Some reading for Cup Day
The Public Transport Users Association has outlined the extent of this maze in a diagram showing the many agencies, quangos, private companies and safety bodies running the state’s public transport. — The Age
Read the full feature article at The Age: The Great Disconnect.
PS. Given part of the article was about how hard it is to find the right bus stop at Footscray, maybe it’s appropriate that the photo used was me looking grumpy in front of a number 404 bus. (Little geek joke there.)
Tags: PTUA, public transport, The Age
8 comments
Myki trams and buses: day one
A journo mentioned a certain MP this morning was quoting some transport-related sections my blog — presumably the favourable ones, such as the post that talked about the Myki transition plan. While my posts here do not necessarily represent PTUA policy, I suppose this blog is part of the mix of being an advocate — so I don’t have a big problem with that, provided it’s taken in context.
So, with that in mind, Myki is now valid on trams and buses.
So far today I’ve taken three bus rides:
On the first, everything worked fine. Scanners okay, and my touch-on and off charged me correctly: nothing, because I already have a zone 1 pass (eg a monthly) on the card.
On the second, the scanners worked okay, but as I touched-off, it said it had charged me 6 cents. This is the surcharge for using zone 2 on a weekend, when you have a zone 1 pass. The problem is, that section of the bus route is in the zone 1+2 overlap, so it shouldn’t have charged me anything. 6 cents isn’t a big deal, but if it were a weekday, it would have been an extra $2.02, which certainly is a big deal.
On the third, none of the three scanners on the bus were working.
As Maxwell Smart would say, “One out of three ain’t bad.”
I suppose it was inevitable that there were going to be glitches, and this is only a small sample, but really, it’s not very impressive.
Others out there on buses and trams are having similar experiences. It’s working fine for some, but some are getting free rides, and some scanners aren’t working.
Hopefully these problems will be ironed out quickly. Passengers have enough challenges without dealing with a problematic ticketing system.
Update Monday:
Tram ride 1: Tried to touch-on through my wallet, which normally works fine for me. Instead it said “Multiple cards detected.” Took the card out and tried again, and it worked okay. Didn’t bother to touch-off. ‘Cos you don’t have to anymore, right?
Tram ride 2: No response through wallet. Took it out of wallet (and left it out for subsequent rides), it decided to touch me off. A hangover from the previous ride? Correctly didn’t charge me anything.
I didn’t bother to touch it again — I have a Pass loaded, so I was paid up, but potentially someone on Myki Money (pay-as-you-go) who was taking a second trip more than two hours after the first, might not notice, and might not then be holding a valid ticket. This is another reason why the sounds need to be changed, but also if you touch onto a different tram from your previous ride, it should realise that’s the case, and treat it as another touch-on.
(It’s possible it was the same tram, as it was on the same tram route, a couple of hours after the first ride. But the tram was certainly on a different trip.)
Bus ride 1: Route 401 from the hospital precinct to North Melbourne station. Packed with students. Who says people don’t use buses? Many of them appeared to board without bothering to validate/touch/show a ticket, which is probably not a problem given 99% of them would get off the bus at the station and then need a ticket to get through the gates. I touched my Myki on and off, and all appeared to be well.
Bus ride 2: Route 219 from North Melbourne into the City. Touch-on worked okay, quite fast. Touch-off quite slow; I made sure to touch-off well before the bus stopped, so as not to delay it. Appeared to correctly charge me (no charge on top of my existing Zone 1 Pass).
So, 3/4 for those samples.
Update Monday night
A request for the 6 cent overcharge to be refunded (submitted via the web site) was processed; it should show up on my card within 24 hours.
I should add that travel on trains with Myki has worked fine today… as it has for months.
Tags: buses, Myki, public transport, trams
14 comments
The new timetables
Nice placement, fellas. Was that part of the plan?
But the real news is that it turns out the new Frankston/Pakenham/Cranbourne timetables introduced in June have had a noticeable effect on punctuality.
Metro figures presented by CEO Andrew Lezala at last week’s PTUA member meeting show that in the first two weeks of the new timetable, morning peak punctuality for the Caulfield group jumped from 65.1% to 78.7%.
Curiously, evening peak punctuality rose only slightly, from 56.5% to 57.9%. I actually expected this to improve more, since in theory it should be a little easier to control the departure times of trains entering the loop (eg at the start of their trips from Flinders Street), which is perhaps the biggest bottleneck on this group of lines. Obviously there must be other factors at work.
The all-day change for the group was from 68.9% to 73.2%, so still well below the 88% target, but a tangible improvement.
Apart from morning punctuality, anecdotally the overcrowding has reduced under the new timetable.
But changes on the Frankston line in particular are still causing controversy, of course.
Regular passenger Julie Davis from Carrum said her journey has been extended by half an hour because she changes at Richmond to catch a city loop train.
“If you wish to catch a loop train you have to endure stopping all stations or rush around like a maniac at Richmond where nothing is synced to cater for Frankston loop passengers,” she said.
– Jury out on new train timetable for Frankston line, Frankston Leader, 5/7/2010
Now… it may seem like half-an-hour, but it’s unlikely that it actually is, at least on a consistent basis. I’ve been doing a bit of this myself to/from the Sandringham line this week… It’s perhaps a minute to change platforms, and up to nine minutes to wait for the next express train to Frankston (but an average of 4.5 minutes, all being well). Inbound the wait at Richmond would be much less, generally around 2-3 minutes.
So worst-case scenario (on a good day) would be about 4 minutes inbound and 10 minutes outbound.
I think if I were her, I’d just catch the stopping train and settle down with a good book. It takes 10 minutes longer from Carrum to Richmond, but runs into the loop without changing, and is likely to have plenty of seats inbound (especially for trains that originate at Carrum), and outbound from about Ormond onwards.
Not that anybody likes a longer ride or a change of trains, of course.
But it now seems clear that the change has resulted in more reliable services — at least in morning peak, that is.
The full results are not out yet, but we already know that system-wide for June, Metro missed their target again.
It’ll be interesting to see how the final results look, and the Caulfield lines in particular.
Tags: advertising, Metro, public transport, trains
9 comments
In the wild
There’s a few thousand “More trains/trams/buses = less traffic” stickers out there, but it’s not that common to see them “in the wild”. By “in the wild” I mean stuck to cars that are not owned by PTUA committee members or their friends and family.
I don’t know who owns this little white car, but I was thrilled to see it had a “More trains = less traffic” sticker on the back of it.
It’s a bit hard to read the sticker… here’s a better picture of one (on my car):
You might think it odd, but the stickers were designed to go on cars. The implicit message to following motorists is that if PT were better, that car (and lots of others of course) might well not be on the road.
Also observed in the world of promotion yesterday — it seems Penguin Books are jumping on the bandwagon of bill posters, more commonly promoting concerts.
Tags: advertising, books, Penguin Books, PTUA
6 comments
Outer suburbs missing out on PT options
The government may be embarassed by crowded trains and Myki, but what they should be embarassed about is the sheer number of people who never use public transport because it simply isn’t a viable option for them for any of the trips they make.
So many areas in Melbourne have no PT other than local buses, and most of these run only every 30-60 minutes. It’s no wonder so few people use them and roads are clogged.
Channel 7 interviewed people in the aptly named Transit Place in Tarneit — their only PT is the 444 bus running every 40 minutes — for their views on outer-suburban transport. The report aired on Friday:
I compared some trips from Transit Place to major centres in the west, as well as the CBD, in the Metlink Journey Planner (eg by public transport, in the middle of the day on a weekday) to Google Maps trip planner (by car). The latter is always optimistic, and assumes little or no traffic, but it shows just how poorly the area is served for PT.
Trip to Werribee: PT 45 mins (via Hoppers Crossing); car 20 mins
Trip to Sunshine: PT 84-89 mins (via Hoppers Crossing and Footscray!); car 30 mins
Trip to Flinders St: PT 80-84 mins (via Hoppers Crossing); car 32 mins
And remember, the Journey Planner times are designed so you walk out the door just in time to catch the local 444 bus. On the way home again, you may have to wait up to 39 minutes if you just miss one.
Despite what Graham Currie says, it’s not just low income earners who feel the stress of having to drive everywhere. Many families have multiple cars in the driveway by neccesity, and for each vehicle it’s costing them thousands of dollars a year more than it would if they had useable PT that could replace some of those cars.
You can’t necessarily build rail lines into every suburb, but expanding the successful Smartbus services, offering frequent connections to major destinations, would go a long way to giving more people the option of using PT.
It’s great to see the media giving this issue an airing.
Myki doesn’t always give you the best fare
One of the selling points of Myki is that ‘Myki Money’ will charge you the best daily fare, if you touch-on and touch-off on every trip.
It turns out not to be always true. There’s at least one specific set of circumstances where it doesn’t.
The PTUA got asked a while back about travel around the zone boundaries, and specifically on a scenario similar to that outlined below. (I think the lady actually travels in the Surrey Hills area.)
Here’s how it works on Metcard, using a 10×2 hour Zone 1 ticket, and a separate 10×2 hour Zone 2 ticket:
Mckinnon to Caulfield at 9:05am. (Z1 2 hour, expires midday. $2.94)
Caulfield to Mckinnon at 10:05am. (existing fare. $0.00)
Mckinnon to Moorabbin at 11:05am. (Z2 2 hour, expires 2pm $2.02.)
Moorabbin to Mckinnon at 12:05pm. (existing fare. $0.00)
Metcard total $4.96
Here’s how it works on Myki Money:
McKinnon to Caulfield at 9:05am. (Product: Z1 2 hour, expires midday. $2.94)
Caulfield to Mckinnon at 10:05am. (existing product. $0.00)
Mckinnon to Moorabbin at 11:05am. (Upgrades the existing product to Z1+2 2 hour, expires midday. $2.02.)
Moorabbin to Mckinnon at 12:05pm. (Product: Z2 2 hour, expires 3pm. $2.02.)
Myki total $6.98.
I’ve received confirmation from the TTA that the calculation above is correct: that is, when Myki upgrades your existing (and still valid) fare to cover a new zone, it has the same expiry as the original fare, rather than allowing you the full 2+ hours.
This means in the scenario above, a passenger would be charged more on Myki than on Metcard. The only workaround is to use two Myki cards – just as one would do now to obtain the cheapest fare.
Admittedly this is a specific set of circumstances which is probably quite rare, and it depends on no other travel that day that would incur extra charges.
But it does show that Myki doesn’t necessarily give you the best fare.
What they should probably do is have the additional Z2 fare have its own expiry time — at least when the relevant journey (McKinnon to Moorabbin) can be made under a single zone fare.
Tags: Myki, public transport
17 comments
Making connections
I don’t think it’s any great secret that Melbourne’s buses aren’t very well co-ordinated to the trains — with two exceptions that is, the Trainlink buses at Epping and Cranbourne, which are timed to meet every train.
This is a major problem because so many trips simply can’t be made on PT without using a combination of services. If the connections are too difficult or time consuming, people just drive instead.
It’s easy in places like the CBD and inner-suburbs where there’s a tram every few minutes, every day of the week. But in many cases in the middle and outer suburbs, it’ll involve a bus — most of which are woefully infrequent.
And there you have the crux of why PT is well-used in the inner-burbs, but cars dominate further out.
But how do you prove the connections are crap? Compare the timetables.
Finally with the help of the government’s release of all the timetable data for the entire state, and a lot of crunching of the data, it’s been done. Well, mostly — it was damn tricky to get it all together, and it wasn’t possible to match all the bus routes to their stations.
The results?
If you get off a train from the city, looking for a bus, you’ve got a 37% chance of a connection (that is, a bus departing on the route you want, any time between 3 minutes after the train arriving, and 3 minutes after the next train turns up).
If there is a connection, you’ve got a 42% chance that you’ll have to wait more than 10 minutes for it.
The average connection time is 11.2 minutes.
You won’t be surprised to hear that on weekdays, connections are better than the averages above. On Saturdays they’re a little worse, and Sundays are the worst of all.
In some cases those connection times are so long that they exceed the time you might have spent just driving all the way to your destination.
There’s two ways to fix it. You can scrupulously co-ordinate all the timetables so buses meet trains at stations. But this is quite tricky, and can leave your buses idling waiting for trains, particularly if they connect to a number of stations, and the trains often run late. (Ahem!)
Or you can run all major services (trains, trams, arterial road buses) frequently; say every 10 minutes. Then without even trying, the average connection time will be 5 minutes.
Smartbuses (on weekdays) come close to this. No wonder they’re popular. If only there were more of them, more people would take the option of leaving the car at home more often.
- PTUA: Poor connections leave passengers waiting
- The Age: Push for more train-bus links to limit wait times (note that due to a spreadsheet stuff-up, the headline 37% figure came out as 46% in the report)
- Excel spreadsheet of results (425 Kb)
- Look up the figures for your local bus route or railway station
- How Paul Mees describes it: The network effect
Tags: buses, PTUA, public transport, trains
15 comments
Who has a metro?
The Age: Melbourne trains fail world ‘metro’ test
Based on this study: PTUA: Melbourne Metro by name, but not by nature, which looks at the biggest thirty cities in the developed world by population, and which of them have a metro — that is, a high capacity, high frequency (every 10 minutes all day, every day, to most stations) rail service.
In other words, a way of moving large numbers of people quickly and efficiently around, without making them wait very long or check a timetable first to catch a train.
Of those thirty cities, the only ones that don’t? Detroit, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Sydney and Melbourne.
But Melbourne could have it, just by running its existing trains more frequently outside peak hours.
I especially like the Tandberg cartoon that The Age did.
Read more at the links above.
Update:
Channel 7 coverage
Human Transit blog: Pitfalls of metro-envy
Tags: Melbourne, Metro, public transport, trains
11 comments
