AP This is wildly off topic, unless you consider smacking people in the head with large concrete balls a sport. Indonesian authorities have decided that the best way to thwart “roof surfers” — those who ride on the roofs of trains to avoid overcrowding and those pesky fares inside the cars — is to install a series of grapefruit-sized concrete balls above the tracks, a few inches from the train roof. That way any freeloading passengers will be scraped off or seriously hurt. Your stop: Earlier than you thought it was.
And that was just the least crazy idea.
Other ideas proposed by the government include hosing down the scofflaws with red paint, threatening them with dogs and appealing for help from religious leaders.
“We’ve tried just about everything, even putting rolls of barbed wire on the roof, but nothing seems to work,” said Mateta Rizahulhaq, a spokesman for the state-owned railway company PT Kereta Api. “Maybe this will do it.”
Mulyanto, a 27-year-old shopkeeper, who rides between his hometown of Bogor and Jakarta almost every day for work, said he doesn’t think it will last long. “They’ve tried everything to keep us from riding … in the end we always win.”
“We like it up there, it’s windy, really nice.”
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Indonesia cracks down on ‘train surfers’ [USA Today]
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- staph1nfection - Jan 17, 2012 at 9:41 PM
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This sounds like a video game idea gone bad…
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- govtminion - Jan 18, 2012 at 2:34 PM
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I’m going to take a wild shot in the dark here and say that Indonesia does NOT have free health care the way Canada does…
