Shuttle Boy

Cleaning up my desktop, I found an old comic I made a year or 2 ago when they destroyed the old “pay 20cent per ride, comes every 5 minutes” bus service and replaced it with the “OMFG IT’S FUCKING FREE LET’S ALL TAKE IT, comes every 20 minutes” bus service.

You young ones probably won’t remember any of this, but back when I was a freshie, the only reason I’d be late was because I was late. Not because I had to stare at 2 fully packed buses go by.

I pasted this comic with the questionnaire on a few bus stops in retaliation to the SU doing absolutely nothing:

ShuttleBoy wants to know:

What exactly is being done? Please circle the answer from the following.

a) We have done nothing! Hahahaha!

b) We have sat down and contemplated solutions without really putting any of them into action.

c) We are holding 5 hour meetings where we blame the previous batch and laugh at the little people waiting for the bus.

d) We think it’s somebody else’s problem. We don’t stay that far from school anyway.

e) We are going on expensive outings with all the money collected from you. These outings help you. They really do.

f) We are collecting commissions from all the taxi companies for boosting their number of customers.

g) Others. Please fill in, ShuttleBoy is extremely curious: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When will the problem be resolved? Give us an estimate:

a) Never!

b) 1 year

c) 1 month

d) Tomorrow

It was meant to be an ongoing weekly thing till they resolve the problem. Lo and behold (<–zomg english) they tore down the posters within the hour (as expected), and they solved the problem (somewhat) within the week. Shuttle boy was pacified and never made another comic.

Guess how they resolved the problem.

No really. Guess.

Let me reiterate the problem: There were 2 bus routes. There were way too few buses, probably because they cut down on the funding, probably because they wanted to give free bus services. So, 2 bus routes, way too few buses.

They solved it by taking out one of the bus routes (cos they both covered the same area, in opposite directions), and making 2 new, shorter bus routes.

How does this work? The 2 new routes were short, and didn’t go around the whole school. This allowed the frequency to increase on each of these short routes as the buses reached their destination quicker. The frequency on the 3rd, long route remained the same.

This helped in that people who stayed in hall 10, 11, 14 and 15 did not have to wake up at 7am, sit at the bus stop at 7.30am, only to finally get on the bus at 9am when their lessons are halfway done. HURRAH.

Fast forward to today. Our SUPREMELY CLEVER OMGWTFBBQ student union sees the 3 bus routes. Tsk tsk tsk go the freshies. How come our buses take so long?

HMMMM OMFG LEMME TINK go the union.

ZOMG I NOES. WE SHALL CHANGE THE ROUTES. CHANGE ASLWYAS SI GOOT.

So the union does a survey. A survey which none of my friends, my friends’ friends, nor my friends’ friends’ friends have ever seen.

ZOMG J00 NOES WAT? DA STUDENTS WANT LESS ROUTES AND MORE FREQUENCY.

I really have to put that part in bold, because here lies stupidity in motion.

What happens next is what we have today.

LESS ROUTES.

We actually went BACKWARD to the past formula that didn’t work. And Mr Indian is all so happy about it. HEY WE CHANGES LYKE U SAY. U SAY U WANTS LESS ROUTES AND HIGHER FREQUENCY. WE IS GIVE YOU LESS ROUTES. CORRECT WHAT.

Allow me to provide Mr Indian with a health survey.

Mr Indian, would you like to lose weight and increase fertality?

ZOMG YES!

Mr Indian, I advice that you cut off your balls. You would then lose weight.

ZOMG WHY DIDNT I TINK OF DAT.

Mr Indian, you say that there have been many emails complaining about the bus problems, but none give any solutions. Have you never in your wildest imagination thought that the solution would be to increase the budget, thus the number of buses?

ZOMG. DAT WUN WORK. COS BUSES DUN GROW ON TREES.

Just so you know, take a trip to NUS one day and sit at their bus stops. I have. I sit there with a gigantic grin on my face. The bus comes every 5 minutes. And the last bus ends at 11.45pm. How’s that for a bus service.