If you live in Montreal, and you take public transit with any regularity, you know.
What you know is that with a painful almost clockwork precision there are slowdowns and shut-downs.
About a year and a half ago they pumped a lot of money into upgrading their notification system, by adding notices to their Facebook page, opening a Twitter account for each Metro line, placing multiple flat screen TV monitors in most stations, and more frequent announcements on the PA system.
So instead of just accepting that the Metro is slow, we now hear that there is a slow-down because of a blocked door, every 10 minutes, pretty much every day.
Or, like with today with an "emergency intervention" on the Orange Line. They were very good to keep announcing that there was a shut-down between 3 Metro stations and that service would be restored in 15 minutes. And then 5 minutes later that the shut-down was now 4 stations and the service would return in 15 minutes. And then 5 minutes later that the shut-down was now 5 stations and the service would return in 15 minutes. And then 5 minutes later that the shut-down was still 5 stations and the service would return in 15 minutes. You get the idea... And that 15 minutes quickly has become 30+ minutes.
Here's an idea, accept that you know that an "emergency intervention" is likely going to take more than 10 - 15 minutes and that you're better off saying service will be down for 30 minutes (which is generally the bare minimum) Then if, god-forbid, the service comes back up on line sooner then you actually expected, it makes you look like you were really keen to fix the situation. But no, keep on with your constantly saying it will return in 15 minutes, and then adding 5 minutes to that over and over again until you loose track of the fact that 15 minutes had doubled or tripled in time. It just makes the packed metro cars and stations full of frustrated commuters that much more unhappy and agitated.
It gets old. Really quick. Quicker in fact than the non-stop announcements that you question if they contain any actual, valuable, reliable information. People were impressed for the first few weeks or so. Then they realized that you hear the same damn pre-recorded announcements, non-stop. Seemingly when there's nothing even actually wrong.
Time to start actually improving the damn Metro lines and cars instead of just telling us it's always broke.
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