Gladys@SydneyTrains.info

No response to my email.

Hmm. Guess the site isn’t up and running yet, hey Minister?

No matter. As I was saying, on behalf of many long suffering train commuters let me echo a very popular sentiment: you’re one gutsy dame.

Ifyou actually succeed in carrying out fundamental, fair and customer-centric reforms to the herpes like sore that the rail system has become, thenyou’ll be doin’ us proud. If you fail, then you can join the list of do-nothing NSW politicians who marked time, promised the world but are best remembered for living very high on the hog. The standard bearer of course was Premier “Dubai Bob” Carr.

Minister, while many whine, most of us pine for a better mass transit system. One where short distance commuters don’t subsidize long-haul passengers. Or at least don’t subsidize to the extent that we currently do. A system that runs to timetables that suit customers, not staff. One where trains are pulled out of service to actuallyeffect repairs to the tracks and are not sitting idly by while Rail Corp argues with contractors about who’s who and what’s what.

While reforms are indeed overdue, such restructures are not synonymous with a privatized transit system. Regardless of what the big end of town may whisper in your ear.

Given the appealing sound bites you’ve offered, many commentators are frustrated with the scant details of what exactly is your government’s end game and what is the scope of the proposed reforms.

No surprise really. It’s not your job to spill the beans before they’ve even been harvested let alone canned, is it? And we shouldn’t expect to see Booz Allen Hamilton’s (the consultants engaged by the Government) report in its entiretyany time soon, should we?

One issue surely canvassed in the hitherto unreleased report (or its forthcoming sequel) must be the proposed governance arrangements of the rail network. Regardless of how the transit functions are carved betweenSydney Trainsand its regional sibling, NSW Trains, a key question remains: will Sydney Trainsand NSW Trainsremain subsidiaries of a State Owned Corporation that succeeds Rail Corporation? Will there be one NSW Trainsor multiple service providers responsible for regional NSW?  If multiple, then will they be kept in state government hands but under a geographic franchise arrangement? Or will they be passed into local government ownership? Will the Feds want a piece of the pie? Will the railways be privatized? And if so, then will it be in full or in part? Will the big end of town cherry pick the routes they want? And how will all the disparate parts integrate?  I can already hear financial carpetbaggers looking at buying say, the well patronized Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs line and then making what they’ll term financial and “human capital” adjustments to the franchise before their initial public offering on the Australian Stock Exchange, hoping to make a killing.

Neither the Minister for Transport nor her boss, NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell has shed a ray of light on this aspect of the proposed reforms. But as luck would have it, the matter of governance was commented upon in a study of mass transit challenges in the United States, by none other than Booz Allen Hamilton themselves, only last year: Regional Organizational Models for Public Transportation.

Starting from a very different situation, where most transit systems are run by local authorities or hybrids of multiple public sector bodies and private subcontractors (as opposed to the NSW situation where rail is owned lock, stock and barrel by the one state government), the consultants examined how to address the never-ending challenges to meet travelers’ demands, service coordination, funding shortfalls and governance arrangements transformation that was employed to respond to the challenges for public transportation were considered.

Five governance models were identified dominating the U.S. transit agencies landscape, listed below as Figure #1 extracted from the report. Under consideration was transit agencies effecting change in their governance from one structure to another.

These transformations generally follow three steps:  1) recognizing the need to change, 2) analyzing available mechanisms for change, and 3) effecting governance changes.

Booz acknowledged that over the course of the last forty years population growth in both metropolitan and regional areas of the United States has continued to fuel transit demand in locations not being adequately served by public transit agencies.  While the number of passengers (actual and willing) swelled, disparate public transit agencies did not always keep pace with the challenges and opportunities presented by the growth in regional travel.  This occurred for many reasons: perhaps transit agencies lacked the fiscal resources; maybe politicians saw no compelling need to provide transit services beyond existing service boundaries; or provide them at all.  Maybe poor planning was to blame? In any event, funding was often not readily available to support new or expanded transit services.

In NSW the challenge is different but not too different. The railways are publically owned by the one state authority, Rail Corporation of NSW, managing (management would argue) as best they can, a system stretching into nearly every nook and cranny in the premier state.

Its operations - running costs and frequency of services - are subject to unnecessary political interference, which regrettably often drowns out crucial decisions of how to best ration scarce public capital and replaces such conversations with cheap, shallow and unproven appellations such as “this is the first step to privatization”. As the Shadow Transport Minister, Penny Sharpeshrilled on Tuesday. 

I can already envisage the ad campaigns against the reforms. Opportunistic and cunning politicians from both sides of parliament in cahoots with their financial backers will no doubt bankroll a media blitz. In one scene there’ll be a young, tall, athletic and pretty university student with her cascading chestnut hair partly concealing her large steel blue eyes sitting cross legged on a lounge in her small inner Sydney shared flat, nursing a hot Milo while enjoying some facetimewith Mum and Dad, and in another scene there’ll be Mum on the farm outside Moree or Dubbo slaving over a hot stove, cooking tea and with dear ol’ Dad by her side, imploring: “Minister: Don’t get between our girl and us. Don’t break our link. Save CountryLink”.

Assuming the government weathers the anti-reform storm, how will it manage the potential multiple parts of NSW Trains? As one body or as several units? Granted that passengers’ demands must be met, services need to be coordinated, and funding shortfalls covered, a variety of approaches are available.

According to Booz, transit authorities in the United States have transformed themselves only when pressures were great for change. These can be internal (such as organizational dysfunction) or external (such as appalling customer service or unreasonable funding needs). NSW is no different.

Steps along the path to transformation are simple.  recognize the need to change; analyze the available mechanisms to change governance; and effect the governance change.  

In summary, the Booz report nudges towns, cities and counties to recognize the need for a governance change and to take the initiative of starting the process.  Can the desired changes be reached without a governance change?  If so, alternate approaches are likelier paths of least resistance.  More often than not, pursuing governance change is the only option.   Of course the path of least resistance is to do nothing, but on the evidence to date, Premier O’Farrell and the proactive Minister for Transport, Gladys Berejiklian are not going to ape sixteen years of Labor inactivity.

Reasons for a change in the way in which transit authorities operate include one or many of the following: change in travel demanded; service coordination; customers’ expectations; hard to remove caps on ticket prices and out of control costs.

In layman terms the issues in NSW (as far as one can see as a passenger) are:

·   late trains

·    no trains

·    crowded trains

·    crowded platforms

·    signal, track, overhead wiring and points problems

·   vandalism and anti social behaviour

Every one ofthese factors is vital when considering a new governance model. Critically, any potential change in governance must consider the change in area to be serviced, the (changed) passenger mix and coordination across multiple operators.

Does the government plan to house all non-metropolitan railway operations under one or many rooves? Will NSW Trainsbe a related entity to a bevy of smaller, region-centric franchises, owned an operated by municipal authorities and/or the state government? Will local businesses, say miners, own part of the network?

Contrary to the mythmakers in both the big end of town and the megaphones in the Labor Party, ownership of the system per se is not the key issue in determining performance. Fundamentally, the issues of most concern should be NSW Trains’ regional planning, fare policy, marketing, and coordination of operations across multiple operators, efficiencies, regulation, customer service and transparency in taxpayer subsidy paid.

The transit authorities examined by Booz (see earlier table) are typical of transit authorities in most American states. They are public utilities, some use the private sector to provide services, they are customer focused, careful with their spending, engage with their staff and are manned by workers whose pride in their vocation is infectious. The last point is not in the Booz report but was witnessed by the author recently in Massachusetts.

Many critics of Rail Corp and for that matter the bus operator, NSW State Transit, would no doubt nod in unison, cooing that yes, a newly minted mission by the organization, modified behaviour of unionists and improved white collar/blue collar relations are all important steps to improved commuter services. But the truedriver for change is one further step: selling the organization(s) into private hands.

Well, big business and their PR lobbyists would argue that. It’s in their DNA.

But privatisation is no magic bullet. While the management or ownership of say NSW Trains is important, so too is the character of the privatized entity and even more so is the regulation under which it operates in determining how customer focused the business is.

Offloading public businesses onto the private sector without careful planning is often to the public’s detriment. Consider Prime Minister Howard’s sale of KingsfordSmith Airport to Macquarie Bank. From a passenger’s perspective all travelers see are higher fees in passenger charges, eye popping car parking fees, airport levied taxi surcharges, the eradication of the cheap and efficient public bus that years ago snaked from inner Sydney to Mascot and outrageous prices for food and beverages, no doubt a function of the stratospheric rents charged by Mac Bank. And all passengers hear is frustration from airlines regarding Mac Airports sky high landing fees.

When it came to airports we in NSW aped the British. Let’s not repeat that disaster with mass transit. How about it Minister?