Railpage Australia™ - Public transport meltdown

Why does Melbourne's public transport lurch from one crisis to another? This week's spate of train and tram cancellations in relentless 40 degree heat made the national news. But it's hardly the first such crisis to embarrass those in charge. Two years ago, technical problems with the new trains bought for the privatised network caused a record number of cancellations. And the failure to plan over many years has created a seemingly endless problem with overcrowding in peak hour.

Politicians and managers blame the weather, the unions, their predecessors and almost everyone but themselves. Yet Melbourne's problems seem almost uniquely bad. In Perth, extreme heat slows the trains, but the system doesn't fall in a heap like in Melbourne. Even Adelaide, which has invested much less in its train system, came off better in the heat this week. And around the world, in places like central Europe and Canada that are vulnerable to extreme weather, public transport bears up under pressure. What is it about Melbourne?

Some of our problems go back years; others are more recent. Many of Melbourne's trains have air-conditioning systems that fail when the temperature exceeds 35 degrees, forcing them out of service. When this happens there are no spare trains, because Melbourne's entire surplus fleet was sold off for scrap between 2002 and 2005 - just before the record surge in patronage that has strained the fleet to breaking point.

But ultimately the weather is not to blame. Someone wrote the air- conditioning specification for the Comeng trains that ensures they (unlike Adelaide's Comeng trains) fail in large numbers on the hottest days every year. Someone approved the junking of the Hitachi train fleet without looking at the employment forecasts that pointed to a likely increase in peak-hour patronage. And someone should have looked at ways to mitigate heat-related system failures prior to this summer, the way train operators do in other cities, but no-one did. Melbourne's problems result from systemic failures of management.

Since 1999 the trains and trams have been privatised, using a model imported from Thatcher's Britain and copied virtually nowhere else. A recent OECD report cites Melbourne as the prime example of how not to privatise public transport. The reason is that instead of encouraging the 'innovation' and 'expertise' trumpeted by government PR, all it has done is set up a cosy arrangement between private operators and the government bureaucracy, where both parties have an incentive to collude against the passenger's best interests: in the operator's case to minimise its costs, and in the bureaucracy's case to protect the government from political damage.

Witness the scrapping of trains earlier this decade. This helped the private operator by removing a contractual liability from their balance sheet, and it helped the government by releasing it from any residual ownership obligations. But for passengers, it has meant the remaining trains are now intolerably overcrowded. The government has promised new trains, but not too many, since this would erode the private operator's margin.

A system run by accountants in this manner is prone to periodic collapse. And when it does we don't get solutions, just a tedious argument about who is responsible for what. This confusion works to the advantage of all the 'partners' in privatisation, not only because the public doesn't know where to point the finger, but also because it's unclear which entity (if any) is in a position to actually solve the problem. The Melbourne model of privatisation puts everyone in charge and no-one in charge, simultaneously.

Don't look to the newly released Victorian Transport Plan for a solution. This is an expensive distraction: a $38-billion soundbite dreamed up by the Hollowmen to deflect public anger away from the government. You'll look in vain for measures to prevent heat-related cancellations: this plan is about the mystique of the Big Project, no matter how mismanaged or ineffective.

The government meanwhile is busy with its much more serious plan, the re-privatisation of the system. The stated intention is to re-tender the train and tram franchise contracts with scant modifications, thereby ensuring our worst-practice system lives on for another 10 or 20 years. This is despite the government's own admission that privatisation isn't saving taxpayers a cent. Worse, it is probably wasting money, because it costs more to run a system badly than it does to run it well.

Cities with successful public transport - Vancouver, Stockholm, even Perth - do things very differently. They find a few competent people and put them in charge of the lot: timetables, rolling stock specifications, and the rest. And they measure their success by real passenger outcomes, not the technocratic inputs beloved of bean-counters - though they do better on these measures too.

The people of Melbourne have had enough. The next election will be fought on the issue of public transport, and re-privatisation will not save the Brumby Government. The writing is on the wall for it to scrap this flawed system while it can, and catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to managing public transport.

ABC Unleashed