Hahaha, PvdA and GroenLinks want to revalue public transport. The plan with which they go into the elections is called ‘Everyone gets in!’. The person who wrote it down either has his own car or spends his day in the train or bus with blinders on. Free tickets for minima, price freezes and better working conditions will not save public transport. Everyone gets in: if only they could.
The reason I still want to get my driver’s license at a later age has everything to do with more than forty years of public transport experience. I would rather risk my life than surrender myself to the whims of NS in particular on a daily basis.
Traveling by public transport is never easy. It is dirty, sometimes unsafe and the service level is deplorable, but the biggest complaint is that the carriers do not keep their agreements. Officially there are fewer and fewer delays, but that is mainly because delayed trains are quietly removed from the timetable at the last minute.
Free public transport for everyone, starting for the minimum, is only a good idea on paper. Why do the bureaucrats of PvdA and GroenLinks want to tease their own target group? Why chase the people who have nothing to stations to let them languish there? In our village (Wormer), all GroenLinks and PvdA councilors have their own (electric) car. That is of course not for nothing! I’m also sure they won’t exchange it for a free train ticket.
No one needs to feel sorry for the train crew. If one group has benefited from the chaos and changing of the guard at the top of the transport company, it’s the conductors and drivers. The imaging is incorrect. NS employees are not exploited. They have better leverage than other employees. By striking and threatening more strikes, they have forced more than average wage increases at the expense of travelers.
Meanwhile, aggressive ‘customers’ who can be suspected of faring fare are not checked, travelers have to find out for themselves in unsafe situations – they have to call a 06 number or app to find out where they are – and the conductors hang around with each other. first class. There are zero facilities at small stations, including no toilets.
Trains are long and empty, or – and much more often – too small and overcrowded. PvdA and GroenLinks think they can solve a problem by sending even more people (free or almost free) to the stations, but they only make the problems worse, the NS infrastructure is unfortunately no longer designed for many travelers.
Nor does a war become less terrible by building hospitals behind the front.
Marcel van Roosmalen writes an exchange column with Ellen Deckwitz here.
A version of this article also appeared in the September 6, 2023 issue.