QR - off the rails!

It's not  good week for public transport users. With only few days until the state election, commuters have the choice of either voting for a party who want to increase fares x4 the CPI and proceed with Cross River Rail, or a party who want to increase fares x2 the CPI and possibly scrap Cross River Rail. Then we have had the mother of weekend rail line closures, a threat of strike action, and mass train system breakdowns. You would have thought that the least Queensland Rail (QR) could do is continue to inform commuters of their reliability figures? Of course not! The Courier Mail in this article picked up that QR had not updated their peak period on-time running statistics since the 8th March. Trying to keep something a secret QR?

After the article was published, QR did update their website. The results shown in the screen shot are not good news. On only one of the last six working days shown (09/03/12-16/03/12) did QR exceed their reliability target of 93.77%, and even that figure was a rather unimpressive 94.4%. The 14/03/2012 was a dreadful 57.6%. It should be noted that Hong Kong MTR regularly manages reliability figures of 99.9%, even when running trains just 120 seconds apart.

The reliability figures are not the only secret QR are keeping. The draft phase 2 timetables have also not appeared this side of the election, as predicted by BrizCommuter. As the timetable is not likely to be good news to commuters on the Gold Coast, Beenleigh, and Cleveland Lines, the publication of the draft has been delayed until sometime after the election. Building Cross River Rail would solve the overcrowding on the above mentioned lines, but the likely winners of the election, the LNP, still haven't officially announced if they will scrap the idea and what alternatives they have.

Update 20/03/2012

Yet another train system meltdown occurred last night (19/03/12) after a signal failure at Eagle Junction. One of BrizCommuter's work colleagues was caught up in the mess. BrizCommuter has received reports of poor communication from QR, no buses provided so passengers has to use taxis, then not enough taxis turned up, taxis only took Shorncliffe Line passengers to Northgate, and taxis refused to take aboriginals. Disgraceful QR!