 |
| QR's service - going down the drain! |
New Year's Eve/Day
With extra trains services being scheduled, rail pundits are concerned that New Year's Eve services will be a mess, possibly on the scale of QR's Christmas Day failure. With infrequent overnight services, a cancelled train will result in quite a few pissed, and pissed off commuters. As New Year's Day falls on a Sunday, a day when QR traditionally run out of drivers, BrizCommuter is expecting News Year's Day to be worse affected than New Year's Eve. BrizCommuter's advice for New Year's Day travel - drive instead if you can.
School Holiday Period
QR's SHIT timetable will reduce peak services by up to 50 to 60% on some train lines. With only a 22% reduction is travellers during this period, it doesn't take even prep class school kid to work out that this is likely to result in overcrowding on some trains services. Sadly, Transport Minister Stirling Hinchliffe probably believes in QR's laughable spin of only 11% service reduction. Passengers may be unable to board some train services. Even on the least affected train services, passengers expecting a seat during a supposedly "quiet" period may have to stand for some distance. It seems that QR do not recognised that the majority of commuters actually still need to get work in January, and have massively under-estimated the required service delivery!
TransLink seem to be persisting on charging a peak fare for the equivalent of an off-peak service during the SHIT timetable. This fraudulent lack of respect towards the travelling public will put quite a few commuter's noses out of joint.
TransLink seem to be persisting on charging a peak fare for the equivalent of an off-peak service during the SHIT timetable. This fraudulent lack of respect towards the travelling public will put quite a few commuter's noses out of joint.
Inner suburban off-peak services have also been cut back from every 15 minutes to every 30 minutes (a 50% cut-back) in QR's SHIT timetable. This will be a big pain for shift workers. It will also be an annoyance for families on leisure travel doing the school holidays e.g. families going to and from South Bank, shopping in the CBD, or the Brisbane's various museums. Aside from the car parking operators, the SHIT timetable may loose some trade for CBD businesses. Time to get some shares in UBER!
After the School Holiday Period
Due to terrible transparency from both the Palaszczuk government, and QR, it is still unknown what will happen after the School Holiday Period, from 23rd January. Commuters are expecting that the "normal" 4th October 2016 timetables would be fully restored. In fact, many commuters have expectations of improvements to the 4th October 2016 timetables, such as extending Cleveland pm peak expresses. Given the ongoing delays to the New Generation Rollingstock (NGR) trains entering passengers service, and the number of trained drivers not increasing significantly until late 2017, these expected improvements are sadly unlikely.
BrizCommuter is very concerned that commuters will still be faced with a cut back Interim Timetable (or unreliable "full service") after the school holiday period. If this is the case, expect severe overcrowding and full trains on some services (notably Shorncliffe/Inner Northern Line, Ferny Grove, and Cleveland Line) when the schools are back, with the situation getting even worse when the universities re-start in late February/early-March - the busiest time of the year for public transport. If QR's service cuts persist, also expect increased road congestion due to commuters continuing to avoid public transport. Whilst the background of this disaster was caused by the LNP Newman government, if services are not fully restored by late-January, then the ALP Palaszczuk government can be expected to pay the price at the voting booth. This is of course rather unfortunate, as the LNP opposition seem to have zero public transport policies. Which ever way, SE Queensland commuters will continue to be screwed for years to come due to successive incompetent governments.
I wonder if there might be a situation where QR pulls out all stops and runs a tolerable train service for New Year's Eve revelers to avoid the bad publicity of huge crowds stranded in the middle of the night, followed by mass cancellations the next day?
ReplyDeleteQR drivers are required to have 12 hours off between shifts in accordance with their agreement. So that pretty much rules out most crews who have worked into the early hours operating NYE extras from working at all on New Year's Day...
I think that is quite likely. New Years Day is quite likely to be a disaster!
Delete