News that rail firms’ punctuality is going to be judged by the minute rather than a 10-minute window is welcome but will the change have any affect on our shocking service?
Rubbery figures
One look at rail companies’ punctuality percentages would have Londoners losing precious mouthfuls of overpriced coffee. Commuting in our city is an ordeal with an extraordinary number of cancelled and delayed trains but somehow that doesn’t show up in official numbers.
The reason is that rail firms are allowed a delay window of five to 10 minutes before a train is considered to be late. If a train due to arrive at 12.02 arrives at 12 minutes past, the operator is allowed to classify it as on time. That is great for their performance statistics but crap for the poor people who just missed their all-important connections.
The size of a station is taken into account by rail websites when you buy tickets or plan journeys online. Larger stations come with a longer time window for changing trains but the anticipated transfer times within a station rarely exceed 10 minutes. That means commuters regularly miss their connections without any comeuppance for rail firms – those trains delayed by 10 minutes aren’t considered “late”. Thankfully that injustice is about to change.
More precision?
In a bid to adopt the most transparent punctuality measures in Europe, rail firms are being stripped of that 10-minute grace period. They’ll no longer be able to hide the real arrival times as they will be judged by the minute.
Arrival and departure times at each station on the journey will also be taken into account, rather than just the final stop. Rail firms often streamline tardy services by skipping stations that the service should call at. That means a Victoria train might arrive on time in Brighton and be chalked up as a success despite half the commuters in-between missing their stops.
Stricter monitoring could encourage that kind of behaviour as companies will do whatever they can to be considered on-time but it will be harder to get away with those tactics if each station’s timing goes towards the overall punctuality picture.
A Service Going South
This transparency will prove what we already know about the state of Britain’s railways but what will be done with the new system’s findings?
Poor punctuality can lead to penalties. If the to-the-minute system goes to plan, rail firms should face expensive repercussions.
Such measures are too late for some commuters. Southern Rail’s shameful service dominated the news in 2016 and showed how consistent delays had awful repercussions for their users. People lost jobs and relationships due to Southern’s incompetence.
The new rules will only be a positive step if the government and regulators take action. Their history is not encouraging – the Government took more than six months after the Southern problems began to fine owner Govia Thameslink Railway. The £13.4m bill sounds like a resounding reprimand to an individual but unions have said it “doesn’t even stack up to a slap on the wrist” for the firm. Govia’s unruffled response suggests that’s right – it called the fine “fair”.
Southern’s issues are also far from over. Failed talks with unions have led to more of the overtime bans that created the havoc back in December and January. This reinstatement is messing around Southern timetables and commuters, and there is still no end in sight.
The jury’s out on whether the new punctuality measures will see increased accountability and fines for rail firms and at the moment the proposal is experiencing its own delay. It won’t take effect until April 2019 as 20% of the rail network doesn’t have the technology for monitoring exact arrival and departure times. Until then, rail operators will stay as they are and commuters will continue to pay the price.
by Jo Davey
The post Transport: Will Trains Now Be on Time? appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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