Railing against incompetence

It must be tough being a transport planner in the service of the rum corps -- not only do they have some of the silliest liquor licensing laws in the country, but coming up with imaginative new cock-ups day after day must be a real challenge.

Witness the latest plan -- a metro line designed to solve the city's problems by taking people from one point already well serviced by public transport to another, the latter of which has the distinction of having nowhere to put or send the expected influx of passengers once arrived.

But wait, there's more -- we now learn that doing so would require already existing trains to terminate at the old country platforms, then get out of the way before the next ones come in, a feat that even the eternal optimists acknowledge to be impossible.

The French also seem to have encountered this problem. Witness what happened in 1895, five years before their own metro system finally opened, when a steam train slightly overshot the conventional stopping point at the Gare Montparnasse:
On this basis, I fell confident in declaring that public transport in Sydney is precisely 115 years begind its equivalent in Paris, although more precise estimates will depend on budgetary projections for the Broken Hill hydroelectric scheme...