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Gridlocked transport logo Via the Association of British Drivers (and Transport Blog) comes news of this wondrous logo, which advertises the activities of something called GMPTE:
I don’t know when this poster was first displayed, but it is the star of the most recent ABD press release, so presumably quite recently.
It doesn’t actually say at the GMPTE website what GMPTE stands for. I had to go here to be sure that it stands for Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive. If that logo is any guide to GMPTE’s modus operandi I should guess that it is also known locally as Gumpty Dumpty.
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The GMPTE is a money grabbing public body which tells us all in Manchester that we’ll get fantastic public transport when we also get the Manchester congestion charge. I am confident that despite public oppostion, we’ll get the congestion charge, and equally confident that the money raised will not produce better public trasnsport. The cash will disappear in a similar way to all that extra NHS and education taxation that somehow hasn’t produced superb state run health and education services.
I might see what odds Ladbrokes will give me on this scenario. About 100 to 1 on I expect.
See what happens if you try to rotate those gears. I don’t think it was intentional. Typical ruling class cock-up.
Someone got paid to come up with that visual oxymoron. We’re all in the wrong jobs!
It’s actually the logos for the three Metroshuttle buses (which operate for free in the city centre) that have been combined here. They are often used in the ‘cog’ setting, combining with others, but sometimes alone.
(Link)
For Pete who wonders where his taxes go, I suppose he should sit on one of these for a few days to get his money’s worth. Free city centre buses are all the rage recently, and now occur in other cities, in case nobody here actually rides public transport. Obviously the person who wrote the last ABD press release didn’t have a clue.
Last, but by no means least, the design would not have been conceived by anybody high up in GMPTE. It was probably just a low-level designer who thought it would look good. So soothe yourselves in that knowledge.
Quite renimbi, the cogs spell
Gridlock!
And I’m no mechanical engineer.
The Manchester Trams were a wonderful piece of political pandering.The Train service between Manchester and Bury ran every fifteen minutes and every ten in rush hour.This was a main commuter line so it was improved with a Tram service running roughly the same time table..Similarly the Manchester to Altrincham. Lines that desperately needing updating,Oldham ,Rochdale got cut back.
A main artery Oxford road,out to Didsbury and the parallel London Rd Stockport Rd and the other main routes got nothing.The poor buggers out in the Wythenshaw estates are in another country.
GMPTE didn’t improve general transport,it just gold plated services which were already good.
Ron
The Bury line needed replacing anyway, as it was coming to the end of its life.
Oldham, Rochdale, Didsbury and Wythenshawe, were all to be connected in the next phase of expansion. Unfortunately, central government haven’t decided whether they will pay up for the extensions to Didsbury and Wythenshawe. GMPTE is quite dependent on them, it can only do limited things. In case you haven’t noticed, certain parts of the state have a stranglehold on money/power.
Me,
The Bury Manchester,Altrincham lines were in no worse state than the other lines.The fact is GMPTE used all the money up on replacing the railway with a tram.
Yes I have notice the government controls the purse strings,don’t be snotty.
Perhaps the GMPTE should have planned the whole scheme better.A more direct link between Victoria and Piccadilly Stations would have been a start.
On an aesthetic note,those bloody supports for the overhead cable are appalling.
Is it bad news when the government gears can’t turn?
That’s funny. What makes it more funny to me is the mechanical engineering department at my college had a logo that was identical, save the color scheme.
Whenever I ran into a ME student wearing a sweatshirt with the department logo, I would point out none of the gears are free to turn. Not a single one had noticed that fact on his own.
Of course, my university wasn’t famous for its ME department. I believe I see where one of the graduates went, though.
Pointless locked gears that can’t possibly move – What does that say about them?
Everything you need to know…
Well, as an adopted Mancunian (since just before the invasion of Iraq) I have used the trams once. That was to go to the Imperial War Museum in Salford. They are expensive and quite frankly I have never been moved to go to Bury, Eccles or Altrincham.
I lived down the Stockport Rd (Levenshulme). They were a complete irrelevancy to me despite my council tax helping fund them. Instead the A6 (Stockport Rd) was hideously over-bused with the pretense of competition between Magic Bus & Stagecoach (guess who owns Magic Bus?) turning an already congested road into a nightmare. You would quite literally get four turning up at once “fighting” to get to the bus-stop first. The “get-aways” from the stops are equally as rapid – I almost went through the front window once because an overly ambitious start was terminated with extreme braking. Getting into the city centre is easy but if you want to go cross-town it’s a nightmare and yes, Wythenshawe might as well be in Bulgaria.
I have a better emblem than the stuck cogs though. Just as you enter Levenshulme there’s a huge sign indicating all the myriad agencies involved in the “A6 corridor improvements” which amounted to block-paving bus-stops to raise them for wheelchair/pram access (not enough to actually work, naturally*). Well, the sign is wonky because a Stagecoach collided with it.
If there is any justification for the existence of bodies like GMPTE then it’s to facilitate things like through-ticketing. While this exists to an extent it’s very, very far from ideal.
Nobody I know supports the GM congestion zone. It’s an awful idea and will only pay for more of the same public transport lunacy.
Transport planners equate success with expenditure and with gross figures. When I lived in Nottingham they were boasting about the number of cycle lanes they’d painted on the roads. Quite a few of them were 5-10m long (that’s metres, not miles). Add ’em all up together and you get an impressive figure which is absolutely no use to a cyclist. Transport planners are also utterly distainful of local people because, you see, they just know what’s right for everyone. That’s why the mob in Gateshead (where I’m from) totally ignored the locals and spent GBP1.3m on a transport “hub” (glorified bus-stop) in the middle of nowhere which only made life harder. It has now after 4 years of no one using it been officially abandoned and kids do stunts on their BMXs there.
Well, at least the trams haven’t been the disaster they were for Sheffield. The folk of South Yorkshire will be paying for the capital costs of them forever (at least until 2040). And one of the routes was predicated on going past a high-rise estate. Sensible, no? Bloody good idea except this estate was scheduled for demolitition. Nobody in the transport department had asked anyone in the housing department…
*They might work with kneeling buses but they don’t run the route by and large. Magic Bus in particular uses vehicles sold as surplus by Bedrock City Corporation. That’s joined-up thinking!
On the locked gears: Sir Clive Sinclair some time ago pointed out the same about the two pound coin (with the Newton quote on the rim!)
Mr Jester,
You wouldn’t be pointing out Sir Clive as a guru on transportation would you?
Nick M,
“I have never been moved to go to Bury, Eccles or Altrincham”.
You’ve not missed much,to coin a phrase,”there is no there there”.
Kneeling buses,with wheelchair access,brilliant,except I have never seen a wheelchair on one.Good for the ambulant disabled and elderly,the former usually have motobility.,and of course mothers with push chairs.
My favourite aspect of the poster is the wonderfully imperious weasel statement, so beloved of councils and quangos or public-funded shagging parties that informs us of the nonsensical: ‘Making the city work together’
You mean it didn’t work before? And we have to join in this bold venture instead of sitting at home as we’d prefer?
One day someone will collect all these non-statements and we will be amazed how much alike they are, how meaningless ultimately and how much it’s all down to us to get working.
The Manchester trams were quite exciting when they were introduced in the early 90’s, and made a nice backdrop to the city in episodes of “Cracker”. Now, they are knackered, overpriced and hideously overcrowded. I was once squashed next to a very nice blonde, but that’s the best I can say about them. Given that they largely follow the routes of old railway lines it is amazing they cost so much, but it’s only public money I suppose.
A few years ago the retards running the network had the wizard wheeze of buying some surplus trams from San Francisco to help ease overcrowding. Only when they had bought them and shipped them over to Manchester did they discover they were incompatible with the system, and could not be used. The seized up gear logo may have been chosen deliberately by some cubicle serf with a point to make. You can be sure the bosses never noticed a thing.
Actually John, only a couple of trams were purchased (very cheaply, I might add) from San Francisco. It was necessary to bring them over to see if the trams could work, as though the measurements were about right, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Turns out, the trams were slightly to large, and couldn’t be used.
Now, if they had worked fine, the trams system would have been able to expand services at a fantastically low price (how’s that for spending public money, eh?). Thankfully, only two were brought over and so the overall cost of trying it out was quite low.
Gosh, I’ve nothing against knocking what is basically a very terrible trams system, but let’s not stretch the truth. Metrolink is shocklingly expensive and a poor service, and brutally ugly to boot.
You (once more): why did they bring two, and not one?
How much did it cost to transport the trams from the West Coast of America,was there 17.5% VAT payable?
Me:
I wrote:
And you wrote:
I can’t see how anything I wrote is contradicted at all by what you wrote. I’d love to know what it cost to transport these cheap trams from San Francisco to Manchester to find out they did not work. Still, I’m glad to know that basically you agree with me about the Metrolink.
Alisa, Me, John K: I’m tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they needed two to test clearance between oncoming trams at certain points on the track.
Anyway, my colleages have been laughing about the logo all day (thanks Brian). I want to use it to make a poster with the caption: “IBM Rational Clearcase: helping programmers work together”. Anyone found a higher quality picture?
“Alisa, Me, John K: I’m tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they needed two to test clearance between oncoming trams at certain points on the track.”
Could have done it cheaper with a tape measure.
Ron Brick: you’re right, but then perhaps the bogies pivot differently and the wheelbase is different and the bend in the middle works differently and there is more overhang at the back… Nothing that couldn’t be solved with some maths but how much would that cost and what would be the risk of forgetting to carry a 1?
So they bring 2, and get it over with:-)
And of course it’s not like they’re spending real money is it?
Ron, Rob, et al,
Do you really want an organization that gave us that wonderful logo to work out the clearances on paper? (-D
Pushing a couple of cars around the track like a toy train under the Christmas Tree was probably far the cheapest route to go.