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2011: Posts Of The Year

Michael Wyres — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:00:08 +0000

I certainly hope my readers have had a safe and happy holiday period. Today, I have decided to take a quick look at back at my popular posts from 2011, with the most read articles for each month, and a little discussion of each.

If 2012 throws up some similar results, it will be another good year! Enjoy!

January: Single Point of Failure

V/Line commuters on the Geelong line, and Metro Trains commuters on the Werribee and Williamstown lines have endured another year of extensive “track equipment faults” at Newport station – and nothing ever seems to be done about it.

“Now, I’m the first to accept that unexpected things happen all the time, and that running an integrated public transport network is undoubtedly difficult, but the regularity of problems at Newport are becoming monotonous.”

February: NBN: End User Services Taking Shape

The rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN) gathered pace in 2011, and at their February industry forum, the shape of end user services began appearing before our eyes.

“For the market, this means that the providers who innovate and deliver the best products over the network will emerge on top. The competition will be furious.”

March: Online Piracy Not The Problem

Copyright holders want us to believe that we are killing their business models through online piracy, but is it us or them who are to blame?

“The sooner they adopt digital, storage-format-agnostic distribution of their content, the sooner people will stop downloading material in those formats.”

April: NBN: Hands On The Hardware

This article was actually paired with the top February article, but reared its head with a lot of page impressions in April.

“I managed to get a few moments with the hardware that end users will receive when their premises are connected to the network progressively over the next nine years.”

May: Alan Jones And The NBN Fail!

In the midst of another of his on-air anti-government rants, Alan Jones demonstrated for the masses how little knowledge – (or willingness to research) – he has when it comes to the NBN, and this page generated a lot of views thanks to re-tweets from the ABC’s Mark Colvin and Latika Bourke.

“If you are going to jump up and down, Alan Jones, make sure you do a bit of research first, instead of instantaneously jumping at an opportunity to forward your political agenda. Your idiocy will remain on the interwebz forever, Mr Jones.”

June: New Timetable Improves Little

Back to V/Line and another attempt to “improve services” which appears to have delivered little to long suffering commuters.

“We were promised by V/Line that “these changes follow several months of work with Metro and feedback from our customers“. Oh really? Customers asked for slower trains?”

July: The Australian FUDs It Again

Rupert Murdoch’s various media interests – (and particularly in Britain) – have taken a hammering this year. In Australia, they’ve fought a long campaign against the government, criticising it in news reporting and editorial position at almost every turn – trying to be the news, rather than report it.

“Stop trying to make news, and actually report the news. Ironic that you are called “News Limited” – since your ability to report “news” seems rather “limited” at times.”

August: HP Shipping Fail – You Just Have to See This!

This was not the most highly read article on my site for the year, but it was certainly the fastest moving article – at its peak managing several hundred views an hour. Four months later, this one still stuns me!

“If your goal is to be “exemplary global citizens”, I’m sorry HP – you fail.”

September: A Simple NBN Maths Lesson

The financial critics of the NBN project generally scream blue-murder about where the money to pay for it will come from. Some fairly simple second-grade mathematics is all it really takes – demonstrating some quite astonishing revenues for even a relatively weak uptake of network services.

“That’s where the money is coming from folks! And it will come a lot quicker than many would have you believe.”

October: Waltrip: Bathurst A “Geological Oddity”

October saw three-time NASCAR champion Darrell Waltrip visit Mount Panorama, for the first live broadcast of our Bathurst 1000 into the United States. Interested in what it is like inside the cars on our famous circuit, Jason Bright made sure DW will never forget his first visit!

“It was television gold, and DW seemed genuinely stunned by the experience.”

November: Opposition “NBN” Plan To Cost More?

Opposition communications spokesperson, Malcolm Turnbull has been spouting for months about the “reckless” cost of the NBN – where it is starting to come to the fore that his alternative plan, though cheaper in the short term, will be far more expensive over time – a few shared by many, including the ACCC.

“Over time, the opposition plan will cost more than the current intention of building a full FTTH (better) network, before we even consider the lost benefits to the economy.”

December: Screw You, Greedy Music Industry

Copyright protection is a hot topic at the moment, but information that emerged in December showed that the music industry is not suffering as much as they would have us believe – if at all.

“It isn’t downloads that are killing your industry – it is your own overpricing greed and lack of vision that’s doing it.”

V/Line – Could It Really Be True?

Michael Wyres — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:14:09 +0000

Regular followers of my tweets and blog posts will know that a subject I am, shall we say, “passionate” about is the performance – (or lack thereof) – of the customer service efforts of Victoria’s regional rail provider, V/Line.

Any regular commuter with an ounce of common sense understands that things go wrong from time to time, and that these things are often completely out of the control of V/Line. Such as cement trucks landing on train lines.

Where V/Line constantly fail is keeping their customers informed about what is going on when things do go wrong. This should be a basic customer service principle.

Following what turned out to be my immensely popular blog post following the "fuel fault" incident last week, I was contacted by V/Line, seeking my input in regards to what they can do to improve their customer communications.

Say what? Could it be they are finally ready to listen? Oh, the shock and awe.

I’m happy to help them too. This has been the reason I’ve complained long and loud about this subject, and it seems I have finally had some measure of success. There’s no point ignoring the opportunity.

So, here’s YOUR challenge.

If you are reading this post, and you feel you want something brought to their attention about their customer service efforts, please post your thoughts in the comments of this post – I’ll be only to happy to collate them up and send them on to my contact at V/Line.

We’ve all complained long and hard – now lets put our thoughts where our mouths are – while they’re listening.

Our Customers Are Idiots: V/Line

Michael Wyres — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 05:28:39 +0000

Long suffering Geelong V/Line customers copped another penalty for trying to do the right thing and support public transport yesterday morning when the 4:43am service from Marshall to Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station ran out of fuel at Footscray, halting all trains behind it.

This included metropolitan services on the Werribee and Williamstown lines, and caused “knock-on” effects in other parts of the network.

Thousands of commuters were disrupted because someone didn’t put enough fuel in the tank. I mean seriously, incompetent much?

Of course, V/Line themselves came up with a raft of the usual excuses, and even some new ones.

“The gauge was checked this morning as it always is, from the outside. It appeared that there was enough 'petrol' in the tank. The driver doesn’t have that same gauge in the cabin and it broke down at Footscray unfortunately.”

(NOTE: I’ve chosen to ignore the fact that if they had put petrol in the tank, it wouldn’t have got anywhere – (let alone Footscray) – since it runs on diesel fuel.)

“He did check the gauge on the train and it appeared there was enough fuel to make the trip.”

So, he checked the gauge – but not the tank? How about giving the tank a quick tap with your foot, to see if it SOUNDS empty? Or having a look INSIDE the tank? Or – (and this is a radical idea) – how about just filling all the tanks up at the start of each day?

A few simple tests and/or procedures and none of this debacle would have occurred.

The bottom line is, as people with (hopefully) common sense, commuters do understand that things go wrong from time to time. Shit happens as they say. We accept that.

V/Line’s biggest problem is (still) its ability to not communicate with its passengers when things do go wrong.

This incident occurred at 5:45am. At this point, alarms should be ringing, and customers should start getting informed. The response from V/Line?

Nothing.

I boarded a train at North Geelong at 6:33am – was there any platform announcement to expect delays? No. If there had been, I would have returned to my car and driven to work, so as to not be late to the seminar I was attending yesterday morning.

When the train reached Lara at about 6:45am, the conductor informed us of the problem, and that we’d be delayed. Of course, I was now many kilometres from my car back at North Geelong, and now had no choice but to wait out the delay.

And they’d already known for an hour – so yes, I was late for my seminar.

Poor excuse for customer service, no? This is not an isolated incident – this is exactly how V/Line perform whenever there is a problem. How about this one, or even this one?

And who could forget this one?

Well, today there has been even more demonstration of the contempt V/Line holds for their customers. Of their “vlineinform” Twitter account, they said today:

“The way it was set up was to only look for delays of more than 30 minutes. We are in the process now of fixing that.”

Oh really? Why was it spitting out these updates on Tuesday night?

Forgive my maths, but are not delays of “15 mins” and “28 mins” less than “30 mins”?

Let’s flash forward to yesterday morning, where delays of “up to 47 minutes” were experienced as a result of the “fuel fault”.

Hang on – now there aren’t any tweets at all about the Geelong line, even though there are delays of “47 minutes” which is more than “30 minutes”.

What?

So setup “to only look for delays of more than 30 minutes” is clearly wrong. A lie, or just no idea.

So lets make something up.

Notice also the tweet from Metro Trains of delays of “50 minutes” in regards to this EXACT incident. I think that’s more than “47 minutes” as well.

How are the V/Line trains being delayed for a shorter period of time, on the same piece of track?

We do have a brain V/Line. We see what’s going on, we are intelligent people.

Pointless PR rubbish that is just clearly wrong, and simply never keeping your customers informed is just contempt for the people who pay to ride your “services”.

Ultimately, we give you a job. A job you’re not doing – and we’re sick of it.

V/Line: The Cleanup Progresses!

Michael Wyres — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 09:48:47 +0000

If you stopped by my site yesterday, you would have caught a set of images I took onboard my regular 16:37 V/Line service to North Geelong.

It was pretty gross.

Well, 24 hours on – guess what happened? Same carriage…1207 from V/Locity set VL07…and they’ve attempted to clean it up. I guess they tried at least, but as you can see, didn’t really make a good fist of it.

If you compare these to yesterday’s photos, clearly it is the same stain – just less of it.

Try as they may, one must wonder one thing – with two of the four RFR lines closed down, you’d think there would be plenty of spare carriages hanging around.

How about we take this one out of service for a few days and clean it properly?

Your Train Is Ready For Boarding!

Michael Wyres — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 09:37:34 +0000

Boarding my regular 16:37 Southern Cross to North Geelong service this evening, I discovered this in the front most carriage.

Nice, isn’t it? Want a closer look?

The worst part was that a conductor walked through the carriage, saw the mess, and did nothing about it.

This train was NOT ready for boarding. Lift your game V/Line – that’s disgusting!

New Timetable Improves Little

Michael Wyres — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:08:39 +0000

The much-hyped new train timetables running in Victoria were heralded by the government, V/Line, and Metro Trains Melbourne as a breakthrough for passengers getting around more efficiently.

We were promised by V/Line that “these changes follow several months of work with Metro and feedback from our customers“. Oh really? Customers asked for slower trains?

Obviously, I can’t speak for every single service scheduled into the timetable, but lets look at a couple of the most important ones – peak services when the majority of people travel. These are the particular services I catch most days.

Lets start with the morning peak, and service 8210. I travel from North Geelong through to Southern Cross. On the old timetable below, it left North Geelong at 7:04am, with a scheduled arrival at 7:51am, for a trip time of 47 minutes.

That would have been great if that’s what actually happened. I start work at 8am, and my office is only a three or four minute walk from Southern Cross. Problem was, it invariably ran around 6 minutes late, arriving at 7:57 quite often. Not really a problem for getting to the office on time or near enough – fortunately my employer is not a clock watcher.

I’m sure not every employer is the same.

Overall, this meant the journey time was regularly about 53 minutes. Lets look at the 8210 service on the new timetable.

It now leaves North Geelong at 6:55am – nine minutes earlier – and is scheduled to arrive at 7:46am, for a journey time of 51 minutes. The new timetable allows for four extra minutes to cover the distance.

Given under the old timetable it was quite often around six minutes late, you’d think that allowing another four minutes on the timetable, it shouldn’t arrive much later than 7:48am most of the time – only two minutes late.

On paper this looks great – although it runs to time a little more often than it used to – (which was admittedly almost never) – it still often ends up arriving at about 7:53am, for a journey time of 58 minutes.

Wait a second – didn’t it usually take around 53 minutes under the old timetable? Some improvement!

However, that’s not such a big deal to me. I still get to work on time, and although I’m still getting used to getting up 10 minutes earlier than I used to, it’s not too bad.

But an improvement? No.

Why don’t we look at the evening timetable on the way home, shall we? Namely, service 8229 out of Southern Cross.

As you can see, it used to leave at 4:40pm, and arrive back at North Geelong – (by the timetable at least) – at 5:22pm. Invariably, it would find itself arriving at around 5:25pm – this I know because day after day after normal day, I would be in my car in the car park at 5:27pm.

Almost like clockwork with a journey time of 45 minutes – unless of course struck by one of V/Line’s famous delays.

What do we get now?

The same service leaves Southern Cross at 4:37pm – three minutes earlier. It is scheduled to hit North Geelong at 5:23pm, just one minute after the previous scheduled time. Just like the morning service, allowing an extra four minutes on the timetable.

However, what has those four minutes done? Now I regularly arrive in the front seat of my car at 5:38pm after getting off the train at 5:36pm. Nine minutes later than I used to, on a train that leaves three minutes earlier. It now regularly takes 59 minutes, instead of 45 minutes.

Sounds well thought out, this new timetable, doesn’t it?

To realise why 14 minutes of our lives have been stolen from us every afternoon, what we have to do is to look at the train BEFORE the 8229, namely the 8227.

It used to leave Southern Cross at 4:13, but now leaves at 4:19 – six minutes later. The 8229 used to leave at 4:40pm, and now leaves at 4:37pm – three minutes earlier.

They are NINE minutes closer together on the timetable. The 8227 is also a stopping all stations service, while the 8229 remains “express” all the way to North Geelong.

Almost every single day the 8229 has to slow down and crawl along behind the 8227 as it approaches Geelong. This slow down usual begins before reaching Lara. This almost never happened under the old timetable – only when the 8227 was delayed somewhere en-route.

Bringing these trains nine minutes closer together on the timetable has “penalised” the later train by about 10 to 15 minutes, almost every night. Fourteen minutes over 230 working days a year for most people is almost 54 days a year less at home – more than two days.

Remember that “these changes follow several months of work with Metro and feedback from our (V/Line) customers“.

Yeah right. I bet we really asked for this!

Channel Seven – Please Get It Right!

Michael Wyres — Mon, 16 May 2011 10:05:18 +0000

Over the weekend, Channel Seven Melbourne was heavily promoting a “special report” to be screened on this evening’s nightly news bulletin, extolling the virtues of living in Geelong instead of Melbourne, and commuting into Melbourne for work. About how “easy” and “relaxed” this commute is.

I regularly do this commute, and I can warn the people of Melbourne thinking about it – don’t! What you might have seen in Channel Seven’s report tonight is far from true.

Sure, the house prices are much better down here, but an “easy” and “relaxed” commute? Spare us!

On the preview of the report over the weekend, one woman travelling by train was even heard to say – “oh, you always get a seat!”

Oh really? If I’ve had a seat 50 times in the last five years, I would be stunned. It just almost never happens.

The service is often lousy, and often runs 15-25% late, if it even runs at all. Cancellations and alteration to road coach are fairly common. Anyone who follows the #vline tag on Twitter can see how bad it gets, and how regularly.

But don’t just listen to me – just ask any regular V/Line commuter! This is what it often looks like (not the almost empty off-peak service shown in the story):

So, Channel Seven and City of Greater Geelong – if you’re going to do a promotional – (and probably paid for) – fluff piece, try being honest. It is hard enough for people already doing the commute to get a decent run into Melbourne without encouraging more people to do it.

Doing it by car is no doddle either, regularly taking even longer than a delayed V/Line train.

Do some actual journalism Seven instead of regurgitating crap like this!

V/Line Is A Pain In The Arse!

Michael Wyres — Wed, 04 May 2011 10:37:15 +0000

Now, before I get into this article, I’ll make one thing perfectly clear – this is NOT your typical V/Line rant that I might usually come up with, so if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll be disappointed.

Stick around though, because you will get a laugh at my expense.

Over the last three weeks or so, I’ve been having a problem with a pinched nerve in, err, my……buttocks.

(WAITS FOR SNIGGERING TO STOP)

The result of this pinching has been transferred pain halfway up my back, and most of the way down my leg. Some days, my back has been the biggest problem, but most of the time it has been my leg – it feels like a hamstring strain that just won’t heal.

Last week and over the weekend, it started to markedly improve. Still sore, but clearly finally getting better.

All of a sudden, come Monday it has been getting worse again – frustrating! This morning however, I figured out what has been going on.

As a regular V/Line commuter from North Geelong, I simply do not get a seat in the mornings. Invariably I end up sitting/leaning against the little shelf in the middle of a V/Locity carriage, just near the fire extinguisher sign and two upright bars in the photo.

When I plonked my butt down on this little shelf this morning, I noticed that the main sore point in my posterior perfectly matched the metal edge of the little shelf.

Interesting.

Last week, just like everyone else, I had two days off work for Easter Monday and Anzac Day. The other three days, I worked away from the office at a client site, and therefore drove instead of travelling by train.

Of course, on Saturday and Sunday I didn’t sit on my little shelf either.

This week, back to the train, and back to my little shelf that corresponds to the location of the problem in my derrière – and the pain is getting worse again.

It would seem that after month and months and months of sitting in this spot five days a week – (except for the very rare occasions I get a seat) – has created some kind of “repetitive butt strain injury”.

There’s a good chance I will avoid the little shelf from now on, but it would seem that I finally have proof of something we regular V/Liners have long believed.

That V/Line – quite literally – is a pain in the arse!