Default to Chaos

I listened to Mark Lambert (I think) on the radio on Thursday evening promising an overhaul to the way communication happens when something goes wrong.

Seems like no improvements were made by last night. Some easy steps would be to get a decent twitter account manager and also clear processes for who is in charge of information. NZTA do a pretty good job for motorways.

What was really frustrating about Thursday’s Newmarket meltdown was the total absence of any evidence of a contingency plan. The train I was in stopped and the only onboard announcement was one to the effect that the train was terminating and would return to Waitakere. Platform announcements were confused and, in any case, pretty much impossible to hear over the noise of the diesels (2 DCs and an ADL). Exiting the platforms onto the concourse, there were about 5-6 AT/Transdev staff floating around: the AT staff tittered behind their screens and the Transdev staff just indicated roughly (i.e. the exit to Remuera Road) where entirely notional rail bus replacements could be caught. There were no replacement buses there (15 mins after the first train was cancelled) and no staff in situ to put some order into the boarding process. Of course, because you had to catch another service, you had to tag on again to catch a bus, so a nice little extra revenue for AT/Infratil. AT’s Twitter feed resolutely ignored the whole meltdown. You’d think that AT, recognising the fundamental fragility of the rail network (a two track bottleneck and a lot of ancient/brand new trains), would have robust contingency procedures in place for dealing with a situation like this. They obviously don’t.

A trend that seems to be getting worse and worse is for the operators to consider their No1 responsibility is to ensure safety of the service they provide, rather than continuity of it. Thus if a problem occurs, the first consideration is to stop everything and not move until all safety protocols have been carried out. If this means 1000’s of passengers are stranded for several hours then so be it. “Safety” is above all.

Now often the actual risk that the protocols are there to guard against is minimal, and may stem from a freak incident which occurred in the past whereby circumstances unfortunately coincided to cause something nasty or potentially nasty. The risk of this happening again may be miniscule but a formula now has to be slavishly followed and woe betide any employee who steps outside of this trying to use some common sense or make his own risk-judgement. Who will be held responsible if the unthinkable happens again? If the freak conditions which led to a previous incident coincide this time with someone failing to follow the drill then yes, an accident could occur and this could involve the operator facing a horrendous investigation and possible prosecution up against teams of hostile lawyers with all their fangs bared. Much easier just to inconvenience a few 1000 passengers that risk this.

Unfortunately what this fails to guarantee is that ‘risk-transfer’ does not occur, whereby the process of confining passengers or transferring them to alternative transport etc, introduces risks of its own which may be worse than those which are being avoided. This is particularly true when rail services are cancelled and passengers are forced to go by road, or stand around in bad weather, or make their own arrangements in unsafe circumstances. Because any risk thus transferred is no longer the responsibility of the operator, and thus blame for whatever might occur will fall elsewhere and other butts (if any) will be kicked. This may sound cynical, but the cold reality is that if an accident occurs on the road it is treated far less seriously than an accident of the same severity occurring on rail. Thus rail managers can smugly proclaim that they would rather “shut the railway down” than knowingly allow anything unsafe, with little concern that a potentially greater risk transferring somewhere else because of this action will rebound on them.

This situation has arisen because of the lawyer-driven ‘blame-game’ which now has to play out each time anything blameworthy occurs. Disruption to passengers or even harmful Inconvenience is mere collateral damage in the butt-covering process which results.