It’s Official – Sydney has the ‘World’s Worst Trains’

Official studies have now proven what disgruntled commuters have been saying all along … a report was commissioned by Cityrail (the authority that runs the commuter service in the greater Sydney area,but is more often called ‘Shityrail’, even by employees) last year, but the when it was completed, the findings were so embarrassing that Cityrail CEO Vince Graham did not present them to the Transport Minister or other rail authorities. Now they have been leaked to the media, less than a week before the state election 😆

The Hong Kong company Mass Transit Railway Corporation compared Sydney’s metro system with others around the world for efficiency, cost effectiveness, reliability and maintenance. They found that the system was hopelessly below EVERY other city on EVERY key indicator, even comparing to cities in South American and Asia.

Here are some of the sorry statistics …

Operating cost per passenger

1. Sydney – $6.70
2. N. America – $1.42
3. S. America – 0.98c
4. Europe – 0.98c
5. Asia – 0.69c

Maintenance cost per carriage km

1. Sydney – $1.23
2. N/S. America – $0.84c
3. Europe – $0.72c
4. Asia – 0.61c

Kilometers between incidents causing delays of 5 minutes or more

1. Sydney – 32km
2. World average – 60km
3. Hong Kong – 396km

Driving time vs paid time

1. Sydney – 40%
2. Hong Kong – 70%

If the drivers & guards are only spending 40% of their shift on a train, what the fuck are they doing the rest of the time ? Certainly not memorising the timetables that they don’t follow 😦

It was calculated that improving staffing inefficiencies alone would save between $70-120 million  a year 🙄

Of course now that the bigwigs have heard about the report, they just dismiss it saying that our system, with 2,000 kms of track & 300 stations, doesn’t compare to others in the world in size etc, so the comparision are not valid !!! Railcorp CEO Vince Graham said comparing Sydney’s train system with railways in other major cities is like comparing apples and oranges. “There is no metropolitan rail system anywhere in the world that has the same geography, the same patronage, the same number of stations as the Cityrail network,” Mr Graham told reporters. “It is important here to compare apples with apples and not apples with oranges.” Get your heads out of your arses guys, and have a look around – $250,000 was wasted on 17 Railcorp execs flying to overseas destinations (in one case for around a month !!) to study other systems, and they still can’t see any problems ????  These dickheads even claim that Sydney’s rail system is one of the most complex in the world – they obviously didn’t include Japan on their overseas junket, and have a look at how well Tokyo can run a system that has 2 million commuters pass through ONE station in ONE day !!!!

Just last week, one small breakdown on the Harbour Bridge caused 4,000 people to be trapped inside closed trains with no air conditioning for up to 3 hours, and 40,000 others were stranded without any way to get home. This week a major drug operation across the network was cancelled in case it caused problems and generated more ‘bad publicity’, after police had spent a month getting the operation organised !!!

And another problem is that reports show up to five commuters a week are collapsing in sweltering conditions on overcrowded trains, where temperatures regularly soar above 35C. The fainting rate peaks in summer as passengers put up with an ageing Cityrail fleet in which only about half the carriages are air-conditioned, with some more than 35 years old. More than a third of the 1500-carriage fleet will remain non-air-conditioned until at least 2010, with temperatures regularly more than 35C during summer. The sweaty conditions on Cityrail carriages contravene the Federal Government’s guidelines for the transport of live animals – including battery hens.

Well , what else can I say  – except they still expect us to vote them back in again this weekend ???