By Joyce Shamini
Most of us have experienced the frustration of a website server crashing or an online transaction getting interrupted halfway due to God knows what devilish technical glitch.
Now take that and multiply it with a frustrated crowd confined to queues that can last hours and you have a picture of a classic experience of trying to buy bus tickets at Terminal Bersepadu Selatan (TBS).
Granted there were quite a number of unmanned ticketing counters which indicates that there seems to be a lack of manpower on coincidentally all those times I was at TBS.
Still it is worth noting that the lines at the numerous automated ticket buying machines, which we would presume to move faster, were none the better than the lines at the manned counters.
I personally lined up for up to an hour, got to the machine, keyed in my desired destinations and date. However, instead of getting a simple notification informing that there were no bus services available at the requested date and time, I had to manually select the individual bus trips to see which ones had any seats.
Mind you, this required going back a few pages to get to the master schedule of trips for the chosen destination and date.
It felt like the machine’s design was inspired by the karaoke box machine of the 90s in which you have to select songs by their first letters down a list, a rather tedious process but at least a lighthearted one given the context of a karaoke session.
It didn’t help that upon lining up again and getting to a manned ticketing counter after another hour, the only improvement in service was that I had someone to assist in clicking through what seemed to be a similar interface as that of the automated machine.
The poor lady behind the counter had to again, manually select individual bus trips and companies to check for availability of tickets instead of simply having a summary tab showing all the available bus trips based on the customer’s requirement in a single page.
There are various cinema websites which enable us to book tickets at the last minute, as in an hour before a movie screening. The same goes for airlines and flight service providers, that allow bookings for scheduled flights as close as a day before.
Hence, it is hard to comprehend what makes it so impossible for such a major bus terminal to provide decent facilities for commuters to purchase bus tickets in a simple and efficient manner.
After all, isn’t it to the advantage of everyone to get more private vehicles off the highways and more people onto public transportation?
Apart from focussing on the extension of train networks and new public transportation projects, it should also be a national priority that existing public transportation systems are kept up to par lest they become under-utilised and only serve as a last option for the general population.
Joyce Shamini is an FMT reader.
* The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.