A unique verb in Melbourne’s vernacular is “Connexed”. Just say the Queen was in town and you’d been invited to formal tea at her hotel but you’re running terribly late due to an inevitable combination of cancelled and late trains, you’d be able to apologise to a frustrated monarch with the line, “I’m sorry, your Maj, but I was Connexed.” You see, everyone understands how the train system (dis)functions in this city and they’re very understanding when you have been fucked over by the system’s private operator, Connex.

Now the Brumby Government, itself largely responsible for the dog’s breakfast that is the train system, has gone and ruined the entire city’s ability to efficiently and succinctly sum up its frustration with the trains by awarding the contract to a new operator.

The Government, reeling from a public backlash over the rail network’s failings, yesterday dumped the French-owned operator Connex and replaced it with a consortium backed by Hong Kong’s metro operator … But Premier John Brumby insisted commuters would get a better deal from new rail operator Metro Trains Melbourne …

What will it be now? Metro’d? Metro Trainsoed? How will we possible cope? Brumby says we will be compensated appropriately.

More staff on stations, fewer cancelled trains and improved punctuality have been promised by the Brumby Government and the new consortium appointed to operate Melbourne’s train network for the next eight years.

Just after they finish spending millions and millions on new station and train signage, new uniforms, new stationary, new audio recordings, and an advertising blitz to promote the brand to the pissed off and cynical Melbourne population who have see it all before each of the several other times the operator has changed.

Andrew Bolt loves to cry about how teh evil Leftists are running this state into the ground.

Water:
MELBOURNE’s summer water storage levels have slumped to their lowest point in 25 years… Yarra Valley Water managing director Tony Kelly, said Victorians were now using an “unacceptable” amount of water…

Power:
TENS of thousands of houses sweltered through the night as sizzling heat caused power outages across the state…. “These extreme temperatures and excessive use of air conditioning can impact on the electricity distribution network,’’ Mr Batey said.

Transport:
MELBOURNE’S train system buckled under the strain of Wednesday’s heat, forcing maintenance workers to cool the rails with water… But commuters were left boiling mad after enduring more than 150 cancelled services in one of the system’s worst days in recent memory…

PUBLIC Transport Minister Lynne Kosky has blamed ”underinvestment over a long period of time” as a key factor in the poor performance of Melbourne’s public transport network in recent weeks.

But it’s not actually teh Leftists, it’s extreme weather events.

Water:
Melbourne has experienced below-average rainfall for the past decade.

Power:
Melbourne is sweltering through a once-in-a-century heatwave that is placing enormous demands on power supplies, with interruptions due to fuses blowing and not lack of supply.

Transport:
I’m no real fan of Connex, but when rails are physically buckling and breaking due to the extreme heat I do tend to understand that problems are largely out of their control.

Maybe the weather is leftist?

Once a week for GroupthinkFC indoor soccer matches I strap on my money belt, put a can of mace and a rape alarm in my pocket, and leave the safe and familiar surrounds of Brunswick in Melbourne’s inner north for the unfamiliar badlands of the eastern suburbs. Before this season I’ve never bought a zone two public transport ticket and now I know why zone two residents have the king shits with trains (when they arrive) and drive their cars instead (even though most have no choice.) If I choose to leave Brunswick before 6pm for a return trip to the soccer venue it costs me a whopping $10.10 for a daily ticket, and if I leave after 6pm it drops to a slightly more acceptable $5.50 for a two hour ticket that is valid all night. Highway freakin’ robbery, I tells ya.

Last night I deliberately planned my journey so that I was catching the 6.02pm train from Brunswick and I dutifully pumped $5.50 into a ticket machine. I sat on the (late) train into the city listening to my iPod and thinking about the awesome service I was receiving in exchange for my money. At Southern Cross I alighted in order to catch a second train out to the badlands and standing on the platform I was horrified to discover that my ticket had gone missing from the pocket it was sharing with my iPod.

I swore loudly and profusely.

Fuming, I approached the ticket barriers where two bored ticket Nazis were waiting to arrest people for making eye contact. I explained that I had lost my ticket and would need to be let out of the barriers to purchase a new one to complete my journey. Of course they looked at me skepticly and prepared to fine me in triplicate, but I think the “if you fucking dare try to fine me or even reach for your ticket book I will go Martin Bryant on your arse” look on my face dissuaded them and they reluctantly let me through.

So I ended up paying $11.00 to make a return journey from one part of Melbourne to another. I should just buy a car.

The Editor, John Surname, Ant Rogenous, Jeremy Sear, Wah and Craig discuss the following:

* Blogging
* Kevin Rudd’s first 100 days
* The Liberal Party
* Brendan Nelson
* Interest rates
* Cricket
* The Herald Sun
* David Hicks
* Dick Smith
* Osama Bin Laden
* Prince Harry
* Connex
* Lynne Kosky
* Public transport
* Victorian Labor Party
* Fleshlight
* What is the plural of “penis”?
* Liberal leadership future

** I don’t know why but that bloody “Play now” link is still serving up episode four. I have no solution yet. Something to do with the intertubes broken or something. Just to be safe, use the “Play in popup” link or the “Download” link. **

[display_podcast]

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Apparently the Melbourne public transport system has an image problem.

ALMOST half of Victorians think the state’s public transport system is worse than five years ago.

The latest Age/Nielsen poll found that 49% of Victorians think public transport is worse, while 27% say it’s better.

Dissatisfaction with public transport appears to cross the political divide, with 48% of Labor voters and 54% of Liberal voters saying it is worse.

And of course public transport Minister Lynne Kosky is completely dodging the issue and further enhancing her image as a complete tool.

The report, released by the Department of Infrastructure this month, found 30,000 more people were working in the city centre in 2006 than in 2001. Despite this jump, almost 5000 fewer people drove to work.

And the number of people who walked to work in the city centre rose to more than 5%, up from less than 3% in 2001.

Ms Kosky said she was extremely pleased with the results. “People are voting with their feet,” she said.

Remember, this is the same Minister who has blamed train commuters for delays by taking too long to get in and out of carriages, blamed commuters for expecting that the train or tram will show up when the timetable says it will, and demanded that workplaces and schools change their behaviour to match the public transport service rather than the other way around.

Now, everyone has a couple of hundred public transport horror stories but here’s my most recent.

On Sunday McBec and I wanted to get from Brunswick to St Kilda to meet friends at the pub. We left home just after 2pm and didn’t expect the trip to take much longer than an hour. The Sydney Rd Street Festival was on so we thought we’d walk our way through and grab a tram at the end of Sydney Rd. However, we got there and found the tram service replaced by buses. After waiting 20 minutes for a bus we walked, frustrated, to Jewell train station to catch the 3.04pm service to the city.

Of course, Connex regretted that the 3.04pm to the city had been cancelled.

So we walked back to Sydney Rd and watched a bus go past just before we got to the stop. 20 minutes later we finally got on a ridiculously overcrowded bus to Elizabeth St in the city. It was 3:20pm. By the time we got to St Kilda it was just past 4pm — a travel time from Brunswick of two hours. We could’ve driven to Bendigo in the same amount of time.

We don’t own a car because we live in the inner city and there is public transport almost everywhere we need to go. But every single day I thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I don’t rely on public transport to get to work like so many other poor saps who either have no choice or try to do the right thing by leaving the car at home. I get homicidal when trains are cancelled when I’m trying to get to the pub, let alone get home after a ten hour day at work.

It’s time for Lynne Kosky and the Brumby government to wake up and provide a public transport system that meets the demands of the people of Melbourne and that justifies the overblown cost of a ticket to use it.

Large sums of money are changing hands: Melbourne train network operator Connex has been fined $62 million for poor performance since April 2004 while tram operator Yarra Trams has been slugged just under a million bucks for the first three months of 2007.

However, these hefty fines shouldn’t be a problem for the private companies running Victoria’s public transport infrastructure. The Victorian government paid them $1.2 billion in subsidies between 1999 and 2006, with the subsidy total tipped to hit $2.1 billion by 2010.

Why would these companies make any effort to improve their services if they know any fines paid will be reimbursed many times over in the form of ever-increasing subsidies?

Back when Lynne Kosky became Victoria’s public transport minister she tried to solve the system’s substantial problems but pretending they didn’t exist. You see, the poor punctuality of train and tram services is all relative; punctuality was poor relative to commuters’ expectations which were unreasonable. How dare the public transport user expect their train to arrive at the time published in the timetable?

Now that Ms Kosky has acknowledged that commuters’ punctuality demands are probably reasonable she has decided to try and fix the problem. However, she’s not fixing the problem by making the service more reliable, rather she’s pledged to improve “personal and electronic communications with passengers” to show them that the system “cares” when totally failing the commuter.

Lynne Kosky is fast becoming a farce of a minister.

Any person living in Melbourne who has recently been trying to catch a train from time-to-time, let alone regularly, will know all about the mental condition known as Connex Anger. For non-Melburnians a quick one sentence primer: Melbourne’s privately operated train network has been shit for years but recent brake problems with rolling stock have resulted in dozens of train cancellations per day and may soon force the entire network to run a Saturday timetable on weekdays.

People are pissed.

The Age online is running a story claiming that a day of action is planned on 1 March whereby commuters will not buy or validate train tickets. The impression is given in the first half of the story that the “day of action” is being organised and supported by the Public Transport Users’ Association (PUTA). However, it’s not until the second half of the story that the driver of the “day of action” is revealed as some anonymous nobody on The Age’s lame-arse Your Say page and a throwaway comment is made acknowledging that PUTA does not condone fare evasion.

GrodsCorp sez: Connex are shit and a day of action is the least they deserve.

GrodsCorp sez: The Age should quit sourcing their stories from comments on their pathetic online “blogs” and get on with the important tasks of designing vapid lifestyle magazine inserts and cut-and-pasting celebrity “news” from the wire services.