I have been commuting by train to the Melbourne CBD for over a decade. I have a distant, hazy memory of a punctual, clean, comfortable, enjoyable service (for at least a year). Sadly, almost inevitably, things went to poop.
I survived the Connex years and welcomed Metro with open, hopeful arms. Things did get a little better, but let’s be honest, the service still sucks like a top of the range Dyson vacuum cleaner.
It was tempting to use this blog as a personal venting vehicle for my commuting frustrations. There are plenty of blogs of this type out there, some of which are very popular and amusing. And public venting is much cheaper than private therapy, so this is an understandable trend.
But I want this blog to be more noble. I want it to drive real change. I want to document problems with Melbourne’s train service, with the aim of making the commuting experience better for all of us (including me of course). Who knows, maybe I can attract enough reader support that the people with the capacity to actually make a difference (are you reading Ted?) will take notice.
Where to begin? I have so many frustrations with the train service that it is difficult to know where to start. And there must be plenty of other things that frustrate other people massively that I’ve just not noticed. The breadth of potential blog material is overwhelming.
So let’s start with something that annoys all commuters. Punctuality, or more specifically, non-punctuality.
Metro publishes monthly punctuality statistics. I have long held the view that these statistics are NONSENSE. I should explain my use of CAPITALS. Metro’s statistics take no account of the weight of passenger numbers. Rush hour train services can be completely stuffed up (causing inconvenience to huge numbers of passengers), but Metro can run non rush hour services (carrying very few passengers) on time and still manage to hit punctuality targets. This is a complete joke. I have raised this issue with VIC government in the past, but they just don’t seem to get it. Maybe they are confused by the simplicity of the logic?
Anyway, recently I decided to start monitoring and recording Metro’s performance on my daily rush hour commute (why wasn’t I anal enough to start doing this years ago?). I have recorded my journey times (when the train wasn’t cancelled and actually ran), and will continue to do so.
I travel on the Sandringham line, and I appreciate that experience might be different on other parts of the network, but anecdotal feedback suggests to me that most lines are just as bad as one another. Perhaps through this blog I can start to collect data from other lines.
It is very early days and the number of observations is too low for me to publish detailed results. But I have to give you a teaser to keep you interested.
Metro defines a late train as one that arrives five minutes or more after the scheduled time. I have adopted this definition so that my statistics can be directly compared to the NONSENSE published by Metro.
Metro’s performance threshold is 88% (so no more than12% of trains can be late if the target is to be met). Now, in February 2011, a month that suffered serious storm disruption, Metro achieved punctuality of 85.2%. They only just missed the punctuality target! I certainly felt that my trips were less than 85.2% punctual.
With just 6 observations so far of travel to the city during rush hour, I can report that punctuality was only 66.67%. And this wasn’t a particularly unusual week,
So, my early conclusion (admittedly based on a statistically insignificant number of observations), is that Metro’s punctuality statistics are indeed NONSENSE.
Once I have collected a more meaningful amount of data, I will start to publish regular detailed performance results on this blog. I hope that you will come back to this site to see how things progress.
Punctuality is just one area of commuter frustration that I intend to tackle with this blog. Stay tuned for further discussion about the myriad of things that make your commute more stressful than it needs to be and suggestions as to how we can make matters better.
Until then, good luck with your commuting. You’ll need it.
