NSW Labor's commuter chaos
BY SAM WAINWRIGHT
SYDNEY — "CityRail regrets to announce ...". Before the details are even out, you can feel the atmosphere on the platform thicken with anger and exasperation. What is it this time: signal failure, derailment, train running late, cancelled even?
Since the Glenbrook rail disaster in December, in which seven people were killed and 51 injured, the image of Sydney's rail system has gone from bad to worse.
Derailments at main junctions have become an almost weekly event. In mid-June, a combined points and signals failure held up 60 trains during the evening peak. So far this year, at least 30 trains have failed to stop at red signals.
That the rail system is gasping along like some old contraption held together with string and band-aids should surprise no-one; despite increasing passenger numbers, funding has been in constant decline.
This year, the year of an expected, Olympics-induced, tripling of train passengers to 31 million, Premier Bob Carr's state Labor government really took the axe to the system, cutting $83 million from operating grants to CityRail and Countrylink, from $263 in 1999-2000 to $186 million in 2000-01. Grants to State Transit Authority buses and ferries were cut by 10%.
The government claimed that increasing passenger numbers and fare increases meant the system would lose only 15% of funding in real terms — the public will pay more for less.
CityRail originally sought to increase fares by 12.3%, but the Independent Pricing and Regulations Tribunal restricted fare increases to an average of 8% from July 1, although monthly, quarterly and annual tickets have gone up by 9.2%.
Carr and transport minister Carl Scully have sought to shift blame onto others. After each spectacular breakdown, everyone in NSW has to endure declarations like, "It's not good enough!" and "The public has a right to expect better". Carr repeatedly promises to give the CityRail bureaucrats a good talking to: "It's not unreasonable for a premier and a minister to demand their presence to hear what their reaction to [customer] concerns are and what answers might be".
After one breakdown in May, Scully declared a free-ride day as a "goodwill gesture" to the public — not much compensation for those regular commuters with prepaid monthly and yearly tickets. No one was fooled.
The government has already admitted that Olympics demand will mean that many regular services will be cancelled and others will simply skip stations. The fact that CityRail can't say which will happen where gives a inkling of the chaos to come.
Government and Olympics officials have taken to dishing out useless and irritating "advice". The International Olympics Committee's transport "expert" Anita de Frantz suggested that we should stay at home and avoid using public transport during the games, forgetting that, unlike IOC officials, most of us have to work for a living.
The Olympics Roads and Traffic Authority suggested that commuters avoid using the main north-south and east-west lines (there aren't many others) and have now told passengers to get off at Town Hall and walk to other city stations.
CityRail staff are not only copping passenger frustration, their safety is being compromised. According to the Autumn 2000 issue of the Rail Tram and Bus Worker, 12 workers were killed on the NSW rail system in the last 24 months, a dramatic increase on previous years. The driver training program has now been cut, from 22 to 18 weeks, in an effort to train more people before the Olympics.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald on June 8, the Rail Tram and Bus Union state secretary, Nick Lewocki, said, "Glenbrook was, in my view, a sad inevitability with this current disintegrated structure of operation".
As part of its corporatisation and privatisation, the rail system was broken into four entities in 1996 and a new, $380,000-a-year chief executive, Ron Christie, was appointed. Scully has admitted that in the process "safety might have slipped through the cracks".
The rail system has suffered from permanent under-funding and neglect at the hands of both Labor and Coalition governments for decades. While two short lines have been added in Sydney, the system remains pretty much as it was at the end of World War II, despite a doubling of the city's population. The new belts of suburbia in Sydney's west and south-west have only ever had token public transport services.
The inevitable result is an overloaded rail system for some and car dependence for others, and the conversion of streets that were once places to meet and go shopping (even Parramatta Road!) into angry, raging torrents of pollution, metal and noise.
Despite the regular release of glossy statements professing the government's commitment to public transport, the situation is not about to change. In the May budget, Carr also cut capital grants to the railways by 11%, from $263 million to $213 million.
Meanwhile, more than $1 billion was set aside for road works, including $237 million on M5 East alone. The recently completed Eastern Distributor cost taxpayers $700 million. The oil, car, tyre and road building companies don't just influence government transport policy, they own it.
Meanwhile, "CityRail apologises for any inconvenience caused ...".