Tram Delay Dispatch: A Myki Story Nobody Asked For

7:43am. The 86 to Bundoora. The PTV app says "Service operating to timetable."

The timetable is a legal fiction. A document produced in good faith by people who have never been on the 86 at 7:47am on a Thursday in February. We participate in the fiction because the alternative — acknowledging that the state's public transport commitment is aspirational at best and deliberately defunded at worst — is too much to hold before coffee.

The Myki Situation

The Myki card is a $1.5 billion infrastructure project that occasionally works. You tap on. The reader considers your request. The reader issues a verdict. The verdict is sometimes wrong. The reader has been wrong since 2012 and has faced no consequences.

These numbers are not from a study. They're from twelve years of embodied research. They're correct.

What Actually Happened This Morning

07:41 — Arrive at stop. Three people waiting. We exchange the nod. The nod is everything. It says: I see you, I won't speak to you, we are nonetheless in this together. The nod is Melbourne's contribution to public life and it is underrated.

07:47 — Tram arrives. Four minutes late. No one comments. Commenting would require acknowledging the expectation. We have lowered the expectation. The expectation is now: it comes eventually. We have done the state's work for it.

07:48 — Doors open. Warm air. Paper bag. Sausage. I was not hungry. I am now angry about being hungry. The tram has destabilised me.

07:52 — We stop between Nicholson and Brunswick Street. No announcement. The driver gets on the radio. A man in a suit sighs — the specific sigh of someone who has a meeting that started two minutes ago. The sigh moves through the carriage like a contagion. We are one body. We are a late body.

The tram is not late. You are early for your own suffering.

That should be on a plaque at every stop. That should be on the side of the tram. Yarra Trams can invoice me.

The Verdict

Sometimes the 86 is just vibes. The vibes are structural. The vibes are the predictable outcome of a public transport network whose capital investment has trailed population growth for the better part of two decades. The vibes are political. The vibes vote.

The next one's in twelve minutes. Or twenty. The PTV app doesn't know. Nobody knows. We're standing in the rain with our Myki cards and our sausage cravings and our collective, righteous exhaustion, and we're going to be late again.

Welcome to Melbourne. The coffee's good. The trams are a policy failure dressed in W-class heritage livery. We ride them anyway. We'll ride them tomorrow. We have nowhere else to be.