Long reads · Transport
Why the 7:42 is never on time
We rode Port Ellery's slowest tram line for three weeks with a stopwatch, a notebook and a growing sense of personal grievance. Here's where the minutes go.
Every weekday at 7:42, a tram is supposed to leave the Kelp Street depot, cross the harbour and reach the university at 8:04. In the three weeks we rode it, it managed that exactly once. The driver that morning looked as surprised as we were.
Late trams are not news in Port Ellery. They are weather. People plan around them, complain about them and, in at least one case we know of, met their spouse while waiting for one. But "late" is a feeling, and feelings are hard to fix. Minutes are easier. So we went and counted them.
Three weeks, one stopwatch
From the 3rd to the 21st of February, one of us boarded the 7:42 every weekday with a phone stopwatch, a paper timetable and a seat as close to the driver as dignity allowed.11 Fifteen journeys in total. On two mornings we stood, which may explain the handwriting. We logged the departure from every stop, the doors, the ticket machine, the traffic lights and anything else that held us up.
The result is not a scandal. Nobody is stealing minutes. The delay builds up the way a queue at a bakery does: a little here, a little there, until the person at the back starts to sigh audibly.
The bridge, the gulls and the ticket machine
Half the delay happens in one place. Harbour Bridge carries trams, buses, cyclists and, between seven and eight, what feels like every delivery van on the coast. The tram has priority at the lights in theory. In practice the sensor that grants it was installed facing the wrong way in 2014, and has been politely detecting the river ever since.22 The city's transport office confirmed this and said a fix is “in the plan”. We asked which plan. They said the plan.
The schedule was written for a tram that doesn't exist.
The other culprits are smaller and more personal. The ticket machine at Fish Market accepts coins in the order it prefers, which takes about forty seconds to discover. A colony of gulls has adopted the Old Town shelter and occasionally refuses to leave the platform edge.33 We timed one gull stand-off at 1 minute 12 seconds. The gull won. And the timetable itself allows four minutes between Mill Lane and the bridge, a stretch that takes six on a good day and nine on a Thursday.
| Stop | Scheduled | Actual | Delay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kelp Street depot | 07:42 | 07:42 | – |
| Mill Lane | 07:46 | 07:47 | +0:40 |
| Harbour Bridge | 07:51 | 07:55 | +3:10 |
| Fish Market | 07:55 | 07:59 | +4:05 |
| Old Town | 07:59 | 08:04 | +5:20 |
| University | 08:04 | 08:11 | +6:45 |
What would fix it
None of the fixes is glamorous, which may be why none of them has happened. Transport planners we spoke to agreed on three, in roughly this order of cost:
- Turn the priority sensor on Harbour Bridge around. Estimated cost: one technician, one ladder, one morning.
- Rewrite the timetable to match the street. Adding two honest minutes would make the 7:42 punctual on paper and almost punctual in life.
- Replace the Fish Market ticket machine with one that takes cards. Or with a person. People take cards.
The council's response was that the line is "under review".44 We asked how long the review will take. The answer arrived nine minutes later than promised, which felt appropriate. The last review, as far as we can tell, ended in 2016 with a recommendation to review it again.
In the meantime
If you ride the 7:42, take the 7:34 instead. It is just as late, but it is late earlier. If you can't, sit on the left: the view of the harbour from the bridge is the best thing about the journey, and for four minutes every morning you will have plenty of time to enjoy it.
We'll ride the line again in the autumn and report back. We'll be late, probably.