Transportation woes

I'm sure that many posts will cover what we did this weekend in Amsterdam. Since all 11 of us were together pretty much all weekend, I won't go in to all of that. I will, however touch on some issues we had with transportation. Besides having to walk a mile between our metro stop and our hotel, nothing really was wrong while trying to use the tram system. With a map you can solve anything (or with many different, corresponding maps...especially ones that pop up). The things I took issue with, and the things I will write about all happened on Sunday.
Granted, many people had close calls with cars and with the trams that come in abnormally close to the sidewalk. But Shannon quite literally almost got flattened by a car while crossing the street. That car was just not going to even consider braking. Then, 2 minutes later, I was about to cross another street in accordance with the green pedistrian light. So I started to step off the curb, with my umbrella restricting my peripheal vision. Its a good thing that I heard the shouts of people behind me, because this bike was speeding down the street. No bell, no shout, no slowing down. So I sucked it in like never before and narrowly avoided getting killed by a bicycle by centimeters. It was very startling. In fact, it was really scary to me.
Then, at 1:45, people with Eurail passes were on our platform, waiting for our 2:07 train that never came. Turns out that the train left 25 minutes EARLY from a different track. I have never ever heard of something like that leaving early. Late, sure, happens all the time. But early? So we chilled in the train station for 3 more hours before catching the 5:05 train. An hour outside of Amsterdam we got stopped dead on the tracks for 90 minutes so they could do maintenance on the track. So, instead of getting home by 5:00 like originally planned, or even 7:30 as the amended plan called for, we arrived home at 9:30. Really long day of bad transportation.