Silos are for wheat, not for managing public transport

The only silos a transport operator should have

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are for bulk grains like wheat.

 

Paul Mees, in his recent submission to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into Train Services, appended his paper Does Melbourne need another central city rail tunnel? which reminded me, when I read it, of why I went into the business (or hobby) of pushing the rail political barrel so hard and for so long. I read his earlier book Very Public Solution and I had always been struck by the conclusions – which had floated in my own head for so long but had not been given voice publicly anywhere I had read – from the pro-rail community or left-leaning advocates to the pro-road, anti-left lobbies and institutions. Even dry old transport academia had tended to lean one way or the other, with few clear and original views being touted.

 

And these positions tended to mark out public transport, and rail-transport in particular, as fighting a rear-guard action against an overwhelming pressure from ‘economically-rational’ interests. And some of this pressure seemed rational enough – services and lines losing money, empty of people, wasting resources. People preferred cars. However, the Australian experience was flying in the face of overseas experience, which even into the 1970s and 80s was seeing a massive swing to public transport – or rail transport, with investment, increasing ridership, better political ownership of the issue.

 

We had our “we’re different” crowd who seemed to materialise from both sides of the argument – not just the anti-rail side who might have been expected to push this. Even the pro-rail camp seemed to be averse to reading the lessons of overseas in a clear light and which set out exactly what sort of outcomes to expect where an overseas operation delivered similar rollingstock, similar fare levels between settlements of similar size and density.

 

Until I read Mees Very Public Solution, I found very few advocates on either side who were prepared to venture that overseas lessons could be in most  cases implemented ‘off-the-shelf’to achieve similar results.

 

Or even not-so-similar results. Some Australian networks achieve a small percentage of the ridership or share outcomes of similar sized transport networks overseas,  with no obvious reason.

 

Mees pointed to the experience of Melbourne and Toronto. Two similar sized cities, both with low density and pro-car culture (and before someone challenges me on this, I will rhetorically ask them if they have been to Toronto. I have. Until you’ve seen Freeway 401 and North American-scale cars they drive on it, you cannot tell me Toronto is not a car-oriented city. And all the people I spoke to in suburban Markham had never been on a train or bus in Toronto).

 

Mees copped his detractors too, ostensibly from the side that should have supported him – the rail and bus operators. Rail operators, you would expect, would welcome his findings that operating a high-frequency, simplified rail operation would produce the best results. More, and reasoned voices to the argument for more public funding to achieve this result, you would think.

 

And his call for a tight grid network of buses operating all civilised hours would also be welcomed by bus operators. You would think the little private bus empires would be keen for another voice to push for the increase in funding, and hence expansion in the number of vehicles and staffing that it would require.

 

But no, he probably copped it greater, and from both sides, than if he had been just another voice in one camp or the other. Metaphorically, the Middle East peace negotiator, shot as he arrives at the negotiating table, a threat to both sides perhaps?

 

One thing that has always fascinated me is the personal motivations of those who resent new opinions and voices in a long running debate; and I believe in rail/public transport there are some deep psycho-social issues that lay behind that. I’ll leave that topic for another day.

 

In his submission to Parliament Mees rests on two solid conclusions – that the rear guard action that his spearhead is fighting, comes from the concept of “self-defence of incompetence”, which another academic developed. And that a single integrated authority covering all modes would be the real solution to the problem.

 

The self defence of incompetence arises from the poor competence of employees, who Mees conjectures have filled the system since privatisation (although I don’t believe he blames privatisation per se for this problem) and the departure of competent employees, with the technical skills and corporate memory. Certainly, compared to the field I work in (another controversial area of public administration) it is hard to believe the loss of technical and institutional memory that transport has been through.

 

The system, Mees suggests, actively builds on its own previous ‘bogus’ defences of incompetence until people start believing their own ‘bogusness’.

 

However, Mees moves onto ground that could undermine his own argument when he posits that Connex and the DoT have develop a reciprocal backside-covering arrangement when presumably if a) the system has been underfunded and therefore Connex would be right to blame DoT or b) the operator is incompetent, and hence DoT would be right to blame Connex or c) both of the above, in which case they could both blame each other.

 

But we end up with d) they both lie to protect each other when one or both know the true causes of failure, which are never made public.

 

And before someone rushes to criticise my use of the word ‘lie’ I would ask – suppose I had said they were only ‘very badly mistaken’. It might have been more diplomatic or less personal – but would it have itself been a ‘very badly mistaken’ understanding of their veracity or otherwise.

 

These people are paid hundreds of millions of dollars collectively; are we to believe a situation presents itself and they are ‘very badly mistaken’ about what it was, or what caused it? I could accept a mistake here or there by an individual or two. A minister misreads his briefing note in Parliament; or a clerk mistypes a figure into a database; an adviser mishears an explanation over a mobile phone from a rail yard. But a whole team of media advisers, Division heads and PR hacks write these documents, they would either by writing them in complete isolation from the facts, or they have the facts and are not writing them.

 

The problem is I suspect an integrated transport authority would only lead to more of this, and Mees would need to explain better how such an authority would actually work, and build a positive culture. Deckchairs and iceberg-penetrated ocean liners spring to mind.

 

Mees presents the Zurich public transport authority as a model but presents it as if we haven’t been down this street before. Sydney had the “Public Transport Commission” from 1972 to 1980, operating rail, buses (but not private buses) and ferries while Brisbane briefly had the Metropolitan Transport Authority in the mid 1970s. Perth has had “Transperth” since the mid 1980s and Adelaide had the State Transport Authority since the late 1970s, though this has been operationally loosened with the privatisation of buses and Transadelaide keeping trains and tram.

 

In Mees home town the Metropolitan Transit Authority was created in 1983 and ran under that guise until the early 1980s, when it was replaced with the Public Transport Corporation (adding in country services) until privatisation.

 

The MTA or Met as it was branded, had rail, tram and bus divisions, and the suburban rail was fairly well institutionally separated from the country and freight rail operator, hence it wasn’t just a new lick of paint.

 

The Met did not cover itself in glory, in fact it was probably one of the worst times in Melbourne’s public transport history, almost as bad as the summer of 2009. Those who were there remember Lou Di Gregorio and the week-long strikes, “Snappy Tom” Roper, Jim Kennan and the scratch tickets, and the 7:17 from Ringwood (which almost never ran). They remember the editorial of the Sun News Pictorial (predecessor to the H-S) wanting the whole system ripped up and replaced with freeways.

 

No-one familiar with the Sydney situation could point to any good coming from the Public Transport Commission, the period of the slashing of rail services, Granville, and the trains being painted blue over the top of their stainless steel. Certainly I don’t recall a renaissance of public transport planning and coordination during this period. Arguably the early State Rail Authority days, when the PTC was desolved, were better.

 

So the burden on Mees would be to better explain how an integrated transport authority might avoid this. And how we might be more ‘Swiss’.

 

Most calls for ‘integration’ relate to the benefits of silo-busting. What is a silo? Management studies gurus will know the answer – it refers to organisational structures which encourage communication and accountability running vertically, from the shop floor through Division and Branch heads to the top. Because people only answer for their work and for their performance to the guy on top, the only person who will see the entire perspective, for example, what the customer experiences, is the CEO. And because he/she is a long way away in a corporate office, in effect no-one sees in the organisation the effect on the customer – what the customer gets, or pays for.

 

And a customer experience is very multi-faceted in the provision of public transport.

 

The customer will experience variously across their journey – the asset/infrastructure, vehicles, ticketing equipment and revenue collection, the provision of information both fixed and in real time, the experience of safety and comfort, and because transport is about a change in geography, the customer sees how things are done ‘differently’ according the geography, sometimes more than the staff see (because they might be limited to one location or route).

 

For example, a customer could travel from St Ives to Sydney, via a private bus to Turramurra, a Cityrail train and walking along the city streets. Arguably the NSW Transport Minister sits across the top of this journey; noone else does. The journey requires 2 separate tickets and therefore revenue streams, which never meet. The two vehicles are owned, maintained and driven by vastly different staff working for different silos.

 

The station facility is provided by Cityrail. If they’ve thought to accommdate the bus in the design of the facility, it would be the exception rather than the norm. The timetabling, if it is done at all, would be by a third silo in a distant building, remote from the reality of what’s happening.

 

Even walking along the city streets is the responsibility of the City of Sydney, who doubtless are not responsible for how pedestrians flow into the station complexes, way people direct themselves on common journeys to popular destinations and so on.

 

Measuring the performance of the whole would be patchy or non-existent. A passenger’s journey time could vary widely according to the reliability of the interchange between bus and train; a process that does not actually have a person responsible for it occuring.

 

I’ve developed a matrix that helps us to understand how multimodal public transport might be integrated, both by aspect of integration, and depth of integration.

 

 Click to enlarge.

 

And no matter how clever Steve Crabb or Philip Shirley were in painting their vehicles all the same colour – integration is not about paint on vehicles, but about the extent to which the factors listed above are managed. By accident, by design or by a tight end-to-end view of what the customer actually experiences.

 

I’ve marked on the matrix some code letter positions as I would welcome comments below on whether certain integrations could be placed in alternative positions from the ones I’ve chosen.

 

On the vertical axis are the cumulative achievements of potential integration. Branding is the easiest, hence its position as the lowest possible achievement of integration. On the horizontal axis is my own assessment of the evidence for that. Because the vertical position assumes cumulative achievement, it therefore assumes the integration items below have already been well achieved. This is not always going to be so clear cut. However  it would be rare for an organisation to achieve only the minimum on something like branding or ticketing – but to have a well-founded performance measurement system that is fully integrated. The reverse is possible, as in Melbourne, with zonal multi-modal ticketing and a single brand for marketing public transport (Metlink) but neglible effort to measure the performance of the system as a whole.

 

In the final column, I’ve put the question that will guide users to better decide whether the achievement has been met.

 

The lower achievements are fairly self-explanatory but the higher ones won’t be.

 

Let’s look first at performance measurement. Some of the sins of existing non-integrated systems include: measuring a train+bus journey as two separate journeys (this is common), measuring mode performance to the end of the mode, notwithstanding that a vehicle has missed a connection, either by accident on the day, or by design of the timetable. Another is to measure customer satisfaction with one mode only, knowing full well that the passenger’s overall satisfaction will be lower if a connecting mode fails to deliver.

 

What is process management? I first ran into the concept from Paul Walsh who taught at UNSW. It grew out of business process reengineering – a concept which aimed to avoid “paving over the cow paths” as Hammer and Champy put, but to design new processes that reduced cost, time and effort, often using automation. Walsh had a different take – it wasn’t so crucial to process efficiency the number of steps or how long they took, but whether someone was accountable for it. End to end, from the customer’s point of view.

 

If all the key interfaces were being managed, for example, the McDonalds manager was watching not just the burgers being made but the order being given and the finished burger being given to the paying customer as quickly as possible, then business process management was taking place. If not, you were probably seeing silo-based management – with the kitchen manager winning awards potentially for the fastest made hamburger in history, but the finished product sitting waiting to be given to the customer because another silo, the shopfront staff, not doing their jobs. If the kitchen manager is not accountable for that, and that would be a reasonable expectation, then it is no surprise that it doesn’t happen. As they say, what gets measured gets done.

 

In public transport, who is actually accountable for the customer experience? The depot manager getting trains or buses ready for the day? The driver (or signaller in the case of railways?) The ticket seller? The station staff? The Line Manager in head office? The person who wrote the timetables? The guy installing concrete sleepers in the track? It is duff to say “all of them” because you cannot hold “all of them” to account.

 

Who is accountable if the bus misses its train connection? If the two tickets are incompatible? If the bus has nowhere to pull up safely at the rail station? If the customer, just off the train, doesn’t know where the bus is? The station assistant might well say “Don’t ask me, I only work for the railways” but that could be a perfectly reasonable explanation, it isn’t part of his training, he doesn’t get in trouble for saying that – and he’ll still get paid whether or not that customer continues to use PT. So who is accountable?

 

To come back to Mees – I think he needs to build the bridge between his public advocacy of an integrated transport authority – and the reality that in Australia this has often not produced much more than single tickets and single signage. Even basics like integrated bus-rail facilities are only seen in a few places, for example, Perth. Route planning and substitution is not done, for example, in Brisbane, the BCC buses and QR are in competition, not just at a route level but even for major infrastructure development. In Sydney what baby steps were achieved towards integration had been rewound, and the system improved for it. That needs some explanation/

 

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Planning and Operation, Politics and History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.