Last Thursday I boarded a Metrolink train in Riverside, at 12:40 p.m., heading southwest toward the station in the city of Orange. It was my understanding, encouraged by the conductor, that a “Los Angeles” [bound] train would arrive within a reasonably short time; I could board it and exit at the station in Norwalk in Los Angeles County, and make quick connections to get home. The conductor repeated this assurance as the train pulled into the station in Orange.
About an hour passed; no train. I called the service number–it was now past 2 p.m.–and was told the next train would not come until 4:30! I might not get back until six hours after leaving Riverside! I wound up taking two buses, one of which took an hour to appear and another hour to reach the connection I needed. It was 6 p.m. when I got home.
Should the conductor bear blame for this?
Upon looking at the timetable, the 4:09 PM train to Union Station is indeed the first Norwalk-bound train that arrives at Orange after the train you came in on arrived at 1-ish, so the conductor would have been mistaken if he told you there’d be a northbound train “within a reasonably short time”.
If the conductor had given you correct information, how would you have proceeded, and what time would you hare arrived home?
Most likely, if he had told me what the service number person told me, I would have called the information number for the Orange County bus system and made my way back to the Norwalk Green Line Station hours earlier; from there to the “Rosa Parks” station (Blue Line connection); and driven home–I parked my car at the Artesia Blue Line station. I might have made it home about 3 pm instead of 6 pm. If what the conductor had told me were the truth, I would have taken the Los Angeles-bound train to the Norwalk Metrolink station; taken a Norwalk bus back to the Green Line station; and proceeded from there. The conductor’s information completely misled me and made me waste three hours. :mad:
Yeah you should use google maps or similar app to work out which public transit connections to make. People can’t be trusted to memorize a table of numbers.
I would not rely on a transit employee to tell me what train or bus to take, where or when. I check out all the timetables and connections ahead of time and plan my trip accordingly. If I were to try to have someone else do it, that person would have to be part of the trip planning line - which I’m still not sure I’d trust if the trip were across multiple transit services.
FWIW, some Metrolink schedules changed effective June 6, 2016. So the conductor may have been working off of old information.
The smart thing for the conductor to do would have been to hand you a new timetable and let you look it up, or have you call Metrolink information.
That is likely the mistake I made. I should have picked up schedules for those lines at least a week before my trip rather than trusting an employee. Although I don’t know what he stood to gain by misleading me. :mad:
I spent more than 10 years riding the Metrolink system daily, and I’m really surprised by the misinformation from a conductor. It’s possible he was subbing for someone else and that it wasn’t his normal line, but then I’d expect he’d have looked up the info in a schedule himself.
I’d say it’s reasonable for you to have relied upon information from the conductor, though as others have said, it would (obviously, in retrospect) have been worthwhile to have looked it up yourself. You say, however, the you had an understanding that was “encouraged” by the conductor. What led you initially to think the schedule was favorable to you?
Don’t attribute to malice, etc. People make mistakes.
Yes he is to blame. Why does it matter? What do you intend to do about it? People make mistakes.
Yes, it can be blamed on the conductor. He gave you wrong information.
Or, it can be blamed on you. You chose not to go to the most reliable source for information, but to the more convenient but less reliable one.
Blame is not indivisible.
And, we might reasonably ask, what is the point of blaming anybody for this? Does it matter? Does it change anything? Next time, presumably, you would do things differently, but is the difference in any way related to the question of how you apportion moral responsibility for the stuff-up that happened this time?
I might point out that, because of the conductor’s wrong information, I lost three hours of time–one hour waiting at the station in Orange for a train that never came, one hour waiting for the 460 bus (MTA) because the bus I transferred to it from, stopped too late for me to reach the 460 stop across the street ( so I had to wait for the next one), and an hour of riding the 460 bus until it finally reached my connection in Norwalk. I was a nervous wreck by the time I got home. 
And assigning blame somehow gives you that lost time?
It sucks that you lost the time, and gained the aggravation, but does it matter whose fault it is?
It does if I can get some satisfaction out of it. I’m not going around looking for this conductor with a sockful of wet sand.
You lost the same amount of time, no matter how you apportion blame between the conductor and yourself. Thus, apportioning the blame achieves nothing.
If anything, it may be counterproductive, since apportioning blame to others may tend to distract you from asking yourself what you can do to take ownership of this situation, and prevent it from recurring.
only problem with getting wrong info is you can lose money as tickets fluctuate depending on commuter times and routes …it gets worse if you get stuck in union station over night as they kick you out since Amtrak owns it …and security will repeatly chase ya out as people try to sneak and hide out over night ,
I did not use Union Station. I had traveled via the east-west Metro Green Line to its eastern terminus in Norwalk; then I took a Norwalk city bus to the Metrolink station, where I boarded the Metrolink train which I transferred from at Orange to the train that I rode to Riverside.
On the way back, it was the conductor in the train that took me from Riverside to Orange who misled me. Yes, the train I wanted would go to Union Station, all right–but I wasn’t going that far–only to Norwalk. It was this train that never appeared, so I had to use buses instead.
I did. The answer came back, Don’t ride a train to Riverside again.
Today I went there again, in my car. Worst idea yet. Summer solstice, and 108 degrees in Riverside. I was just as much a wreck when I got home today as I was last Thursday. I’m 67 and overweight, and I can’t keep abusing my system like this. So, no more trips to Riverside, by any means.
nm