Get On the Bus!

Quick note about public transportation. Actually, it's not even about public transportation. It's about privately arranged transportation for mass transit. Specifically, the bus system used to shuttle the hundreds of thousands of guests around the many different properties that make up the WaltDisneyMegaTelCo. collective. This is a privately owned, privately operated enterprise here, not a municipal or state-run agency.

And yet it took over an hour to traverse a distance of some 7½ miles this morning.

Yes, there's more to the story involving multiple stops, unscheduled pick-ups, and less-than-confident operators, but the fact remains that even in a private setting, where the stakes are high and customer satisfaction ranks slightly higher than eternal reward with the bean counters, sometimes things fail. Sometimes paying customers spend an hour on a bus for a trip that should take no more than 20 minutes, tops.

And as long as these sorts of things keep happening, there will always be resistance to public transportation.

You don't get better results by taking away all incentives to performance as Lissa so eloquently points out. A public "servant" who has no fear of losing his job isn't going to go the extra mile as a rule; human nature in general tends to put in the minimal amount of effort possible to get the job done. The guy driving the bus doesn't care if he makes one trip or three in a given hour; in fact, more than likely only one trip is preferable, as it means less work. In the private sector, a guy who only makes one trip in the amount of time it should take to make three isn't going to drive a bus for very long; the same cannot be said in the public sector.

And if you're the poor bastard stuck on that bus for the hour, you'll think very long and hard before getting on another bus if you don't absolutely have to...

That is all.