Weekly, monthly and yearly ticketholders can apply for a free daily ticket from Metro.

V/Line users with a ticket that was valid on Tuesday can apply for a free travel voucher.

While we don’t expect that those who faced long delays will be placated by a free day’s travel, the PTUA encourages eligible users to submit a claim form. And we encourage you to make sure ensure the government knows that you care about public transport, and want to see more and better services. Make your voice heard.

PTUA President Daniel Bowen urged the State Government to throw its own weight behind the campaign. “The government has been so conditioned to public transport failure that in all the years we said Melbourne needs this kind of approach, they had no response other than to stonewall and ridicule. Now there is the will to transform the system and the government has to get behind that,” he said.

A Senate inquiry last year into public transport management found that an independent planning authority, such as operates in Perth and in other cities around the world, had the greatest potential for fixing the system. “This kind of body would work with public and private operators to simplify timetables and get the trains, trams and buses working together to provide a seamless network for all Melburnians: morning, noon and night,” Mr Bowen said.

For some time, PTUA Secretary Tony Morton has been travelling to and from work with a stopwatch. His aim is to measure—carefully and scientifically—what it is that’s making Melbourne trams so slow. His stopwatch counts up the ‘dead time’ on tram journeys: the lost time when the tram isn’t actually picking up or dropping off passengers, yet is not moving.

His results have proved surprising. While trams do spend time in traffic queues in places where trams and cars share a lane, that’s not the biggest source of delay. More often, a stationary tram is just waiting for a red traffic light to turn green.

“A couple of years ago I did a study on the Lygon Street tram,” Dr Morton said. “What I found is that even if you don’t count boarding time, trams are delayed twice as long in the central city as they are in the suburbs. This is surprising at first, because in the CBD, trams and cars occupy separate lanes. But it starts to make sense once you realise the biggest problem is traffic lights, not car congestion.”

Dr Morton’s conclusion—that trams spend up to one-third of their travel time just waiting for red lights—was presented at a Melbourne transport conference in 2007.

Now, Dr Morton has turned his attention to a newly controversial question: whether clearways improve tram travel speeds in ‘peak shoulder’ times.

“In July this year, the clearway finish time in Sydney Road was extended from 6pm to 7pm,” he said. “As it happens, this is exactly the time when I’m travelling home on the number 19 tram. So I’ve been able to time the trams before and after the clearway time was extended, to see what sort of difference it would really make.”

His results? “In June before the clearway was extended, northbound trams took an average of 9 minutes and 12 seconds to travel the length of Sydney Road Brunswick. In the 4 months or so since July, they have taken an average of 8 minutes and 58 seconds. The 14 second difference is not statistically significant, and may well be down to pure chance,” Dr Morton explained.

Dr Morton also collected data for morning peak travel to the city, and for travel in Royal Parade, immediately south of Sydney Road. This evidence confirmed his earlier finding: that trams are delayed more by red lights close to the city than by traffic queues further out. “In Sydney Road the trams averaged 16.5kph in the evening, but in Royal Parade they only averaged 15.1kph. Yet as we all know, Royal Parade has a barrier to keep the cars off the tram tracks—there’s no traffic for the trams to be caught in. That’s why when people in officialdom talk about delays to trams, just talking about ‘traffic congestion’ is far too simplistic.”

There was also the opportunity to time the tram in the middle of the day on weekends, a time when trams are known to be significantly affected by traffic queues. “We certainly recorded a significant amount of dead time,” Dr Morton said. “But to put this in perspective, it’s about as much delay as occurs to Swanston Street trams at the same time, without any traffic queues to delay them.”

“The longest delays in Sydney Road, without question, occur in the morning peak on sporadic occasions when traffic queues back up Sydney Road from Brunswick Road. The longest of these I observed was a 20 minute delay. Yet even including these in the average, the average speed is faster than just to the south, on the reserved tramway in Royal Parade.”

Dr Morton urged attention to traffic light priority for trams. “Clearways seem to be mainly about squeezing in more cars. We have a great opportunity with a new tram operator coming to Melbourne, to refocus on what world’s best practice can do to speed up our trams.”

Summary of Results

Observations were collected between 25 May 2009 and 18 November 2009. AM observations were collected between 8am and 8:30am. PM observations were collected between 6:00pm and 7:00pm.

The difference of 14 seconds between mean travel time in May–June and in July–November has a t-statistic of 0.77. The null hypothesis—that the true mean travel time is the same before and after the clearway extension—is not rejected at the 80% level.

The median travel time, at 9 minutes, is identical before and after the clearway extension. This is consistent with the running time according to the Yarra Trams timetable, which was not changed with the September 2009 timetable revisions.

PTUA submission (PDF, 449Kb)

Summary:

The present inquiry has been prompted by an ongoing and widespread pattern of failure in Victoria’s train services, culminating in the near-total shutdown of the metropolitan system in extreme heat conditions in late January 2009. In keeping with the terms of reference, this submission does not aim to catalogue the failures that have occurred in Victorian train services in recent years, but to analyse the underlying factors.

It has frequently been observed that Melbourne scores near the bottom of the world’s large urban rail systems in its fitness for the purpose of transporting people. Yet at the same time, Melbourne is in no way short of rail infrastructure relative to other cities with higher rates of train travel. The conclusion to be drawn is that there are few technical justifications for the poor record of train operations in Victoria, and that the true factors underlying the state of our public transport system must be sought elsewhere.

In 2005, a team of experts from the University of Toronto reviewed the factors that contribute to ‘best practice’ in urban transport and concluded that the most critical requirement is effective governance—more important even than finance, infrastructure and urban land-use planning. When one investigates the management arrangements for public transport in all the cities that have been most successful in growing patronage and mode share in the past two decades, one finds in all cases that there is one body that bears ultimate responsibility for all aspects of the system: from the state of the infrastructure to the frequency and reliability of service, the cleanliness of vehicles and the level of crowding.

In Victoria, a passenger who is dissatisfied with their public transport service must take their complaint to a private operator. They quickly learn that under our franchising system, governments and franchisees are free to avoid any difficult issue by passing the buck, and only when an issue lasts long enough to cause real political damage, as with the train failures in January 2009, is a Minister forced to declare that “the buck stops here”. For the rest of the time, we have a system where passengers complain to the private operators and the operators dismiss the complaints. The litany of train system failures—whether acute as in January 2009, or chronic as in the overcrowding seen every day—is the natural consequence of this hands-off approach.

If we are to have a public transport system that is not set up to fail, there is a need to reform the management arrangements that perpetuate failure. Despite all the promise of ‘innovation’ that accompanied privatisation in 1999 (and re-privatisation in 2004), the only evident result was to perpetuate and entrench the old management practices under private owners. Now that the Minister has admitted that franchising is no cheaper for the taxpayer than simple retention of train and tram services in public ownership, there are no good reasons left for continuing the franchising experiment, and many good reasons to pursue an alternative model.

The timing of this inquiry is fortunate, in that not only is there is an opportunity this year for the government to pursue new management arrangements at minimal cost, but there is also a ready-made candidate in the Public Transport Authority of Western Australia, better known as TransPerth. In relative terms, Perth has in recent years been more successful in growing public transport patronage than any other capital city in Australia, Melbourne included. One of the key lessons from Perth is the need to recruit expertise from successful jurisdictions, including overseas. Given the similarities in legislative framework with WA, a similar Public Transport Authority may readily be established in Victoria. Its first task would be to make a decision on the re-tendering of contracts for Melbourne’s train and tram operations: this may be to re-tender to new private operators (under redrawn contracts) or to return to public ownership.

The specific problems that led to the catastrophic failure of the train system in Summer 2008-09 have a number of immediate causes, leaving aside the general neglect and planning failures for which we have proposed a competent Public Transport Authority as a remedy. These immediate causes relate primarily to track buckling, the fitout of the Comeng train fleet and other maintenance issues. In relation to these immediate issues we have made a number of recommendations, in particular the accelerated rollout of concrete sleepers and an upgrade to the Comeng air-conditioning units.

There are also numerous longer-term issues that affect the train system, in particular overcrowding, inadequate train services both within and outside peak hours, operating practices that waste rail capacity, and the lack of a proper multimodal network. Many of these issues would be tasks for a new Public Transport Authority to address in its initial years of operation. Our recommendations on these issues are intended as guidance, to highlight the actions that will help convert Victoria’s rail systems from failures to world-leading successes.

Note that V/Line and other regional issues are being covered in a separate submission from the PTUA Geelong branch.