Re: V/Line Pass- Railways now forgotten in Government Policy?

["Roderick Smith" <rodsmith@werple.net.au>]

The improvement in off-peak services was only a part recompense for the
withdrawal of two-person crews.  It was not uniform across all routes, and
applied to only part of the day.
Likewise the improvements on Sundays were left for 6 years to implement,
and again did not apply all day.

The record of two Kennett governments was that reality did not match
rhetoric.
* The 3 hour zone 1 ticket was cut to 2 hour, with no price reduction. 
Voters forgot that within 3 years.
* The promise at the first election was for free transport in the cbd.  The
implementation was City Circle trams.
* Mon.-Fri. services were cut in the earliest months; hence quite easy to
reinstate some before an election.
The promise for five years was that a common Sunday and Saturday timetable
would be introduced.  The implementation was a meagre mid morning to late
afternoon implementation.
* Trains still don't serve the loop on Sunday evenings.
* Flagstaff is not served at weekends; Parliament is not served on Sundays
- but trains were not accelerated.
* Evening services still have 30 minute headways.  Try leaving a theatre,
city meeting or another train and waiting for a connection.

* We got the customer-unfriendly ticket-selling and monitoring system:
designed to give maximum benefits to management by converting all patrons
into potential criminals.
I am fully in favour of electronic ticketing systems, with no conductors on
trams and with many stations unattended; I travel on systems like this in
other countries extensively.  However, the ticketing system should work. 
Remember, the actual fare and ticket structure is independent of the
selling mechanism, and was introduced by Labor 10 years ago.
 - All ticket machines should sell all ticket types (including on tram
ones).
 - Tvms at all selling points should accept notes (with auxiliary coin-only
machines at busy spots).
 - Change should be given beyond the $10 limit.
 - Multiple purchases should be possible in a single transaction.
 - The requirement should be for a ticket to be validated once; thereafter
no further poking should be required.
 - There should be no barriers.

Unfortunately, ERG's shoddy system is attracting interest elsewhere,
probably because of its management bias at the expense of customers.



-- 
Regards
Roderick Smith
Rail News Victoria Editor

Michael Walker <walker@hotkey.net.au> wrote in article 
> >Kennett is far too much of a smug git for my liking, but you have to
face
> >it - the improvements to off-peak services over the last 5 years is way
> more
> >than Labor ever did as far as service improvements during their time in
> >office. Mind you, you could argue that the loss of conductors and
guards,
> >privatisation and ticket machines outweighs that.
> Yes, the improvements to off peak services have been impressive. Even the
> ones before the most recent ones were an improvement on the labour years.
> However, the reduction in peak services introduced in the summer after
Jeff
> was re-elected still exists. The summer timetable was introduced as was
the
> norm, except it was unusual in that there were hand out broadsheet
> timetables this time, an apparent improvement over previous years where
the
> only evidence of a summer timetable was the yellow timetables in the
poster
> frames. The timetables had some trains marked with an 'A' as those which
> were to run from the 11th January on as well as the others. Since then
there
> have been some revisions to peak hour services but the number of trains
run
> is similar to that timetable from 11th Jan of whichever year it was. We
> still haven't returned to the number of peak hour trains from under the
> previous Labour government, nor the number of peak hour express trains on
at
> least the Hurstbridge line.
> Mind you, I'm not dead against ticket machines and privatisation, just
the
> haphazard near enough is good enough way it was done...