Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Stephanie,
I'm so exercised by this topic that I get all twitchy and shouty with very little provocation...
Do it! Twitch and shout, let it all out.
I feel the same, I have to stop talking on the subject in company.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Sacha,
However, it doesn't produce all the intended environmental and economic benefits.
Name one aspect in which they're less environmentally beneficial? Or economically, for that matter. I'm describing THE system that has the buses idling on the roadside for the least amount of time. Which economically means it's the system utilizing those scarce resources (buses and roads) the absolute best, just by utilizing a superabundant resource, labour.
Your Melbourne experience shows that the human touch of a conductor may feel better for individual passengers.
Virtually no one in the public wanted the conductors to go. No one. I never heard a single person say they thought it was better afterward, or that it was a good idea, and I lived there for 5 years. Only the bean counters running the trams claimed it was better, right up until they did it, then it was made abundantly clear that getting people to line up at a stupid machine that cost untold millions to set up, had cost them a lot of money. There was never a drop in the cost of the service, certainly there was not an improvement in the quality of it. But they never turned back, the ideological power running the privatization drive was far to strong.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Matthew Poole,
Sorry, I honestly read that as sarcasm. Bloody context-less intertubes :/
Well OK, I guess it had an element of "well, if you're really serious about the wait times, then lets actually approach this from top down", which perhaps has a hint of sarcasm. The point being that the most efficient solution in those terms is the least technological. Although more technology to aid them would be good if it didn't cost a lot. There could be little Hop machines in various places, which would mean the conductor wouldn't have to visit those people.
It’s common in Auckland for peak-hour buses to be literally full from stem to stern and just blaze past people standing at stops because there’s no space for anyone else to board.
I see that problem as being nothing to do with the ticketing system, and everything to do with the number of buses, and their timing. It's quite crappy that the most frequent users of public transport have to put up with the least congenial conditions. It's also not safe to have people packed into transport like that.
but they’re more bodies on the bus, and worse they’re bodies that need enough space to be able to move about freely.
It just didn't seem like that much of a problem in Melbourne. The trams got packed, but the conductors just wriggled past, in just the same way that a passenger who wants to get off has to do. It is possible to reach out to hand people tickets/money, or even get people in between to hand it along, and the driver can refuse to open a particular door at a stop if people are only boarding and the conductor is stuck in some particular part of the vehicle. In the worst case, some people got a free ride. Big deal - it's not like the system isn't creaming it at times when the vehicle is packed like sardines. In that situation, the capacity planning is failing, not the ticketing system, and it's failing everyone because riding like that is really unpleasant. It's not inconceivable to have more than one conductor - they scale up much more easily than vehicle fleets.
It's different on a train, the carriages are much longer than buses and trams. When it's really packed, they probably should have a conductor for every door.
Yes, it's another body, but note also that the driver can be completely sealed away from the passengers, and doesn't need ticketing and cash facilities, so you can actually cram to the front more. In terms of safety that separation of duties is big, too. The driver only has to think about traffic, and controlling the doors. Passenger wrangling has a dedicated resource, with a whole different skill set. A conductor doesn't need to also be able to drive a bus, and they aren't stressed out from the traffic conditions. The driver is also much safer from attack, hijacking, having the controls grabbed, etc.
I think it speaks volumes that I can clearly remember the conductors from that time, 15 years ago, in a positive way, as actual people. If I remember bus drivers in NZ it is usually in a gradation from most disliked. I'm not surprised, on reflection, it must be a shit of a job to have to drive a big dangerous vehicle and deal with hundreds of members of the public at the same time. No wonder so many are surly.
FWIW I don't think of you as an efficiency Nazi, either. Someone has to ask these questions. But if you're going to be about efficiency, you do need to consider all the options, including the non-technological ones. I thought you made a good case for Hop in terms of the more efficient use of the bus fleet, but in your argument you made an even clearer case for a different system altogether.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Matthew Poole,
Yeah yeah, break out the sarcasm. Each individual passenger, it's irrelevant. Multiplied by thousands of passengers over hundreds of buses every day, it's an enormous amount of time wasted.
I wasn't being sarcastic. You really did convince me, with your numbers argument, that time spent paying at the door (by any of the methods discussed) costs. It doesn't just cost the bus company, it costs everyone using the bus. The transaction should be done on the bus, after boarding, to get the fastest possible turnaround, like they do on trains. Even if everyone paid with Hop and that took only one second per person, on a bus with 120 people on it, that means 2 minutes lost on the bus traveling the route, and and average of 1 minute per passenger (given they're evenly distributed along the route), which means 2 person hours of traveller time lost every bus trip. So if you're paying the conductor for less than 2 hours you are making on the deal. Not to mention you have the best possible outcome for passengers who don't need any passes whatsoever (although they could and probably should have many means of paying, from cash, to eftpos, to pre-purchased bus passes, to touch cards), and they can sit down immediately. There's probably even more time really saved because passengers can board at all doors.
I'm not imagining this system, I used it for about a year in Melbourne, where that was exactly how they ran the trams. It worked great, I loved it. Then neoliberals got hold of the transport system, sold the trams, and the bean counters running it decided to sack the thousands of conductors and replace them with machines that you could pay at. This did not slow the trams down any, but it cost the tram company more than the cost of the conductors in lost fares, and it reduced the passenger experience because they now had to queue at the payment machine, which was horribly slow, and also took away 3 seats. There was no official person to ask about the tram route, and passengers at night felt less safe.
I'm just not the kind of person who can be trained to see any of that as progress, just because there is a shiny machine instead of a person there. Whatever Sacha has to say about dead horses, I will never forget that that system was the best system I have ever used anywhere in the world at any time, from a customer point of view.
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Conductors are better. Matthew has convinced me. Even the one second delay of Hop is one second of life all the passengers never get back. Not to mention farting around with a website and some evil loyalty card shite just so I can use the bus. Board via all doors, sit down. Then pay using coin of the realm without all the other passengers tut tutting you. Old, proven, effective, reliable, unbeatably efficient. Customer service as the phrase used to mean. Bog standard? I don't live in a bog.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Tamara,
Yeah I get my cash out in exact change when using the bus. It takes under 5 seconds to pay and receive the ticket.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Matthew Poole,
I, and many, many others, want a single card that works everywhere.
Yup, that's a whole 'nother issue, and no arguments from me there. My point is that delivering that as paper tickets is piss easy by comparison to the alternatives. But aren't the barriers non-technological anyway? The networks don't work together because they refuse to, not because it would be difficult to print out a transferable bus/train pass.
since I don't use public transport every day I don't want to buy a monthly pass. That means a multi-ride ticket which then needs to be clipped by the driver/fare-collector
Not necessarily. There's lots of ways of making flash passes. They could be day-coded, so you can only use your pass on, say, Friday. There's lots of possibilities that don't require making expensive hardware and software.
Why on earth would we buy, or even lease, additional rolling stock from overseas?
Because the carriages are overcrowded?
Plus there's the Britomart issue.
Yes, we need the loop.
"Just wearing lost fares" is a non-starter, and it should never be an acceptable solution in any case.
You're trying to convince someone who is not me with that argument. It's not an "acceptable solution". But it might be justified in the circumstances. Obviously the solution is to improve the service.
Essentially that's my main point about the wonders of paperless public transport. I'm underwhelmed by the improvements. You knock a minute off an hour long trip by taking away the cash transaction delay. But having more buses coming more frequently, from a lot more destinations, with a lot more express buses is clearly going to do one hell of a lot more to improve matters. Improving the roads and the train lines likewise, bus lanes, double tracking, loops, etc.
If, conservatively, HOP saves 10 minutes of stop dwell time for a bus that's doing a 50-minute run
Is that really conservative? Are you trying to tell me that 30 people on every bus pay cash? Based on a 20 second transaction. I'm genuinely curious - if the cash handling time is really that high, then the savings sound worthwhile.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Matthew Poole,
Which is great, if your aspirations are nothing greater than to have a public transport system that is little more than a way to move commuters. If, however, you want to make it a viable alternative to owning a private car, it needs to be a whole lot more flexible
But...it was and still is flexible. All you're talking about is that it could be a little bit quicker, maybe. If you're seriously talking about it being an alternative to owning a car, then the users of it are hardly going to find it that much of an arse to own a couple of bus cards, and occasionally to pay cash for a ticket if they want to do something unusual. My point is that 95% of boarding passengers are not slowed down by a clip or flash system compared to, say, Hop. The residual 5% are always going to slow it down anyway.
More people might help, but it's also more people trying to move through absolutely packed carriages.
It probably wasn't clear what I meant. I didn't mean more people so they can check more tickets per minute. I meant it so that they could be spaced out on the carriages, without having to move more than a couple of meters to ticket everyone within their responsibility.
There aren't more trains to put on
What, nowhere in the whole world?
there also isn't movement capacity at Britomart during peak hours even if there were more trains available.
That's more of an issue, soluble only by increasing line capacity. Finishing the loop, making more lines, etc. Until then, turnstiles probably makes more sense if they really must collect every fare. Which means there's no need for any fancy payment systems, really, people can buy their tickets at their leisure. Or they can acknowledge that whilst providing a rather crap service (being crammed into a train is unpleasant), they probably have to just wear those lost fares.
For the 20 seconds that the driver is dealing with that one person, you could board another 10 people who're using touch cards
Even if you could board a thousand people, you're still only losing 20 seconds on the cashie. So long as their numbers are kept low, basically the people who have come to the system completely unprepared, the savings are minimal from a system that cost tens of millions of dollars more. So long as it is generally cheaper to buy a flashable or clickable card, then most people boarding will have one, as they did when I was a kid.
But yes, I can see that it makes the bus a little faster to have a whole lot of Hoppers. Presumably over a long period of time this actually amounts to a saving on the large capital outlay involved in the system.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Works fine for fixed-value trips and zone-based passes, but the second you need to do a trip that's outside what's contemplated by whatever pass you hold (have a two-stage pass but want to go three stages, for example, or have an A-zone pass and want to go to zone B) you start having to bugger about with cash
Sure, but most trips (don't have the stats, but still), are commutes and they are always the exact same thing. Once you start asking the driver about the fare and so on, you're already into buggering around territory.
Having different passes for different kinds of pass is also an administrative hassle, since those have to be managed, distributed, prepared, etc.
And designing, mass producing, installing, maintaining, upgrading touch technology and selling the cards to people for a stored card system isn't a hassle?
Regarding the loss of revenue from free-riders, Auckland is currently losing a lot of revenue on peak train services because the on-train staff simply cannot move to collect tickets.
Sounds like they could get more people on the job at peak times. The improved revenue would probably pay for it. Or perhaps they could be trained to be more pushy. I rode on many a jam packed tram in which conductors simply pushed through, demanding that people move, which they always did. It's also worth considering that from a customer point of view, riding standing on a jam packed train is a much lesser experience than sitting comfortably, so it's actually fair enough to get a free ride occasionally. If the train company wants to be all stally and collect every fare, they could put more trains on.
I agree with trains that platform turnstiles make a lot of sense. Especially with ridiculously crowded commuter trains.
Still not fast enough for rush-hour commuting on a crowded system, I think – the driver has to take it, look at it, ascertain which square hasn’t been punched, punch it, hand it back…it’s not as fast as you might think, in a situation where you need to onload people *quickly*.
Punching the ticket is slower than swiping a touch card, yes. But not by a great deal. And a touch card is slower than a card you simply show. I'm not guessing about this - as a child I commuted to school every day across multiple buses in Auckland, and a bendy bus, holding almost 200 kids could be loaded in a few minutes. You could board side by side, the driver only had to look at the card, so you didn't have to pass under their nose. They just sat back and watched. On the commuter bus, I was in the driver's face for a second. As were most passengers - the adults going to the city had monthly passes. It really didn't seem like something that needed a hugely engineered solution.
However, I'm not against all touch systems. If they increase patronage, as Matthew claims, then that's reason in itself to have them. I just can't help but feel that they're often an excuse for not solving the real problems with public transport, like not having enough buses/trains in service. Every million you spend farting around with the ticketing system is a bunch of buses or trains you don't have on the road/rails. If they think they're making money by doing it, I really hope they did their numbers right.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Paul Campbell,
also people don't have to all get on at the front - people can get on and swipe through any door - makes loading and unloading even faster
Pursuant to that, in Melbourne, on trams, there's no one, in general, checking your tickets at all. They simply have random inspections and spot fines. You check the ticket in a little box, or buy at the annoying machine (it has the advantage of being so slow and unwieldy that you often get to the end of the trip before you even have a chance to purchase a ticket).
I preferred conductors, frankly. I seem to remember that they ended up actually losing money putting in machines and taking away the conductors, just on the free riding. It only took about 10 people every hour not to pay for their ticket and that was the entire wage cost of the conductor lost. Not to mention that a conductor is actually a better service all round for the customer - you can sit down straight away, you can ask them questions, and on late lonely trains, they gave a considerable sense of security to people. It's one of the things I really like about the Auckland train system, that there's a human being. It changes the whole feeling of the ride, really, it becomes more like entering a community and less like stepping onto a conveyor belt. You get a lot less of the dickishness that can happen on unconducted trains, people making a racket, constantly moving between carriages, threatening behaviour.
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