Monday, February 01, 2010

Public Transportation

I take every opportunity that I can to ride the DART trains here.  I’m not a big fan of the buses and it really never occurs to me to use them at all but the train is fun and frequently goes where I want to go.  Saturday Sunil and I took the train to the American Airlines Center to see the Globetrotters.  It honestly takes almost twice as long to ride the train as it does to drive but it’s basically simple and its fun; so we do it anyway.  I was a little steamed this time though with how difficult it is to buy the tickets.  The kiosks are entirely automated and come with pretty clear instructiosn but half of them were out of service, none of them take credit or debit cards, half wouldn’t accept bills and half wouldn’t accept coins.  I was unable to purchase roundtrip tickets for us as I didn’t have enough cash so I paid more for one way.  On the way back I had to try three different machines to be able to make the purchase.  The first one warned you that it would not make change and I had a $20 but needed less than three dollars in fares.  The second wouldn’t let me buy both my ticket and Sunil’s at the same time but it did accept my two $1 bills and produced three quarters as change.  Then I had to go to a third machine to use those 3 quarters to buy Sunil’s ticket because it was in a bill only mode.  It’s hard to be excited about it when you have to work this hard.

 

2 comments:

Team Sharma said...

Wow - I am such a whinner.

-lyn said...

But justifiably so. Last year when Sheela and Jaz rode the train from with us from downtown, it took four people, including a uniformed train employee, to manage to get our tickets. Hope Sheela can get some sort of multi-use pass in advance if she will be taking the train to/from the zoo. I hope so, 'cause it's such a great thing (otherwise).