Re: Yarra Trams Article in Sunday Age

[amorton@mudguard.ee.mu.oz.au (Anthony Morton)]

Railvic  <railvic@primus.com.au> wrote:

>This is not a customer-hating attitude, this simply is the fact ...
>Customer can pre-purchase tickets (fact!).  And if they choose not to
>take this advantage, then they must be prepared to queue up during the
>peak hours (fact!).  And if you missed your train, don't blame the
>staff, but those queued before you (fact!).  Or you should arrive
>earlier to be ahead of other customers!  First in first served!!

This isn't rocket science.  I'm only comparing the current system with the
one it replaced.  We had staff at stations capable of:

- selling the most popular tickets promptly and with minimal fuss;
- selling four tickets to a family of four without having to carry out
  four separate transactions, and allowing one note to pay for all of them
  without any 'no more than $10 in change' nonsense;
- keeping an eye on the platform so passengers felt secure;
- assisting the passenger at Hawthorn wanting to go to Essendon, with a map
  that actually shows both lines;
- assisting people who are unfamiliar with the system (after all we were
  all new PT users once);
- and so on.

The staff were replaced with ticket machines capable of none of these
functions, over howls of protest from PT users.  In a social engineering
exercise instigated by career bureaucrats at the PTC, we were told to
stop behaving as though PT catered for spontaneous travel, and exercise the
inconvenient alternative of prepurchasing tickets from retail outlets, as
though fare collection was no longer the operator's responsibility.

You can take your pick which is the more passenger-hostile: the replacement
of staff with ticket machines to the detriment of passenger convenience and
safety, or the attempt to offload the responsibility for fare collection
onto passengers (with retailers caught in the middle), or the attitude that
blames passengers for getting caught in queues due to the introduction of a
system they didn't ask for.

>Like many other customers, I pre-purchase my tickets and cannot
>understand why such a concept is not acceptable to people who choose not
>to?  Afterall, this concept is not new and does apply to airlines and
>interstate trains services, etc. as well.

Airfares and long-distance train fares involve larger transactions and so
inherently involve a larger degree of forward planning.  Urban PT fares are
just one amongst the innumerable small transactions occurring in daily life,
often without much planning at all.  Just how do you think the number of
visitors to the Zoo or the museum would be affected if people had to book in
advance?  How would you like having to prepurchase a food voucher before
visiting your local supermarket?

>Anthony, in pre-Metcards days, you cannot pre-purchase your tickets or
>purchase tickets over the phone or from retail outlets, such as
>milkbars, newsagencies, chemists, etc.

Big deal.  If I was a frequent public transport user, I'd go to a station
once a month or once a year to buy a periodical ticket, and that would be
my only contact with the fare-collection system.  If I wasn't a frequent
user, I'd know I could simply jump on a tram when the need arose and buy a
ticket on the spot, whatever my journey requirements, and regardless of
whether I happened to have coins in my wallet that day or not.

Exactly how does pre-purchasing tickets improve convenience for the customer,
as opposed to the operator who then has an excuse to get rid of staff?

Tony M.