I got forwarded the following email (not by someone at ARTA), sent by a regular commuter on the Western Line:
Dear ARTA
Ongoing concerns about rail transport especially on the Western Line:
A. Cancelling of trains – Please check (as funder) with Veolia whether they intend to ad hoc cancel the 6.20am train from Swanson to Britomart (cancelled twice this week – no msg over the tannoy). Today on the replacement service (6.35am departure from Swanson) we were told this train had fewer carriage as “not many people travelling” and from New Lynn on this train was crowded with standing passengers. This is also the train type that usually has diesel fumes coming into the carriages (in spite of denials by all concerned), hence many of us prefer not to travel in that train. Other passengers at my station were discussing the fact that they may have to get up even earlier because the train they usually catch appears to be subject to being cancelled, which we now suspect is more likely due to a financial decision (experimental, this year) not to run it due to falling numbers of pax.
B. Timetables – everyday we get text messages saying “train delayed 10 minutes due to
1. “operational fault”
2. “train fault”
3. “signal failure” etcPlease ask Veolia to publish timetables that reflect the reality of the service they can offer; e.g the 6.20am from Swanson is scheduled to arrive at Britomart at 7.13am – this is obviously an impossibility in the near future and I was surprised to see this published arrival time as the train (if running and “on time”) arrives at Britomart at approximately 7.23 am.
C. Another issue that seems to be overlooked is that if we commit to public transport many of us have connecting services – I have noticed staff at Britomart smiling indulgently at passengers racing from one platform to another to catch a train. I have a bus connection which I often miss, even if I run up the escalators and down the road. If the train arrived at the published time, I could easily walk to this bus. Stress is a word mentioned most often amongst passengers, including, right now, students starting first semester at University who are not only dealing with new life situations, but the added realisation of the unreliability of the train services. One student today was crying as this was the last straw in a challenging day.
D. Several passengers on the platform and in the train this morning were discussing what they could do to get realistic information about what is happening so they can make better informed decisions about travel arrangements. In their attempts to communicate effectively with the operators (phone calls, emails etc) the general feeling is that they get a “generic” letter back or are “fobbed off” with banal (business speak, no blame to us type) comments .
Overall – we may have lost the point of why we have public transport – i.e. to conveniently, effectively and environmentally sustainably transport our working and studying people (and our older folks and our potential tourists.).
What has gone so wrong that Veolia staff will say – “oh ARTA has decided…”, ARTA staff will say “oh, you need to talk with Veolia, they run the service”, OnTrack staff will say – “oh we are working on this wonderful rail system that will be so good in the future, please bear with us. It has been a long four+ years of this kind of fudging of the real situation. There may be good things in the future, meanwhile life continues and we deserve better/honest service delivery now.
Please consider this email – many of the passengers are supporting the system twice – as fare paying passengers and as rate payers to ARTA. Do we have a voice? Please be honest and realistic about the situation. For example, if the Veolia management plan is to “ad hoc” cancel a service, let the passengers know this is the plan (we are generally intelligent people), then we can consider alternatives that reduce stress and fit with our working and life styles. In January I was able to take my car to work – a pleasant journey, at the same time of the morning, which took 20-25 minutes maximum. On the train it would have taken 50-60 minutes best time. 75 minutes on Monday, including waiting for the replacement train.
Also, I note that the number of passengers appears to have dropped on the service I use.
Thank you for your consideration of this lengthy email – I hope it will be helpful in addressing some of the issues and lead to a better profile for the Auckland train services – we’d like to think that “our train service” values us (eg we buy a ticket and are given a timetable – a mutual contract), yet we often feel like chattels rather than partners.
There seem to be two obvious problems here. The first is the ongoing problems of having a reliable service run on the Western Line. In recent months this seems to be getting worse rather than better. Here are the reliability statistics for the rail network for January – for example:
On the Western Line we can see that only 36% of trains arrived at their destination within five minutes of the timetabled time. Only 36% – that’s absolutely pathetic! That means that, boarding a train on the Western Line in January, you had only just over a one in three chance of not being late by less than five minutes. It is true that signalling problems experienced at Newmarket caused many of these problems, but really does the average passenger give a damn about whether something’s Veolia’s fault, ARTA’s fault or KiwiRail’s fault? I don’t think so.
Which brings us to the real problem in my opinion – where does the buck stop? If there’s a problem then it seems like all the agencies just play “pass the buck”: blaming the other for the problem. If we compare this to Wellington, there’s quite a difference. Over the last few weeks there have been a number of problems on the rail network in Wellington – but because KiwiRail does pretty much everything when it comes to operating the rail network in Wellington they’ve fronted up – given everyone a day’s free travel, ‘owned’ the problem and are actually quite likely to do something about it. I guess one could never give Auckland rail passengers compensation for the crap we have to put up with as most days would probably end up being free.
The really bizarre thing in all of this though is that Steven Joyce doesn’t like the way Wellington’s rail system is set up. He wants to separate out the agency that does the day-to-day operations of the rail system (like Veolia in Auckland) from that which owns the trains themselves. In Wellington KiwiRail does both these, at far lower per-passenger subsidies and actually does seem accountable for its performance. Shouldn’t Auckland be copying what’s going on down there, rather than vice-versa?
I agree, the service has been completely appaling this year. Perhaps I should write one as well.
If Stephen Joyce is still keen on going towards something in Wellington, like the British model of franchising (what is used for Veolia), he should look again, carefully, at how things worked in practice in the UK, or more precisely didn’t work. What he is proposing simply adds an extra level of fragmentation for, frankly, no good end. If Kiwirail is remaining in Government ownership, and no-one now is seriously suggesting that it should be privatised again, then that is all the control they need. The reasons why the Auckland rail operation was originally tendered out don’t really apply any more.
Wow, western line has a 10% cancellation rate! So I assume that the 36.1% punctuality must only refer to the trains that actually did run, right?
So if we apply this to the 92 Western Line services that are sheduled to run on an normal weekday, only 30 trains will be more or less on time, 53 will be more than five minutes late and 9 won’t make it at all!
“What has gone so wrong that Veolia staff will say – “oh ARTA has decided…”, ARTA staff will say “oh, you need to talk with Veolia, they run the service”, OnTrack staff will say – “oh we are working on this wonderful rail system that will be so good in the future, please bear with us.”
This is one of the problems with the way public transport is funded. With most goods and services we pay the full price directly to the seller. Successful sellers are generally those that provide goods and services that are ones people want to buy and which they deliver to a standard that satisfies buyers.
On the other hand, public transport operators have two customers to satisfy: the traveling public and government, local or central or both. The operator might be able to turn a profit based on subsidy income by keeping government happy, even if their passengers aren’t.
For example, I used to regularly take a long distance train in the UK and then transferred to a local connector service. There was really no point in operating the connector without the long distance service to provide it with passengers. The timetables for each coincided. But, if the long distance service was late, the connector would depart with almost no one on board, rather than waiting. Why? Because if they didn’t, then their departure statistics would look bad and the government would punish them by withholding subsidy. The subsidy was more important than the passengers.
Subsidies are a reality that can’t be avoided. But it will inevitably confuse the link between transport operator and passenger and the incentive to provide the service that the passenger wants.
“and no-one now is seriously suggesting that it should be privatised again”
On what basis do you say that? I know that National would very much like to privatise it again. They have said they wouldn’t do it in this term of government, but I have not heard them giving any such promises for post 2011.
I’ve been a loyal commuter on the Western Line for 3 years. Now I’ve given up. A one-and-a-half hour commute twice every day just isn’t acceptable for a journey I can drive in under 30 minutes.
How many others are abandoning the Western Line? How many of us will NEVER return?
What’s the point of all the investment in upgrades if you disaffect your customer base in the process?
I’ll be keeping an eye on the train patronage statistics over the next year or so. As we’ve seen in the past, a downward trend in PT use is a very difficult thing to stop and reverse.
To Max –
Yes, but who would buy Kiwirail? Fifteen years of private ownership have demonstrated pretty thoroughly that:
(a) you cannot run a freight railway in New Zealand on straight commercial terms;
(b) as a result, if you want to have 14m tonnes of loaded freight per year on rail, you have to be prepared to pay some pretty big subsidies; but because,
(c) government will not pay subsidies to a privately-owned ‘monopoly’, as was made clear to both Tranz Rail and Toll;
then, a business as subsidy-dependant as this needs to remain in the public sector, whereas an infrastructural monopoly like Auckland Airport can be and was happily privatised. Certainly, there is no point in putting the passenger side of the rail business back in private ownership.