When people travel interstate or overseas, one of the things they love to point out is how the public transport system is much better than the one they use at home – a case of “the grass is always greener”? If so, what would a person who has travelled on rail systems all over the world think of the Melbourne network?
Robert Schwandl is a Austrian railfan and author, who has travelled to dozens of cities around the world while curating his UrbanRail.Net website.
In 2011 he visited Melbourne and wrote about what the saw.
Melbourne appeared to me as a great city from the beginning, and even a week later I think it is quite a good place to live, not only because of its extensive and mostly well-functioning urban rail system.
Poor access to railway stations was one observation.
I was often annoyed by the bad accessibility. Probably thought to create a properly separated paid area, most platforms are enclosed by fences, so one often has to walk a long way to the actual entrance when an opening at the other end of the platform would be easy to make and save passengers a lot of time.
In particular the interaction with the ticketing system.
Therefore I didn’t understand either why they don’t put proper ticket gates, if the access is channelled through a small slot anyway.
And the abundance of level crossings.
At many stations with side platforms, the two platforms are not really connected, but one has to walk to a nearby level crossing to get to the other side.
Manually operated doors were another thing that stood out.
The second-oldest are probably the largest number, those are the refurbished Comeng trains. They are quite pleasant, except for their peculiar door handles. Unlike on the newer trains, which have a normal button to open the doors, these have a knob, and you have to manually slide the doors open, which can be quite hard, especially if you carry things in your hands.
Along with our poor quality trackwork.
When it comes to riding the train, I might prefer the Siemens, which seemed to offer a smoother ride, but this may also be due to the track, as on some sections I even noticed with my own eyes when waiting for a train, that the track is not in the best condition. When standing on a bridge, you can also observe that the cars move a lot from side to side.
And the poor condition of the Siemens train fleet.
But there was one thing that stroke me most about the Siemens trains: they are extremely dirty inside! The other trains also have some window scratching (made me feel like home in Berlin…), but the Siemens trains have dirty and sometimes even destroyed seats, while on the other two types I did not observe anything like that.
This may have two reasons – the areas where these trains are used (the southern and the western lines) have a different type of passenger (they say the western districts are more problematic), or, the seats call for aggression, because the fabric used, its colour and pattern, is so horrible that one feels the need to destroy it, very weird.
Confusion with the City Loop stood out.
Inbound trains normally show “Flinders Street” as their destination, sometimes with the add-on “via City Loop”, but I was not always sure whether the train would go around the loop or not
Congestion around Flinders Street.
but between Southern Cross and Flinders Street all trains I have been on crawl, although there are six tracks between these two main stations.
And a lack of information about onboard services once a train arrives.
On other occasions I took a Frankston train at Southern Cross, which was then stopping at Flinders Street for 10 minutes. Also, while the panels in the station showed Frankston, inside the train the destination remains Flinders Street until the train leaves from there, so passengers boarding a train on the loop cannot really check inside the train whether it continues or terminates at Flinders Street. An accoustic announcement following “Now arriving at Flinders Street” like “This train continues to Frankston” would be helpful.
Complexity in service patterns was called out.
It would be interesting to see a map that actually depicts service patterns.
As was the general uselessness of the network map used until a few years ago.
The network map has some flaws, and I would prefer a Sydney-type map with colour-coded lines. While it is difficult to depict the direction the trains take around the loop (this changes at lunchtime for most trains), the area around North Melbourne station is quite misleading. It appears that trains from Upfield continue west to Footscray!
Level crossings get called out yet again.
All in all, riding the Melbourne Metro trains through the inner suburbs, where stations are very closely spaced, reminded me a bit of the London District or Metropolitan Lines, although with modern trains, or even the Green Line on the Stockholm Tunnelbana. But none of these has level crossings, which in Melbourne are a standard feature. These work fairly well, but make the system appear more like a light rail with heavy and long trains.
Finally, a subjective view of what train looks better.
Visually, I prefer the Alstom train, which like the Comeng has a wider waist, or a belly, whereas the Siemens cars have completely straight sides, a bit boring.
And to end.
To conclude, an overall very modern system (in fact, much more up-to-date than I expected) which suffers some problems due to the Flinders Street bottleneck and maybe some other infrastructure issues.
Sounds about right to me!
On the subject of comparisons
Australian transport lecture Alexa Delbosc wrote a piece titled Public transport is always greener on the other side at The Conversation:
As a researcher in public transport, I am frustrated by a narrative I see time and again. It comes up in comments in focus groups and pops up at the bottom of news articles. It goes something like this:
I’ve been to London / New York / Tokyo and their public transport system is better / cheaper / more reliable than ours! Why can’t our public transport be that good?
Australia’s public transport systems seem shoddy compared to other countries for a number of reasons. These reasons make me question whether those comparisons are valid.
The first reason this comparison is flawed is because when we’re on holiday, we don’t use public transport the same way we do in our mundane commute back home.
The other reason this comparison is flawed is due to the super-size of Australia’s cities.
While American transit consultant Jarrett Walker wrote about the The Disneyland Theory of Transit:
Political leaders frequently take junkets to other cities, ride those cities’ transit systems as tourists, and then come home proposing to build the same kind of service. But our values as tourists are different from our values as commuters: We enjoy riding the Ferris wheel, but that doesn’t mean we’d enjoy commuting on one.
And more comparisons
