RE: A day moving around in public transport
Lol I can kind of relate to you here. I am a person that always wants to plan ahead too, make sure there will be no mistakes on the road, like not able to find a ticket machine/bus stop or standing on the wrong station for that bus etc. So I always do a thorough research on forehand like you did, and if possible a test drive lol. So I don't think that's weird at all!
How nice that the bus was there 20 minutes early instead of arriving at 40 minutes. I mean I have had a 15 minutes early on a bus trip that was supposed to last for 2 hours but not on a "short" trip like that! Would be very pleased by that haha.
The ticket/passes thing is something that works horrible in Holland too. They used to have paper tickets with 45 strips on it, so you can let the bus chauffeur stamp every trip, those were relatively cheap! Then they decided there should be a card similar to the touch n go card you mention in this post, and things got horrible. I have been living in Holland the first year they started with this, and there was always trouble.. You could charge them online but you had to accept the charge in the bus after you already checked in! So you could not first accept this uploaded balance and use it.. and on top of that those upload machines did not work like 90% of the times.. a real pain in the ass!
I have no idea how much RM40 is worth in euro? And if the public transport is cheap over there? here in Budapest (where I live now) it's cheap and so many connections, even if you go the wrong way there's almost always another option to take the subway to another point.. :) very convenient.. I can't do without public transport anymore lol :)
Well...I do try to stray out of trouble as far as I can, but most of the times it's the opposite of it, I always push myself in trouble in some ways lol. I didn't mention it in the post, but I am almost late for the train to my first station that day. Running to the station under the sun isn't the best way to start a journey...
I somehow believe it is only possible for the bus to arrive earlier than expected on weekends, because on weekdays the roads will be filled with cars since everyone is working...with their own cars haha. To be honest, it took me 5 seconds to realize that I arrived at that station because it is just wayyy too early compared to schedule!
Ah...almost the same issue with our cards here! You can see what Misty said in the comment above, the mobile app does literally nothing because you will still need to confirm the payment somewhere in a physical office within 24 hours of payment. I don't know which engineer proposed this idea but he should really take another few years to restudy software engineering. Shrug. About those machines...yeah, what's the logic of only accepting RM10 notes but not others...reminds me of the stupid vending machine in my school that only accepts RM1 notes. I'm not a banker, wew.
Probably we should care a little more on the relative prices because the amount might look little in euros, RM40 is sufficient for 2 days of food in my school lul. Public transport here is generally cheap except for that one train from the airport to the city. It's pretty expensive but I think it's justified, since it's really convenient and fast and is really never late. I guess it's not too hard to find another option to fix your broken route here, the entire city is somehow connected well enough for it. But for the rest of Malaysia...not that much! This rule only applies to the big cities, rural areas have only a few buses to the main destinations and rarely to anywhere else (but that's pretty sufficient anyways, it's rural areas and you can bike to everywhere...)
Yeah, I think I really can't live without public transport now too. Lol.