04 May 2008

Public Transport Farce

The metropolitan public transport system in Victoria was operated by the government.

In the global trend to privatise all utilities, the government did exactly that.

The tendering out of a service is done officially, but unofficially contracts can be quite easily obtained for the company that is supposed to get the job.

The public transport system was handed over to two companies in order to stimulate competition, as claimed by the government. The companies that took over the rail system were Connex and M-Train. One was to take over the Eastern side of Melbourne, and the other the West. Since there is one per side the customer cannot chose which service they want. It is therefore a monopoly, and NOT competition as claimed by the government.

After some time, the whole public transport system was taken over by Connex, again a monopoly. Since the privatisation of the public transport system, the train services have slowly degraded. The current acceptable time frame of a late train is 10 minutes, where in some cases that falls in the time frame of another service. Previously a 10 minute delay, under government guidelines was NOT ACCEPTABLE. Connex constantly pay penalties for its substandard services.

The government has knowingly created a monopoly, and thus an inferior public transport system, at the expense of the general public.

1 comment:

Rich said...

Connex's crappy service certainly frustrates the hell out of Melbourne's commuters.

There's a new website set up to keep track of just how Melbourne's commuters feel about using the Melbourne train network over at melbourne-trains.com.

The twitter tracking provides a particularly interesting snapshot of what people are saying about Connex's service.