the train didn't even have curtains or individual seats for that matter, just these hard benches covered in tattered leather. The lack of air conditioning in the middle of a heatwave didn't help. It got so hot that after a while my friends and I started to feel like we might faint, but we couldn't even buy a drink because we only had euro and of course they only took zloty. It was awful.

On the other hand, the airport train service in Krakow was excellent. Cheap, clean, modern, fast and reliable.

Trains in Poland are unreal práisce. It reminded me of the old Mallow to Killarney shed!

munchkin_utd

galway up till a few years ago, when there was a bus outside your door but christ knows when it went or what route it took.
By rights, if the point of galway busses was simply to burn diesel and keep drivers in a job, as obviously a system with no map or information or timetable or sense or reason was designed for those 2 purposes, they should have just tarmaced the race track and got the drivers to circle it all day.
At least then you'd know where the bus was going, and it would be only marginally less useless than before.

Seriously, in 30 years of visiting Galway i have taken the bus only once (getting taxi, hackney or walking every other time) and even then it proved me right that it was a bad idea as the bus to Renmore (a suburb) did an unannounced lap of a hospital half ways to Oranmore before herading back into town and serving the estate which it passed (/ignored) on the way out.

When I was in Belgrade a rickety tram somehow caused a rickety overhead power cable to fall on the tram, causing an interesting sparking effect as the cable shortciruited using the tram as its path to earth, but I'd rate galway as worse as at least you could figure out where the trams go in Belgrade whereas in Galway they may as well have shut down the bus system for all the use it was.

cgcsb

Cool thread, I've had many interesting experiences.

In terms of design I would say Istanbul is quite poor for a City of it's size in terms of the layout of the lines, the lack of integration etc, but it does what it says on the tin. Similarly you get some really effing dangerous mini buses in smaller Turkish Cities but they are frequent and very cheap. The mini buses in Iran are a similar offering.

Toronto is very similar to Istanbul in that regard, huge City, really limited, poorly connected system.

I've bought tickets in London for services that don't exist or are out of service on the day of travel both off staff and off machines, at least Irish rail won't let you book if a line is closed for maintenance.

I tried to get a train in California before and it didn't turn up, one staff member there didn't know when it was coming, but it did turn up after 90 mins with no explanation. Greyhound buses in the US are also an unmissable experience, you encounter all manner of mental illness, substance abuse and extreme poverty that you would assume didn't exist in such a wealthy country.

Transport staff in Russia win a rudeness award, some even go out of their way to miss direct you for fun.

Some places with lots of people don't have public transport at all, like Dubai pre metro.

The number one worst public transport I have aver encountered on Earth has got to be the Mumbai suburban rail, mother of devine Jesus, just don't do it, you are risking your life.

Duffy the Vampire Slayer

Transmilenio in Bogotá, Colombia. The city badly needs a metro (Which Medellin has) but instead we have a sort of rapid bus service that's overcrowded and falling apart.

Bray Head

Duffy the Vampire Slayer wrote: »

Transmilenio in Bogot , Colombia. The city badly needs a metro (Which Medellin has) but instead we have a sort of rapid bus service that's overcrowded and falling apart.

I rode this many years ago. It is a bit like BRT with more grade separation.

It is undoubtedly crowded but it is fast and comes on time. It transports a lot more people and a lot quicker than the DART for example.

Maybe it has deteriorated since I used it.

Stephen15

cgcsb wrote: »

The number one worst public transport I have aver encountered on Earth has got to be the Mumbai suburban rail, mother of devine Jesus, just don't do it, you are risking your life.

Saw a program on bbc4 about it altough it's an extremely overcrowded service it looks like a very efficiently run service what do you expect in one of the world's most densely populated cities in fairness.

Jamie2k9

I've never gotten the Gatwick Express and I never understood why people did. That is until the recent malaise at Southern.

When I was there last month I fly into Heathrow and use it most of the time but it was last minute so on cost used EI ex Gatwick for return. Was running late had only arrived in Victoria 90 minutes before flight departure so needed to get there as fast.

Will never pay for it again, regular Southern does the job.

BTW the GX driver problems are because they are ensuring maximum Southern schedules can operate.

skywanderer

Manila in the Philippines, an interchange station there involves a 15 minute walk through two malls, the trains of which they are few are crammed and hot, one of the lines is new and modern, the buses are all old and traffic chronic. A mega city with mega problems and no effective public transport.

cgcsb

Stephen15 wrote: »

Saw a program on bbc4 about it altough it's an extremely overcrowded service it looks like a very efficiently run service what do you expect in one of the world's most densely populated cities in fairness.

Something approaching appropriate capacity would be nice.

McAlban

Have to agree on the Northern in the UK, but The "BRT" in Bradford is shocking, had to take it back to my hotel recently at night, I think the bus driver was genuinely surprised to see a non-Asian punter. Smelled of P*ss and S*it and Weed. A Bit like a 41 to Swords Manor but on Steroids. It's fairly new but falling apart already.

josip

Standard class on a train from Varanasi to Delhi.

Rock of Gibraltar

New York subway, absolutely manky stations, undersized platforms, filthy trains, complicated maps and poor communication. Also New York has worse, or at least on par, ground transport to their airports than Dublin.

Dublin Bus is the worst bus service I've experienced.

Stephen15

mhge wrote: »

Rome: suburban trains and underground are shockingly dirty. As in ripped out seats, graffiti inside, years of caked on soil grim. Stations are extremely run down too.

I agree with you about rome the metro is in a state similar to nyc subway in the 80s with the the graffiti last time I went to rome I went to naples as well which has a beutiful metro. The Trenitalia suburban trains are much cleaner than the ATAC metro and suburban trains however they have everything going for them and are similar to the Dart with double decker trains however they connect Termini.

buffalo

Got a 13 hour train overnight from Beijing to Xi'an. No beds nor seats, we had to just stand in the aisle. Other passengers had brought little fold-up stools, so we tried sitting on our backpacks. That was fine, but every time the food trolley came by, we had to get up out of the way and move our backpacks. Exhausting after the first two hours. A couple of fights between passengers as well.

And the train was slower than published, so it took 15 hours.

BonnieSituation

buffalo wrote: »

Got a 13 hour train overnight from Beijing to Xi'an. No beds nor seats, we had to just stand in the aisle. Other passengers had brought little fold-up stools, so we tried sitting on our backpacks. That was fine, but every time the food trolley came by, we had to get up out of the way and move our backpacks. Exhausting after the first two hours. A couple of fights between passengers as well.

And the train was slower than published, so it took 15 hours.

I once did a train from Sydney to Perth via Adelaide (I also did the return journey [Perth to Melbourne]). 3 days. But yours's sounds way worse!!!

murphaph

I have to say the worst urban public transport I have ever used has been in Dublin. Outside Ireland the worst experience I had was when travelling across the US by Amtrak as a student, where delays were measured in hours or even days rather than minutes. I remember sitting for hours in Flagstaff Arizona waiting for the Southwest Chief to arrive. Great experience though all the same and we weren't in a rush.

whisky_galore

The worst bus journey was an overnight one in Burma, the coach was modern and reasonably comfortable. I had thought I could catch up on some sleep,but the tv was on all of the time at ear splitting volume levels featuring Burmese 'comedy' and karaoke-esque soft pop rubbish.
At a refreshment stop I assumed I could get a bit of shut-eye while the telly was switched off but was told to get out while bus was locked up.

ClovenHoof

Dublin Bus is the worst system I have ever used. It is just a mash up of old services - one on top of the other - and trade union work to rule legacy of nothingness.

It is a completly hopeless and unfixaxble network. Dublin is screaming out for full privatisation of all bus services.

Jayop

Ulster bus intercity non express routes. Stop at every barn the whole way. Takes for ever.

fg1406

Probably in France along the Mediterranean coast. I was hopping from town to town via busses and trains about 9 years ago. The timetables were suggested times, the trains (despite having booked seats and paid a premium for doing so) were full with people in the seats. When I asked them to move they just looked at me as if I were dirt on their shoe. Also I came across an airport which was served by only 5 busses a day. The bus didn't even leave from say, the town centre, train station or bus station..,it left from a random suburb which necessitated getting a second bus and walking.

ClovenHoof

Jayop wrote: »

Ulster bus intercity non express routes. Stop at every barn the whole way. Takes for ever.

but at least you get a service.