City Rail to Triple Crush

[Sarah]

When are governements going to wake up and spend less on money losing tunnels and more on a decent public transport system?

The following is from The Sydney Morning Herald.

Linton Besser Transport Reporter
January 4, 2009

OVERCROWDING will become accepted practice on triple the number of CityRail trains under a NSW Government bid to make its performance figures look good.

CityRail aims for no more than 5 per cent of trains to carry a "crush load".

But bureaucrats want to extend that target to 17 per cent after a review revealed 16 per cent of services in 2007-08 ran with such a load - whereby passengers exceed 135 per cent of seating capacity.

Rail officials have approached the Independent Transport Safety and Reliability Regulator (ITSRR) in an attempt to relax its standards for overcrowded services.

Full Story Here":

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/train-crush-load-limit-to-triple/2009/01/03/1230681809446.html

[NigelWaring]

That is really moving the goalposts to catch the ball.

I would prefer them to make trains more comfortable for standing passengers. Much bigger vestibules so that passengers do not need to block the doors, remove many of the seats and provide horizontal bars that standing passengers can hang onto. London buses did something like this in the sixties, I don't know if they still run. We called them cattle-truck buses, there was seating for just the elderly and others who really needed it. It was near impossible to put more buses on the already crowded roads so making it more comfortable to stand was acceptable to most passengers, we joked about them a lot but honestly it got us home much quicker.