zhasper.com

First we had the traffic chaos caused by the crowds flocking to see the QM2 and QE2.

Then we had the traffic chaos caused by Dick Cheney's visit, combined with the shutdown of all trains in the CBD.

It's only getting worse though. According to today's MX, the same we-close-the-roads-for-your-convenience courtesy extended to Cheney will be extended to all 23 APEC leaders between the 2nd and 9th of September.

As if that wasn't bad enough, evening trains will be replaced by buses between Central and North Sydney from the 3rd to the 5th; buses will replace trains between Ashfield and Central and on the Airport line on the 8th and 9th. The article also suggests that the entire City Circle will be shut down on the 8th and 9th, the days of the actual APEC conference.

That's not all though; the NRL final is due to be played the following weekend at Telstra Stadium. Guess which weekend citrail have decided to replace the Olympic Sprint trains with buses?

I'll add links to this story as I can find them online - the best I've seen so far is on news.com.au, but it doesn't contain all the detail that was in the MX report.

Update: SMH has the same story, but with more detail. Confirms that CBD, Inner West, and Airport lines will all be shut down for the weekend of 8/9 Sept; also implies that the whole harbour bridge may be shut for the same period.

Of course, the govt. says it's not going to be much of an issue:

The Premier Morris Iemma today acknowledged that Sydneysiders would be faced with delays, but said the government was working to minimise disruptions.

...

He said a public holiday would be in place to ensure that disruption and inconvenience was minimised.

Of course, that makes sense. Everybody knows that when there's a public holiday, we all just sit around in our houses - no-one takes public transport, no-one goes to the CBD, and most of all, there's no reason at all why anyone would be travelling on public transport through the CBD in order to reach, say, a nice beach to relax for the day, or the city's major parks...

Cityrail's own trackwork timetable looks pretty grim for September. Some of the highlights:
* Northern, North Shore, Newcastle and Hunter lines down on the 1st/2nd
* North Shore line down between Springwood and Penrith Sept 3-6 (I don't understand that either, I'm just quoting Cityrail)
* Newcastle line down between Gosford and Wyong during the day Sept 3-7
* Inner West, Airport and East Hills, and City Circle lines all down Sept 8-9. East hills services operate via Sydenham and terminate at Redfern
* Inner West between Central and Strathfield, and Olympic Sprint lines down Sept 15-16
* City cirle operates via Musem only, Airport and East Hills lines down completely, South line down between Macarthur and Liverpool, and Southern line down between Goulburn and Liverpool on Sept 22-23

Huzzah!

I've long thought that Sydney's monorail was the second most pointless monorail in the world (right behind, of course, the monorail between Jupiters and Oasis on the Gold Coast) - but I've now found out that this is wrong.

Seattle has an even more pointless monorail: only two stations (the one on the Coast has 3, even if two of them are at opposite ends of the same shopping center...), on a mile of track (even the Coast has.. well, probably about the same, really).

Cityrail have their ontime running stats online also. Some stats, anyway - they only show data for "peak hours" - trains arriving in the CBD between 6am and 9am, or leaving the CBD between 4pm and 6pm. The rest of the trains don't seem to matter.

Also, the data collection is, we are warned, a manual process. Wheee.

Anyway: for the month of May, only 62.2% of services were on time - where "on time" is redefined by Cityrail to be "No more than 4 minutes late". If you extend that to "No more than 10 minutes late", 87.5% were on time.

Connex' figures on their on-time running in Melbourne are also available. They managed to run 99% of scheduled services in May, and 92.9% were on time - in this case, "on time" means no more than 6 minutes late, and no more than 1 minute early. That's more arriving within 6 minutes than Cityrail can manage to have arrive within 10 minutes!

Note that cityrail doesn't care about early trains. That train just pulling out of the station two minutes early as you arrive puffing at panting at the station on your way to work in the morning? That was "on time", according to Cityrail.

Connex apologise heavily for the tardy performance - cityrail don't seem to care.

I shall go away now - but I have another rant planned for the afternoon. Prepare yourselves!

Sounsd like London's Underground system is almost as bad as Sydney's train system. They seem to provide more information about it though..

Via BoingBoing:

Cory Doctorow: Stef sez, "For 15 days, I've been grabbing the London Underground realtime disruption map every few minutes. I've just glued them all together into a three minute Quicktime, so you can visualise just how bad London's subway system is. My calculations indicate that the system is only fully operation 22% of the time!" Link (Thanks, Stef!)

A few days ago I posted an animated gif showing purple spots in a circle.. James Kew has discovered the source of the image, along with some more detailed information about how it works.

Of course, if you're reading my comment feed you'll already know about this ;)

In other news, cityrail are crap. utter utter crap.

Saturday night I was going to a friends place at Artarmon.

First, I toddled to my local train station. This isn't some minor station, this is Redfern. As you can see on Cityrail's map, it's just south of the city. Every train line goes through Redfern. Virtually every train stops here - exceptions are intercity trains, and a very very few ultra-express services.

I arrived at the station around 6:40; considering I wanted to be at Artarmon around 7, this was, I thought, cutting it a little close, but it should be doable. (In fact, according to Cityrail's published timetable, I was wrong - I should have been at Redfern around 10 minutes earlier).

When I arrived, there was a train arriving in "9 minutes".

20 minutes later, at 7, this had dropped to 8 minutes.

5 minutes later, the train suddenly arrived. The indicator boards still showed that this train was going all the way to Hornsby.

Hurrah, I thought. On my way at last!

We managed to get as far as Central before the train stopped. For quite a while. About 5 minutes. Not sure why, no announcements were made, we just sat around for a while.

Eventually, we set off. Through Town Hall, Wynyard, over the bridge, through Milsons Point, into North Sydney...

Just as I though I wasn't going to be too badly late, we stopped. Permanently. "All passenger please note: this train is now terminating here. All passengers please change. Repeat, all out, all change".

Thanks cityrail, thanks.

Over to platform 1, wait for the *next* train (which took about 10 more minutes). This one did get me to Artarmon, and in only just under an hour since I arrived at Redfern.

Coming home was slightly smoother. Only had to wait at Chatswood station for about 20 minutes. During this time, 4 trains passed us in the wrong direction before a single train arrived heading to the city. Well, there was one train that arrived, slowed, and looked about to stop - but at the last minute, it sped up again and kept going, leaving all the hundreds of people (maybe not literally hundreds, probably no more than 150 or so) of people who'd stood up in readiness for boarding this train to go reclaim seats.

Well done, cityrail, well done.