Am I waiting in vain?

I NOTICE that the pro Canal & River Trust publishers have 'gone to town' on the wonderful things that the Trust has achieved over the past year, and was waiting to see if narrowboatworld had fallen for it.

But to quote your Victor—'ner a word', so am I waiting in vain? asks T. Lang.

Visitor number conundrum

But one of the sheer exaggerations, or perhaps you will allow me to call them lies, was that 'Increased annual visitor numbers by 33% to 396m with visitor satisfaction hitting 85%'.

I have looked back and confirmed that Canal & River Trust were proclaiming it had 440,000,000 million visitor a year for a couple of years now, so how can 396,000,000 be an increase by 33%.  They are crackers, and must think we are too. And now another claim is that there are  'around 4.3 million regular visitors each fortnight'—again to quote Victor, work that one out.

Satisfaction

As to its 'visitor satisfaction', whoever thought this one up hasn't spoken to boaters, who they claim are visitors. I know of many who are absolutely fed up of having their way stopped by the many stoppages.

It just does not ring true when the Trust tells us it had the 'biggest ever programme of lock repairs and gate replacements, as well as hundreds of thousands of minor repair and maintenance tasks'.  So why so many stoppages?  Many more than when is was British Waterways.

It is only Monday, yet four already this week I read!

Doesn't believe it

Richard Parry says 'we beat our target for unplanned navigation closures with a further reduction year-on-year and I am pleased with the improvement in both boater and visitor satisfaction which grew to 76% and 85% respectively.  With another statement  'reduced unplanned navigation closures by 62%'! I certainly don't believe that eithert.

Like yourselves, I have cruised for many days with no longer having the help of a volunteer lock keepers, they being very few and far between, yet we are told that there now 750 of them.  Like I am sure many other boaters, I would like to know where.

Statistics

There are many more debatable statistics, so like you it only remains for me to add those immortal words of Benjamin Disraeli: There are three kinds of lies, lies, dammed lies and statistics.