Improving staffing levels on the network was one promise Metro made, as found in this media release dated November 30, 2009:

Metro takes the reins
30 November

More staff, better customer information, an increased investment in infrastructure, stations brought to life and greater reliability and punctuality will start to roll out as Metro takes the reins of Melbourne’s train network today.

Metro CEO Andrew Lezala said “Our first priority is to get the basics right by improving network reliability and customer information.”

Metro is now recruiting for more than 200 new roles as it prepares to start work improving customer services and information as well as network infrastructure.

The first group of 13 Platform Assistants has been in training and will commence their role helping customers. Tasked with encouraging a smooth and safe flow of customers through crowded stations, the spread along platforms to ease areas of congestion, assisting the flow of customers boarding and exiting trains in the peaks and giving information on the timing of the next trains.

“This is a Melbourne solution for a Melbourne challenge,” Mr Lezala said.

“Some visual and audible changes will be experienced in the first couple of weeks but many of the initiatives will take some time to put in place,” Mr Lezala said. “We’ll be working really hard to make improvements to customers’ travelling experience.”

Metro did actually follow through on their improved customer service promise, when they published this media release on May 4, 2010:

Metro recruits more station staff and adds 22 new staffed stations
4 May

Metro’s recruitment drive for customer service staff and station staff is set to continue following the announcement of the 22 new stations to be staffed.

An initiative described when Metro was named as the successful franchisee, the list of 22 was today revealed with each station to be staffed for a four-hour period each weekday at a time when staffing is most needed. Manning of these stations will start from June and be complete by September due to works required at many stations.

Today’s announcements bring the number of staffed stations to 145 out of 211 across the network and the number of new roles created in the first half of 2010 to 211.

“In our first five months we have analysed the network and selected stations based on customer numbers as well as crowd movement and customer safety and assistance requirements. We have established a new category of station which will be staffed for 4 hours each weekday in the morning, shoulder-peak when large numbers of school students are using our services, or evenings. Whenever it is needed the most” Andrew Lezala, CEO said.

The 22 new staffed stations are Spotswood, West Footscray, Royal Park, Merlynston, Oak Park, Glenbervie, Strathmore, Pascoe Vale, Kensington, Tottenham, Canterbury, Burwood, Hawthorn, Gardiner, Dennis, Regent, Rosanna, Toorak, Hughesdale, Hawksburn, Sandown Park and McKinnon.

“As well as improving network reliability, we are focussed on providing our customers with a better experience of our services. We have been looking at ways of improving the perception of safety and working hard to improve customer information, announcements and signage and overall customer service” Mr Lezala added, “the changes we are making will become more and more noticeable in the coming months”.

“Following this announcement we will commence recruitment of 26 new employees who will work four-hour shifts at the 22 stations soon to be staffed. This is on top of 26 additional barrier staff starting this month at stations in Dandenong, Glenferrie, Caulfield, Ringwood, Camberwell, Glen Waverley and Footscray” Mr Lezala said.

Anyone interested in these customer service focussed station staff roles can enquire through the careers section of metrotrains.com.au

This additional recruitment is on top of:

• 63 new platform assistants who started at city loop stations in December and January;
• 31 new platform assistants, (half started last week, half start next week) located at Flinders Street, Parliament, Melbourne Central, Southern Cross, Flagstaff, Clifton Hill, Watsonia, Footscray, North Melbourne, Sunshine, Tooronga, Auburn, Box Hill, Frankston, Malvern, North Brighton and Richmond;

With additional staff in place at City Loop stations during afternoon peak, platform attendants kept the doors clear and indicated to drivers that it was safe for the train to depart.

Additional staff were also deployed to suburban stations in morning peak for the same reason.

There they served double duty, welcoming the regular commuters, as well as updating them of delays and disruptions to normal services.

Unfortunately all good things come to an end, and so did the renaissance in station staffing on Melbourne’s railways – in October 2012 Metro pulled station staff from the Craigieburn and Upfield lines as part of a six month long ‘trial’ of full time CCTV monitoring, with the removal of platform staff at City Loop platforms in afternoon peak ending soon after.

It is now five years since Metro took over in Melbourne with a blaze of promises around station staffing – now we are two years into a ‘six month’ long trial of CCTV replacing station staff, and have spent $212 million for two guys with guns to patrol every station after 6 PM each night.

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Scan of/scan off

The Myki website circa December 2008 promised the following:

myki is simple to use. Every time you travel by public transport you will scan on with myki at a card reader (called myki scanners) at the station gate or near the vehicle door. The system instantly recognises that a myki has entered the network. At the end of your journey, scan off with myki to finalise your trip details. myki money will ensure the best fare is calculated automatically for your travel.

The ‘instant recognition’ of Myki cards promised has never eventuated, with the Transport Ticketing Authority having to run a “Myki users urged to touch, not swipe or wave” campaign in early 2012 to reset user exceptions around the poor performance of the system.

Weekly best fare

Up until March 2008 the Myki website described the ‘best fare’ functionality as follows:

myki gives you the best fare for the way that you travel.

Using myki money, your fare will be capped at a 2 hour, daily or weekly (Monday – Sunday) maximum, no matter how much you travel.

Alternatively, pre-purchase of myki pass ensures you receive the best discounted fares.

In Melbourne, myki money can calculate your best fare as you travel, and deduct it automatically as you scan off at the end of your trip.

For example:

• If you scan on and scan off in Melbourne city one morning, myki money can calculate that the best fare for you is a two hour Zone One.
• Then if you travel more than once during the same day, myki money will re-calculate the best fare for you as a daily fare.
• The more you travel during the same week, myki money will automatically give you the best fare by capping your accrued travel to a weekly fare.

A weekly cap on travel was also described in the 2008 edition of the Victorian Fares and Ticketing Manual – the official document to all transport ticketing in the state.

The weekly fare cap is based on the zones used during the week (from 3.00 am Monday to 3.00 am the following Monday). If a customer pays for an off-peak trip, then the peak price of that trip is counted towards their weekly fare cap. This provides an incentive for customers to avoid peak times. The weekly cap will be the same as Weekly Metcards or Weekly V/Line tickets.

It appears that the weekly cap was killed off in mid-2008: the June 15 version of the Myki website is exactly the same as that a few months earlier, but only mentions 2 hour and daily caps. I haven’t been able to find official reason for the change, but presumably implementation difficulties killed it off.

Short term tickets

An integral part of the original Myki system was the sale of short term tickets: a cardboard smartcard that is bought from a ticket machine or bus driver, and provides the user with 2 hour of travel for a cost slightly more than the normal fare charged to standard Myki users.

Sales of short term tickets commenced in 2009 when Myki went live in Geelong, and they continue to be sold onboard buses in Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Seymour and the Latrobe Valley even today.

The sale of short term tickets from ticket machines was also built into the system, but the option to do so is currently disabled for machines located in Melbourne:

Expanding the rollout of short term tickets was cancelled by the Baillieu government in June 2011, acting on advice contained in a secret report by consultants Deloitte. Supposedly the continued rollout was cancelled because the cards cost $0.40 cents to manufacture – making up almost half of the $0.90 charged for a concession bus fare in Geelong! The withdrawal date of the tickets already being issued outside Melbourne is still unknown.

Ticket machines on trams

Allowing passengers to top up Myki cards onboard trams was the second part of the system cut by the Baillieu government in June 2011: these machines would also have sold short term tickets to occasional travellers.

A single Myki ticket machine was installed onboard a tram in early 2009 for field trials, with it remaining in place but not in use until at least November 2011:

Yarra Trams says that the change would reduce the tram company’s costs, boost space for passengers and reduce fare evasion issues by eliminating a key reason given for not buying a ticket – but everyone else says the change makes it much more difficult for passengers who only use trams to pay their fare.

Long distance V/Line services

Myki was originally intended to be used on all V/Line services across Victoria – with fare zones going all the way up to 78.

And so the initial rollout of Myki equipment boxes at railway stations covered the entire state, even small stations like Winchelsea.

But the V/Line rollout was another victim of the Baillieu Government in June 2011 – the scope being cut to just trains running as far as Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Seymour and Traralgon.

The end result – the retention of paper ticketing, and unused Myki reader stands at railway stations in country Victoria.

So my verdict…

The entire point of a smartcard ticketing system is that it is faster than a magnetic strip based one: Myki fails at that. Maybe building the entire system atop Windows CE is the issue, perhaps it is because we hired a company that was described in a leaked draft of an Auditor-General’s report as having “no corporate experience in developing, implementing and operating a ticketing system”.

I’m willing to be more forgiving around the removal of weekly caps on fares: users currently have the option of buying 7-day Myki passes, so if one can plan ahead, the cost is still the same. I don’t know of anywhere else in the world where pay-as-you go weekly fare caps apply, and I can only imagine how difficult implementing the logic in software would be. Beyond the processing of a week worth of travel data to determine the cap, the correct handing of thousands of ‘exceptional’ use cases make the current logic look like a cakewalk – what happens if I travel in zone 1 for five days in a week, then make a single trip into zone 2?

The removal of short term tickets is a joke, but the government that came up with the specification in the first place is also to blame – Perth and Brisbane both use simple printer paper receipts for single trip tickets. So why use expensive cardboard smartcards when a piece of paper does the same thing, and requires less equipment than our current ticket machines are equipped with? Giving all users a way to pass through ticket gates is the only possible explanation I can see.

Given that we are already a long way down the path, going to paper tickets would need software changes in ticket machines, but a much simpler ‘solution’ is still available: jack up the price of short term tickets to cover the extra costs associated with selling them. If passengers don’t want to pay the extra each day, they can buy a reusable card like everyone else.

Finally: ticket machines on trams. If the government wanted to save money on the rollout of the system, they should have taken it out of scope at the beginning of the project. By the time the Baillieu government cut them in June 2011, the ticket machines had already been developed and tested, with hundreds of them already been purchased and sitting in storage. You might say that I’m arguing to keep the machines because of the sunk cost fallacy‎, but in reality the machines would have been quite valuable for tram passengers, assuming they operate as expected – which is another issue entirely!

I wonder what other promised features will go ‘missing’ as time goes on?

Footnote

Thanks to Toby Nieboer (@tcn33) on Twitter for coming up with the ‘spot the Myki differences using the Wayback Machine’ game:

Despite the TTA promoting that as a selling point once upon a time, of course. Wonder why they stopped? #Myki web.archive.org/web/2006111802…

— Toby Nieboer (@tcn33) November 29, 2012

Bonus factoid

In the Transport Ticketing Authority’s 2012-13 annual report, the value of the destroyed short-term tickets and tram ticket machines was listed under the “Asset impairment” heading:

All short-term cards in stock as at 30 June 2012 were written off with the exception of stocks required to support sales on regional buses for a reasonable period. Total amount of write-down as at 30 June 2012 was $15,702,136.

As at 30 June 2012 all hardware and software costs attributable to tram CVMs were written off except for any reasonably expected recovery of hardware costs as spare parts for compatible network devices. The amount of impairment charge for 2011 – 12 was $197,095, resulting in total impairment charge of $13,078,028 as at 30 June 2012. As at 30 June 2013 the remaining costs of tram CVMs of $1,661,268 were written off and tram CVMs were physically destroyed after usable parts were extracted.

$30 million flushed down the drain!

Update: short-term tickets finally scrapped

Despite the objections of locals, the sale of two hour and daily short-term tickets ended in Geelong on Friday 19 April 2013.

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