Connex, wherefore art thou?

About three years ago, Connex assumed full control of Melbourne’s suburban rail operations, and so far they don’t seem to be doing a particularly good job. I haven’t criticised them significantly in the past, because I’ve been well-accustomed to poorly-run public transport since I started using the system as a child. It’s what I’ve come to expect. Recently, however, I’ve realised that the failings of past management don’t excuse Connex’s current failings; if anything, Connex should have learned from their mistakes.

First are the overt, quantifiable failings: The Victorian Department of Infrastructure’s last quarterly bulletin shows evidence of a steady decline in the level of service and customer satisfaction over recent months. To give you an idea of the current level of service, let’s take a look at the monthly bulletin for May this year. The report shows only 92.5% of their scheduled services running on-time.

The DOI defines on-time trains as those “[arriving] at their destination not more than 59 seconds before or not later than five minutes and 59 seconds after the scheduled time in the timetable”. I’m going to assume they actually meant that an on-time train cannot be more than 59 seconds early or five minutes and 59 seconds late, since the actual wording suggests that all trains qualify as ‘on-time’ (correct me if I’m wrong, but I would have thought a train can’t be simultaneously early and late)!

In all my years of using public transport, I’ve seen plenty of buses running early but I’m yet to see an early train. This suggests to me that almost one in every thirteen trains are at least six minutes late. I don’t know about you, but that falls a fair bit below my expectations.

Then there are the problems which don’t show up directly in monthly reports: a ridiculous ticket sales policy and severe overcrowding, to name two. I’ll address these two briefly to give you an idea of what I mean.

Melbourne’s suburban rail network is currently divided into two zones. I travel mostly within only one of these zones, so I usually carry a monthly ticket. However, when I do want to travel into the other zone, I require an extension ticket to allow this.

The first part of the problem here is that ticket machines will refuse to produce a ticket for zone 2 if you are in zone 1, and vice versa. This is not a stocking issue, as the tickets stored inside the machines are generic, and only obtain their identity when they are requested by a customer.

The second part of this problem is that staff aren’t authorised to be much more useful than the machines. The stated policy is that to buy a ticket for another zone, you must first prove that you have a valid monthly or yearly ticket for the zone in which you are making the purchase.

Now, I don’t know for sure whether this is some half-arsed attempt at reducing fare evasion, or simply another way to double-dip into customers’ pockets by forcing them to buy dual-zone tickets, but either way, I find the policy downright insulting. It often prevents buying tickets in advance, makes it difficult to travel between zones without shelling out extra money for a service you’re not getting, and sends a clear message that they don’t trust their customers.

The second problem is simply that Connex aren’t providing enough services during peak periods, so trains are overcrowded to the point that some people waiting on platforms literally can not fit in the train when it finally arrives.

That said, I don’t think all the blame lies with Connex. It’s also largely the Department of Infrastructure’s fault for implementing a privatisation model that clearly doesn’t work. They need to enforce higher levels of service if they expect them to be a reality. They need to charge steeper fines for consistently late trains. They need to crack down on senseless policies that serve only to hinder customers. The obvious rebuttal here is that being too strict on commercial providers will make them unprofitable, and they’ll withdraw their operations. But if this is truly the case, then the solution seems pretty obvious to me: the government should buy the rail network back.

It seems to me that one of the major responsibilities of government is to allocate money to services that are not commercially viable, but are important enough to operate anyway. If the Department of Infrastructure can not find a private provider that can offer a quality service at a reasonable price, then surely the train network falls under this category.

All this leaves me with a single unanswered question: why are Connex still running our trains?