Let’s do public transport properly

Waiting for a better public transport system - PTUA photograph

The seat of Melbourne is home to some of Victoria’s most critical – and iconic – public transport lines and hubs including Flinders Street Station, Southern Cross Station, the City Loop and Melbourne’s famous tram network.

But even within the Melbourne electorate, the public transport system is running down. At Newmarket station in peak period there were 18 trains to the city in 1929, and today there are 12. At South Kensington there were 16, but today there are 10. That pattern of rundown and neglect is true across the network.

The woeful state of the current system is unacceptable and immediate action is required. We need a public transport system that can respond to a growing population and offer a real alternative to car use.

The Greens have a six point plan to fix public transport:

1. End the failed privatisation experiment

Under privatisation, costs have dramatically increased, performance is appalling and planning is chaotic. No one is accountable for the system as a whole.

2. Establish a powerful, accountable Public Transport Authority (PTA)

The Greens will create a publicly accountable PTA modeled on successful agencies like Translink in Vancouver, ZVV in Zurich and Australia’s own Transperth.

3. Fix urgent problems

Expert task forces will act now to increase capacity, review ticketing, plan for expansion and establish the PTA.

4. Make public transport safe

Staff all train stations from first train to last, bring back tram conductors, fence rail lines and fix level crossings.

5. Extend rail and tram systems

Urgently extend the rail line from South Morang to Mernda, and tram routes to East Malvern Station, Doncaster Shoppingtown and Knox City. Double-track key lines, order more trains and make better use of the existing tram fleet.

6. Introduce ‘Swiss-style’ public transport for regional Victoria

Reform V/Line, order more high-speed trains, devise an integrated rail-bus network connecting regional Victorians to local, inter-regional and metropolitan destinations.

Public transport should be in public hands for the public good. The new Public Transport Authority will have the skills and experience needed to build great public transport. With a new agency, we can cut through the byzantine bureaucratic mess public transport users currently deal with, abolishing:

• Director of Public Transport and the Public Transport Division of the Department of Transport
• Transport Ticketing Authority
• VicTrack
• Metlink
• Public Transport Ombudsman
• Public Transport Customers Charter Consultative Committee

The new PTA aims to be small, smart and transparent. Public transport experts will be recruited from the best-performing agencies around the world, instead of re-assigning staff from the existing, failed bureaucracies. Based on the experience of Perth, Vancouver and Zurich, around 60 staff are required, including a dozen public transport experts. The PTA will hold public board meetings and seek community input into its plans. Public accountability is key.

Victoria has the potential for a world-class public transport system. It’s time to get started.

External Links:

• Six point plan to fix public transport
• Public transport a hot issue in Melbourne and Richmond
• Opposition pledges Doncaster rail line study

Westlink nightmare

The freedom of the open road

So the government has announced its route options for Westlink - its "number one priority project".

Whatever option is chosen, the outlet ("hell mouth" as one resident calls it) will come out south west of JJ Holland Park at Dock Link Road, with further links to Dynon Road and Footscray Road. The government has admitted there will be 60,000 vehicles a day using Westlink. A three lane freeway at peak hour would be expected to deliver about 5,000 vehicles an hour.

The result will be gridlock in Footscray Road and Dynon Road. That means much of the traffic will move up Kensington Road and along Macaulay Road - causing massive traffic jams in Kensington. Each evening the process will be reversed, with cars using Kensington to get back on to Westlink.

When planners were asked about this, they answered that trucks would not be able to get under the railway bridge on Kensington Road. This may be true of some trucks, but not all. It will have no effect on the thousands 0f cars which will constitute the majority of the traffic from Westlink.

The heavy traffic load will also mean gridlock in West Melbourne as cars and trucks try to get to and from the city on every available route.

Westlink is the first stage of the controversial Eddington east-west tunnel. The government said so in its documents sent to Infrastructure Australia, obtained by the Greens under the Freedom of Information Act. The RACV is already calling for completion of the whole tunnel.

The build up in traffic will be used to advocate further tunneling, and the result will be ventilation stacks and outlets across the parkland between Kensington and Fitzroy. We don't want to struggle to win something we thought we'd already won.

There is something decidedly dodgy about the government's figures. The say that Westlink will cost only $3 billion. They told Infrastructure Australia that the shorter version of the tunnel would cost $5.8 billion.

There is no federal funding for this project, because Victoria could show no net economic benefit for the project: we would be spending $3 for every $1 gained. Just what is the economic justification for this white elephant?

We don't want the pollution, the noise, and the traffic of Westlink. The entire route follows an underutilized train line. For a fraction of the cost we could have a proper commuter service.

In an era when climate change is a pressing reality, and when peak oil is rendering the combustion engine too expensive, we should be well past thinking of building more roads for gas-guzzling vehicles.

External links

• Westlink: three options, three nightmares
• Westlink route options
• Westlink, Schmestlink
• The People Plan

Fixing trains

At Kensington Station talking to commuters

This morning I was at Kensington Station speaking to commuters and watching them trying to climb on to overcrowded trains. They'd often have to wait for the next one. Is this the best we can do?

1929 timetable for the Essendon line

It's a little hard to read in the copy posted above, but the 1929 Victorian Railways timetable for the Essendon line makes interesting reading.

No less than 81 years ago, there were 17 trains stopping at Kensington on the way to the city between 7.00 am and 9.00 am on weekdays. That's an average of a train every 7 minutes or so.

Today, between 7.00 am and 9.00 am there are just 12 trains - an average of a train every 10 minutes.

The population of Melbourne in 1929 was less than 1 million. Today it is more than 4 million.

Our public transport system is infrequent, overcrowded and unreliable.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Zurich administers its entire public transport system (which moves more people than Melbourne’s) with just 36 staff (I'm not counting actual drivers). In our “Transport Ticketing Authority” alone – whose only job is to hire someone else to run a ticketing system – we have 104 staff.

A single train moves more people than an entire lane of cars driving past in an hour. Public transport can be efficient – to say nothing of the environmental benefits.

In a recent parliamentary inquiry, Greens MP, Greg Barber, found that Melbourne’s rail managers are guilty of “self-congratulation, complacency and strategic misrepresentation”.

The evidence showed that many ‘reasons’ given for public transport failure were simply excuses for poor planning or justifications for the disastrous adventure of privatisation.

1. Unprecedented summer heat

Melbourne has hot summers. We need to plan for them. The hot weather exposed the fact that we have no effective management of our transport maintenance backlog.

2. Over-crowding: the system is the victim of its own success

The government says that rapid patronage growth causes the crowding that delays trains. This is too convenient. Patronage targets were set almost a decade ago, but new trains are only just arriving. The main cause of over-crowding is poor planning.

3. Connex was bad; Metro will be better

Privatisation has been fraught since its inception due to “aggressive” under-bidding by the operators and the government’s acceptance of demands for extra funding.

4. The system is at capacity

It isn't. As the 1929 timetable shows, we ran far more trains 80 years ago.

Fragmented responsibilities created by privatisation, combined with inadequate planning skills, mean inefficient use of existing tracks and poor design of new projects.

Privatisation complicates and confuses planning for today’s growth in rail patronage. How can it possibly deliver high-quality public transport to meet tomorrow’s challenges?

It's time to fix public transport. We need to:

• end the current franchise arrangements;
• create a metropolitan public transport authority and bring in managers with a track record of success to deliver a ‘network’ that meets the needs of our city.

We need a public transport service we can all enjoy.

External Links

• Select Committee on Train Services
• The People Plan

MYKI Mouse

Many disabled commuters cannot reach high enough to use MYKI

In December 2007 Perth commuters saw the opening of the Mandurah Line. It is over 70 kilometres long, including a lengthy underground section. It has 11 stations, including two underground stations. It carries 60,000 people a day. It has rail lines that do not buckle in the heat.

The cost of the line itself was less than a billion dollars, but as part of the project the government also purchased a fleet of trains and carried out a number of other improvement works - totalling $1.4 billion.

Here in Melbourne we've spent the same amount on the MYKI ticket system - which is not even properly operational. It is a staggering waste of money.

Back in January I tried to buy a MYKI card on-line, in order to take advantage of the discount for buying early. Despite filling out all the form - including credit card details - I got a message on screen saying they were unable to process my application at this time and to try again. I did, with the same result. I sent an email to the address provided for difficulties. I have never had a response.

MYKI was supposed to be a "smart card" which would take account of the complexities of Melbourne's fares, and automatically calculate the cheapest.

But this week we've seen the city saver fare scrapped because MYKI could not calculate it.

Some 35,000 people use city saver tickets each day, and now they will have to pay 90 cents more for each trip. So commuters are having to pay more for a system which was supposed to make it easier for us.

And this follows the scrapping of the "short trip" ticket - which allowed a commuter to travel several stops one way. When that ticket was abolished, many inner Melbourne travellers found their commuting expenses going up 70%.

MYKI is already causing significant delays at train stations. Many platforms only allow one person at a time to exit, and even the few commuters with MYKIs cause significant bottlenecks as they "touch off".

If we have to touch off when alighting from trams, the delays at each stop will considerably slow tram journeys.

Because MYKI scanners are higher off the ground than Metcard validators, many disabled travellers cannot use them - breaching anti-discrimination laws.

It is hard to believe you could blow $1.4 billion on a dodgy ticketing system like MYKI.

That's enough to build over a hundred kilometres of railway track. Or we might want to do what they did with the Mandurah line and have less distance but a long underground section and a whole lot of new trains as well.

With $1.4 billion, we could buy 93 new six-carriage trains and still have enough left over to train 200 new drivers. Imagine how that investment would make our system more frequent and efficient.

It's hard not to be angry about MYKI. We will never get that money back.

But it's only the tip of the iceberg - we have not had a proper focus on public transport in the Victorian government for many years, so commuters have to put up with an infrequent, unreliable, overcrowded and poorly staffed service - a service that doesn't even run 24 hours a day in our 24 hour city.

Smart utilization of our trains, trams and buses could give us a great public transport system. With peak oil making cars much more expensive, and with the climate crisis crying out for carbon efficiency in transport, it's time we took the needs of public transport seriously.

External Links

• The People Plan

Hoddle Highway?

Hoddle Street beside Collingwood Town Hall

- just the other side of the Town Hall runs the Hurstbridge/Epping rail line

Each morning Hoddle Street is choked with traffic. The government has committed to a $5 million study “to investigate ways to improve the efficiency and reliability of all modes of transport along and across Hoddle Street from Eastern Freeway to just north of the M1 Freeway”.

Although the proposal is to improve "all modes of transport" the study is being conducted by VicRoads. The focus on Hoddle Street, separate from the other major transport routes with which it interrelates, suggests there will be a focus on cars and roads, rather than, for example, trains.

Close examination of the Project Description, which forms part of the Hoddle Street Study Scope document (downloadable from the home page of the Study) shows that the real purpose of this study is nothing other than roadworks. It is an engineering study to best carry out "grade separation" (ie flyovers and tunnels) along Hoddle Street:

Grade separating some of these junctions has the potential to improve the operation of Melbourne's central road system for cars, trams, buses and commercial vehicles.

The Government will allocate $5 million to commence engineering investigations to determine the feasibility of grade separating key junctions on Hoddle Street. A key element in these investigations will be to assess how disruption to traffic could best bee minimised during any construction works.

Rail will not be considered. Nor any other more imaginative options. It's just lots of road building. Disruption "to traffic" will be considered, but not to residents or parklands.

Each morning at peak hour Hoddle Street carries in total some 8000 vehicles. There is an average of 1.1 people per vehicle. Most of the traffic is heading into the city.

The best capacity roads can achieve is about 700 cars per hour per lane. Hoddle Street is already very close to that level of use, so the benefit from expensive grade separation is necessarily minimal.

Let's take a look at how people move in the area during the mornings at present:

People movement in Hoddle Street area

In addition to the 8000 cars along Hoddle Street, there are about 12,000 cars going along the cross streets. Along the cross streets, buses move about 4500 people at present. Trams move about 4200 people.

But the big people mover is rail. Trains in the vicinity of Hoddle Street move 80,000 people each morning. Whilst the cars sit in their traffic jams, fully loaded trains whisk by.

The train system has a lot of room for more efficiency - more frequent trains would get many more people into the city in less time. Those who have to travel by car would do so more easily.

Hoddle Street is crowded because cars are such an inefficient way to move people in numbers. The billions of dollars in upgrading Hoddle Street would be better spent upgrading the rail system.

And that's even before we've talked about peak oil or carbon emissions - or bicycles.

Residents certainly don't want this Hoddle Highway white elephant. It will mean using Yarra Park as a construction site for years, and major disruption to the local area. The Greens held a public meeting in the East Melbourne Library last week, with numbers overflowing the venue. The opposition was unanimous, well-informed and passionate.

We want imaginative solutions that deal with the real transport needs of Melbourne. The Greens' People Plan is a great start.

External Links

The People Plan

Kathleen Maltzahn's account of the Greens' East Melbourne public meeting

Hoddle Street Study