40 years since The Met (Was it any good?)

Today marks 40 years since transport was organisationally reformed in Melbourne. Metropolitan train, tram and government bus operations were united under the Metropolitan Transit Authority from July 1, 1983. This was one of four new transport authorities set up by the Cain government. 

These reforms could be seen as a continuation of the trend towards ministerial control of the transport network. While transport and politics had always been intertwined, declining patronage and rising costs meant that fares could no longer fund operations (let alone capital improvements) and services required government subsidy after about 1970. 

State funding always comes with strings attached. In this case it was a desire for political control (in the name of things like 'the public interest', 'accountability' and 'efficiency' or less stated political ends like looking after marginal seats). Associated organisational changes can affect the relative profile and power of various people within the transport hierarchy. 

Hence, much like how police commissioners are household names, 60 years ago everyone knew who Robert Risson (Tramways Board Chairman) was. Whereas in 2023 few can name DTP's Secretary (Paul Younis), Metro CEO (Raymond O'Flaherty) and Yarra CEO (Carla Purcell), but Transport minister Jacinta Allan is recognised by all. Back in 1982-83 incoming minister Steve Crabb sought a similarly high profile as a big-promising 'Mr Fix it' with organisational changes reducing the autonomy of the old modally-based rail and tram bodies. 

The appetite for change in 1982 was high due to transport's then poor state. While there was a revival of government interest in public transport in the first half of premier Hamer's time (including the arrival of Hitachi trains, new trams and City Loop construction) this gave way to a decline after about 1978 (including strikes, service cuts, line closures and the unpopular Lonie Report). Network patronage was also falling, hitting rock-bottom around 1981.

A public backlash to the Lonie report (which wanted to cut basically all regional rail) and an election looming led the Hamer/Thompson government to change tack in 1981. That year's New Deal for Country Passengers started the reversal of fortunes on the busier regional lines and there were some bus upgrades in 1982 (interestingly the exact same recipe for Steve Bracks/Peter Batchelor with other modes neglected).  The public did not seem convinced by the 27-year old government's latter-day conversion. Public transport was still a big negative for the Liberals with John Cain's Labor opposition promising a big revival.  

The new Cain government, with Steve Crabb as Transport Minister, introduced the Transport Act 1983. This was transport reform's enabling legislation. More about it and further subsequent restructuring  here. 

Industrial relations

As everyone was only too well aware, industrial relations could make or break public transport. Even someone being rude in the lunch room could stop the trains. While older Melburnians romanticise tram conductors and pre-privatisation Met-era trains, the truth is that service was pretty mediocre in the 1980s with cancellations higher than now. Much was due to industrial disputation with accounts of disruptions published in PTUA newsletters of the time. 

Unions in those days were not just after pay and conditions but also wanted a big say in how things were done. This 'Me and The Met' video shows how management (led by American Lynn Strouse) sold organisational and other change to its workers. 

As a former managing director of Hertz Rent-a-car, Strouse brought transport (but not public transport) experience to the MTA managing director role. He didn't last long, resigning in 1985. The same could be said for his successor Mr K Shea from the Road Traffic Authority. These appointments may indicate a dissatisfaction by government with existing railway or tramway managers, with a preference for leaders with automotive or roads backgrounds.  

Fares

In theory The Met was multimode, even if operations were mostly still not.

Achievements in multimodality included unified livery, improved passenger information and a new neighbourhood-based fare system. That continued the multimode principle of the previous concentric three zone TravelCard system with time-based tickets allowing free transfers. However neighbourhood fares made Melbourne a patchwork of fare zones with numerous ticket combinations. All it did was to add complexity for little extra revenue as relatively few people made long orbital trips. Hence in 1989 Melbourne reverted to three radial zones but with slightly different boundaries to what operated under TravelCard. The popular time-based feature with free transfers (which contributed to increased usage on all modes) was retained. 

Subsequent fare changes in the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s made fares almost independent of distance, firstly across Melbourne and then across the state. These were all done because politicians see greater returns from cutting fares than boosting service. However the almost flat fare system makes it possible to simultaneously (and reasonably) complain that very short trips cost too much while long distance travel is outrageously cheap. 

Controversy and achievements

The Met era was not free of controversy. Plans to convert railway lines to St Kilda, Port Melbourne and Upfield to trams (or 'light rail') faced opposition, and in Upfield's case was not carried out. Few of Labor's bold 1982 promises to build or extend lines were honoured though some lines (eg Stony Point) were reopened.

Some of what was done was a case of 'two steps forward, two steps back', for instance the routing of previously fast Werribee trains via the slow Altona section when the line to Laverton was completed. Werribee people had to wait decades for their all-day direct service to be restored, though this has only been partial, with weekend and evening services continuing to operate the slow way via Altona in 2023. 

The Met period is also associated with the full completion of the City Loop, the roll-out of A and B class trams and delivery of air conditioned Comeng trains. The latter is significant as air conditioning  went from being a rare luxury to a standard feature in private cars during the 1980s and 90s. There were also some rail infrastructure upgrades such as overhead renewals and Frankston line's third track to Moorabbin which allowed more expressing. 

Train services

Trains were largely considered peak commuter transit. There wasn't much interest in increasing off-peak service frequencies (nor even of reversing the 1978 cuts to evening frequencies).

At this time the typical Melbourne train line ran every 20 minutes Monday - Saturday off-peak, every 30 minutes Monday - Saturday evening and every 40 minutes on Sunday (with a later start and earlier finish than on other days of the week).

Met-era train frequencies compared poorly with what Perth was rolling out in its early 1990s electrification with their weekday interpeak frequencies improving to every 15 minutes (which later got extended to 7 days and into the early evening).    

Trams generally were more frequent but remained with less service than 30 years prior. 


Multi-mode planning

With the railways running their evening trains typically every 30 minutes (after the 1978 cuts) and the tramways preferring 20 minute evening frequencies, there was no timetable co-ordination between modes in pre-Met times, with the best connections recurring only hourly.

Despite the organisational changes and the rhetoric, The Met didn't walk the walk when it came to the nuts and bolts of service planning, especially across modes. This is unlike what Perth was doing in the early 1990s when it was designing its feeder bus network to harmonise with the new Joondalup line.

The Met experience shows that although you can have on-paper unification modes will continue to operate as separate fiefdoms unless there is a determination to bring a network perspective to service planning and harmonise timetables. Some opportunities to weave a network were taken but too many were missed during The Met era, such as short tram extension where they stopped short of stations. 

Box Hill was The Met's showpiece when it came to physically integrating train and bus connectivity. It was good for those getting to the shops but weaker for connectivity between modes. With the trains at the bottom and buses three flights of stairs above (with a shopping centre in the middle) it did not make for the fast and direct interchange that such a major transfer point ought to have. Other states were doing better at the time, having recently built efficient train-bus interchanges at locations such as Sydney's Bondi Junction, Adelaide's Noarlunga and Perth's Kelmscott. 

Bus planning

Melbourne's two-tier bus network continued through the Met era. For example main routes inherited from the Tramways ran frequently over wide tram-type operating hours. Whereas privately operated routes rarely operated on Sundays or even Saturday afternoons. Despite operating hours improvements since, stark differences in service levels, even on routes that ought to be comparable, remain to this day.    

The mid-1980s saw reviews of bus networks in areas like Moorabbin. There was still a large number of short routes but small private bus operators were gradually merging or being bought by large operators. 

Older areas (often losing population) had bus routes very closely spaced while growth areas lacked service. Bus resources tended to be shifted to growth areas with inner area frequencies reduced. Some people gained but in other cases buses became a less attractive 'last mile' option for commuters beyond walking distance of a station.

Trading hours were widening with Saturday afternoon shopping, especially at major centres, becoming more common. Buses then often ran a frequent Saturday morning service but ceased operating after midday. 1987 bus timetable changes added Saturday afternoon service to many bus routes as well as some later evening trips. This was a major upgrade program, benefiting 85 bus routes (out of a 250-300 network total). You could say it was a precursor to the 2006 Meeting Our Transport Challenges plan which implemented even better upgrades on more routes. 

The rise

V/Line was doing well while Melburnians loved their new air conditioned trains as Red Rattlers became rarer and rarer. Trams extended further north while growth areas gained new bus routes. Patronage across all modes revived from its 1981 nadir as unemployment fell from 1984. There did seem to be some feeling of progress. Confidence peaked in 1988 with minister Kennan writing an optimistic introduction to that year's Met Plan (more on that here). He said that the 'atmosphere of decline and decay' was over and the only way was up. 

The fall

That MetPlan introduction proved to be the hubris before the fall. That fall was fast, hard and long. So long that almost none of MetPlan got done in its 15 year term and service actually went backwards.

Victoria was the hardest hit state of the 1990s recession as manufacturing industries closed and people left for Queensland. Unemployment surged and state finances were parlous due to the VEDC and Pyramid scandals and reduced revenue generally. Affiliated unions (including in transport) would not accept cuts proposed by the Labor government. The government sold and leased back trains and trams to pay its bills. Decline and decay were back. Big time. 

Not all transport problems were related to or started when the state's economy soured.  

For example political and industrial relations between the publicly moderate Cain government and the broader militant left-wing movement had long been toxic. There were times where ministers appeared like ineffectual teachers facing a rowdy classroom. Controversies existed over the Upfield line's future, numerous strikes, ticketing and staffing issues. Background on some of this activism here.

What might  have been seen as public transport's ungovernability could have made ministers throw up their hands in despair and warm to the (mostly incorrect) hope that franchising out operations would transfer risk and responsibility to others. This may have been one reason why Victoria was more eager than other states to franchise out trains and trams even though it didn't necessarily end up saving much money.  

The MTA was also its own worst enemy with regards to bus contracting in 1988. Mis-steps led to protracted litigation (the Waverley Transit case) that private operators won. This resulted in the government paying Quinces to start running long highly duplicative routes across the eastern suburbs (631 and 634) at short notice. These were called 'Metlink' routes but they had little in common with the more direct 'Metlink' routes in MetPlan that were more like the orbital SmartBuses we eventually got about 20 years later.

During this time transport went through another organisational restructure, with the MTA and STA merging to become the Public Transport Corporation (PTC). In 1990 and 1991 PTC cut funding to private bus operators. This resulted in massive cuts to peak, after 7pm and weekend buses across Melbourne. That effectively undid a lot of the 1987 upgrades if not more. Timetables were not to recover for another 20 years if they did at all. An example of the latter was the 800 bus along Princes Hwy between Dandenong and Chadstone. This saw all Sunday, all evening and most Saturday trips cut in 1991. Despite high usage and development since, the reduced timetable remains, almost unaltered, in 2023. 

Most famously was Jim Kennan's 'scratch tickets' debacle that made paying fares optional as the government sought to remove tram conductors. Industrial disputes clogged the city with trams while surging cancellations made catching trains a gamble. A Kennan vs Mees (PTUA) debate appears here: 

Staffing at stations was being reduced, especially outside peaks. Evening train usage was so low that sometimes only the front carriage was open for passengers. There was a vandalism and graffiti epidemic with concerns about personal safety rife. TISM's Mourningtown Ride was one product of this era.  

By 1991 public transport in Melbourne was at a low ebb, like it was a decade earlier. Many patronage gains were lost as train, tram and bus service deteriorated. While raw usage was still higher in 1991 than it was in 1981, modal share was at a record low as population had grown. 

(Direct YouTube link if video above doesn't show - 1989-90 news reports)

Politics and aftermath

Around this time having political responsibility for public transport was a poisoned chalice. This is especially under a Labor government where there were unmeetable expectations from unions and, to some extent, the public (which Labor itself fanned though promises made). Transport ministers in this era tended not to last for long. For instance the 10 year Cain-Kirner period saw 4 ministers (Crabb, Roper, Kennan, Spyker). Only Crabb and Spyker remain alive today with Roper's state funeral in a few days. 

Labor lost the 1992 election with the state still deep in recession. Some regional lines were closed under Jeff Kennett. There was also the threat of metropolitan closures and permanent evening bus replacements but these were staved off.

Minister Alan Brown presided over a major cost-cutting program that was easier for a Liberal government to do as the premier and minister could be firm with unions without threatening factional relationships and thus their positions. Brown, possibly the most competent transport minister for many years, almost comes across as a hero figure in wanting to retain and extend trams at a time Alan Reiher, the state's top transport bureaucrat, wanted to close them. Mooted severe cuts for the metropolitan rail network were avoided. However ticketing was to remain a problem for this and successor governments with Metcard costing more and taking longer than envisaged.

Staffing numbers were cut but the loss of services in transport was perhaps not as severe as that more wider occurring school and hospital closures. By about 1997 things had settled down with fewer cancellations, the Upfield line saved and interpeak train frequency increases on lines in the south-east. Trams that ran as buses on Sundays got 7 day service restored and NightRider buses started. Possibly parliament's longest ever speech on public transport was given by Robin Cooper in 1996 detailing that government's achievements. 

Just before it left office the Kennett government introduced the biggest ever increase in Sunday service increases across the train and tram networks. Over 20 years later the current government has yet to implement any across-the-network metropolitan service increase of comparable size. 

Those upgrades were for trains and trams. But bus services were largely neglected during the Kennett era. 1990s growth areas like Rowville and Lysterfield didn't even get a basic hourly local bus service, with their situation remaining basically unchanged 30 years later. Some existing routes got reduced service but the cuts were not as deep as in the previous two years under Labor.   

Met buses got franchised (ie privatised) in two tranches with National Bus and Melbourne Bus Link taking over in 1993 and 1998 respectively. Trams and trains followed later. The latter was operationally disruptive as the government unwisely sought to split one train network into two in an effort to play operators against one another. (as is received competition theory). The incoming private operators ran reliable services  between 2000 and 2003 but hoped for cost savings did not happen, having bid too low. More on that era here. 

As you might  have gathered, late 1990s transport policy was all about transport franchising. That is, as a Marxist would say, the means of production rather than the product or service itself. The Met's dismantling was overseen by a 'Transport Reform Unit' in Treasury that, like early 20th century railway moguls, saw modes and operators as competitors against one another rather than as part of a connected network. Hence aspects of multimodalism, such as common signage, liveries and multimode maps, that were achieved under The Met were removed (or left to rot) as the new structures simply had no one properly responsible (The then Department of Infrastructure at the time being notoriously lazy on this).

Under franchising there was just one government job in transport, and that was to manage a series of private contracts that periodically get retendered. The assumption that this could transfer political risk proved incorrect, as the Brumby government found. As did the one about having franchisees independently plan acceptable networks as we saw in 2015 with Transdev.

Similar ideologies survive today in the more doctrinaire corners of Infrastructure Victoria who believes that public transport modes should compete rather than connect, aided by differential modal fares that undermine efficient network planning (including the bus network reform that IV otherwise purports to back). 

At the worst depths of this lunacy we saw trains and stations with maps showing only 'their' half of the network (ie Bayside or Hillside). And there was the farce of trains continually being rebranded at the drop of a hat. The network became less legible with information either fragmented or falling to pieces.

Deluded operators thought that there were heaps of potential cost savings there for the taking and if you rebranded a train patronage would rise to meet the levels their ambitious bids were based on. Neither happened and operators made penny-pinching short-cuts (eg National Express not training new drivers).

In the first clue that they had to think like a passenger and see the network as a whole, panicking private operators got together to form the Metropolitan Passenger Growth Initiative. This would become Metlink (technically an operator owned company) and provide multimodal passenger information and network marketing. This period coincided with rising patronage driven by booming CBD employment, higher fuel costs and bus service upgrades associated with 2006's MOTC plan. 

In short Metlink did some of the functions that The Met used to have, except for network planning, managing contracts and direct operation of services. The transfer of planning and operator contract management was to be a matter for another time and another government with this achieved when PTV was created in 2012 (under the Coalition).  

Conclusion

This has been my look at The Metropolitan Transport Authority. It might be a shock to realise that today on its 40th birthday we are further from July 1, 1983 than that date was from the Normandy landing in 1944. 

The lukewarm view above may surprise some so I'm going to explain further. Though less so now (as older generations died and we gained newcomers from interstate or overseas) there used to be a 'rose coloured glasses' sentimentality about pre-privatisation public transport in Victoria, especially around matters like tram conductors, station staffing and even service delivery. 

On the latter, objective data often takes second place to perception. There still seems to be a body of sentiment that regards V/Line service as superior to Metro train service. This is even though the former cancels a higher proportion of its trains, has had a sustained deterioration in operational performance and, due to generally lower frequency, imposes longer waits if your train doesn't run.   

People in every city readily claim their own as an exception in everything from peoples' sloppy driving habits to bad transport service. But I do think Melbourne genuinely has (or had) a fair claim to exceptionalism in how sentimentally it views its public transport past (even amongst people you'd think would be too young to remember). Unfortunately such sentimentality can cloud judgement over what is good and bad.  

Ranking the large Australian cities on this, Perth would be at the other extreme, almost completely lacking nostalgia. This is because only the 70+ remember its trams and its network truly was limited before the transformative rail and bus upgrades from the 1990s. Almost no one there would want to retreat to the time before then. And the enthusiast movement who might perpetuate old myths appears very small there.

Sydney and Brisbane occupy a middle ground between Perth and Melbourne. Both cities had more 1990s/2000s transport projects happening than Melbourne, and Brisbane's suburban rail electrification was relatively new. However some of their regional areas (eg NSW north coast) may still be smarting from rail cuts and more people alive remember Brisbane trams than they would trams in Perth. Adelaide's sentimentality would likely be more like Melbourne's due to an older population and a network that's progressed far less than Perth's.     

You can count multimodal fares as a major and enduring Met strength. Despite the misguided dalliance with complex neighbourhood fares, what it did achieve was so strongly accepted that late 1990s attempts by private operators to fragment fares did not last for long and were (wisely) pulled back under the Bracks/Brumby government. This gave Melbourne an edge over Sydney and Brisbane who had fragmented modal fares. 

Other Met achievements (like the unified branding and information) were discarded too quickly in the name of political trickery and operator egoism. Fortunately stability on branding seems to have been restored after the silliness from the late '90s. However it took years (through Metlink and PTV) to get back what franchising took away from us in terms of information and a workable institutional structure for network planning.  And the threat of restructuring that could lose gains that have been won is never far away. 

On the debit side, service delivery wasn't great. And the five years it took for MetPlan to come out was too long. Had Met Plan came out in say 1985 it might have been possible to lock in more of it before the money and political interest ran out. This may turn out to be a major lesson for Victoria's Bus Plan whose health on the service aspects is not the best at the moment (partly as a. it took a long time for the current government to release a bus plan and b. the 2021 plan that did come out was essentially a 'plan for a plan' without substantive service measures proposed). 

To summarise, some good thing did happen under The Met. But at many times services under it were not particularly good, reliable nor efficient, even when compared with what was happening at a similar time elsewhere in Australia. It was also weak in multimodal network planning and coordination. Hence the short answer to the question posed is no.