An interesting piece from BBC London news has appeared in the Video and Audio section of the BBC News website today.
If you don't have time to watch the video, it basically makes the point that TfL's official performance figures do not include the time lost to upgrade work. This means that while in reality the Jubilee line has only run something like 78% of the trains it should have run were it not closed most weekends, the TfL performance figure says that he Jubilee line ran 95% of services.
There is a short piece in the film by Tony Travers of LSE who is an impressive academic on the subject of local government - I used his publications with frightening regularity for my own MA. He makes the point that London Underground sees things from its own point of view, which is that the railway is an engineering concern, and neglects to think of how the passengers are affected by all this work.
If Tony can find any organisation in the world that doesn't see things from its own particular point of view, I'll give him a hat. In some ways he is right of course, engineering concerns hold a great deal of sway in LU, but there are a couple reasons why I think this criticism of those performance figures is unfair.
The main reason is that TfL is not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes here. The performance figures are actually called the Scheduled Train Kilometers. Clearly, this only covers the scheduled services. So, if something unplanned happens to close down the railway and wrecks a normal day, like one of the failed trains we're hearing so much of on the Jubilee, this negatively affects that measure. But the engineering works, which are planned in advance, do not affect the figures because the number of km run is scheduled to be lower or sometimes of course, zero.
As a sub-element to this, TfL also publishes the figures covering the amount of disruption the upgrades closures cause and supply these raw data to organisations like London First, who then monetise it and tell everyone how much in pounds sterling the closures cost, so it's not as if TfL say "look everyone, the Jubilee line is so fantastic that 95% of all trains run, we're amazing and the line is never closed".
Finally though, this is an internal performance measure. One of many, believe you me. If you thought the NHS and education were excessively target driven, you should try working at London Underground. It makes sense to measure the number of scheduled kms you run because it shows how effective you are at running the day-to-day services. If the figure is low, it shows that at the first sign of trouble the trains management teams start to cancel and turn trains short rather than try to fix the problem, and that kind of inept incident management is something that needs to be flagged up and fixed. It also makes sense to measure how much disruption you cause due to engineering works, and we do that too. All of this data is then collated and our performance is measured on that as a whole. The statistics for how badly the upgrades have been managed are out there and certainly should be discussed, but the Scheduled Train km measure is for something entirely different.
Picking one statistic out of the bunch and using it for something that it is explicitly not designed to be used for is one of the oldest tricks in the journalistic book. It's what I'd expect from local media, but it's a shame someone like Tony Travers was foolish enough or that eager for facetime on TV to appear on the piece.
Finally though, the upgrades need to happen. Sorry to harp on about it, but it's true. Even the slash and burn Coalition Government have looked at the business cases for the upgrades and at the audit reports of TfL and London Underground and guaranteed that every penny for the upgrades will be protected. How many public bodies can say that?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Your comment, "If the figure is low, it shows that at the first sign of trouble the trains management teams start to cancel and turn trains short rather than try to fix the problem, and that kind of inept incident management is something that needs to be flagged up and fixed."
The management of an incident is the down to those out there with it or the InfraCo, prey tell how a controller can get a PEA reset quicker or a defective trainstop fixed or some points secured in seconds - especially as there are now less station staff and cuts coming in InfraCo staff too.
It is right that during some incidents trains are cancelled. What's the point in having most of your trains in congestion, in tunnels perhaps, not moving, when some can be cancelled to the depot and the Train Operators used to reform the then late running service, thereby reducing the need to short trip so many trains due to driving parameter issues.
As well as freeing up line capacity.
Are you really a manager? Actually perhaps you are!
Of course that's right, and most of the incidents I've seen that have caused late running all day have been the result not of a particularly long sit-down but of a Service Manager who is too scared to let trains be cancelled.
On the other hand though, you know very well that if mileage is low then questions will be asked, and to be honest that's fair enough. If you think that doesn't happen, then you've clearly never spoken to an irate Performance Manager!
There's a balance to be struck between never cancelling trains, which buggers everything up, and being too cancel-happy, which makes our lives easier at the expense of a crap experience for the punters. This kind of thing is what LU and the mainlines have always done and been rightly criticised for - running the railway for our benefit and no-one else's.
You know all of this though. Your insistence to argue the point regardless clearly shows that you are really an LU employee!
Post a Comment