I’ve never quite understood the logic behind rail privatisation.
Privatisation in general I semi get. You take some service that was previously provided by a single organisation–the state–and sell it off, thus generating a nice cash windfall for the government and in a handy bi-product you open that service up to competition, which should theoretically mean that the customers get a better service.
That’s great if it means I don’t have to take my phone service from Telstra or BT, and I can shop around for a great deal on my gas and electricity, but unfortunately private companies are driven by the need to make money, not provide a good service to their customers. If there’s no competition to force them to provide a decent service, then they’ll pursue profit over all else, every time.
And so it is with the railways: apart from some pathetically minimal service obligations that will have been written into the contract, there’s really nothing to encourage a train operating company to do anything other than the bare minimum they need to keep their franchise. It’s not as if passengers can choose to use a competing train company to get where they need to be, after all.
Here in Melbourne we’ve just swapped the widely loathed Connex, who’ve been running the trains for the last 10 years, for Hong Kong’s MTR.
We have the same drivers, the same station staff, the same track and the same ageing rolling stock, but it costs $25 Million to repaint all the trains and give the station staff natty new uniforms. Sure, the government has a new scapegoat to blame when things go wrong, but I can’t see the value in that for me as a customer.
When things go wrong, we even have the same person to tell us about it (well, I’m guessing that Metro spokeswoman Lanie Harris is some relation of Connex spokeswoman Lanie Harris).
Last night I got to spend a fun 45 minutes to an hour hanging around at the station staring at a non moving train as I attempted to get home.
The great new system appears to be that we still have the same delays, but there is now an announcement every five minutes telling you that there is a delay. And that no one knows when the delay will be resolved. About five different people will compete to make these announcements, sometimes giving conflicting information.
The other innovation is a small army of uniformed customer service chaps patrolling the platforms, but I wasn’t sure what the point of them was, as they didn’t appear to have any information–every time a customer asked something they would just read the answer off the screen on the platform, or repeat whatever the most recent announcement had said. I for one am glad we’re paying for them to be there to provide that useful service.