Why New Timetables Go Off the Rails, and How To Avoid It
Key Takeaways
- On 15 October, the NSW Government announced a new Sydney train timetable with 200 extra weekly services, then cancelled it nine days later after a backlash over longer journey times
- Treat a timetable in the same way you would a policy reform. Its success depends as much on public acceptance as on technical quality.
- The people losing out will always complain, but whether a change survives usually depends on whether people who aren’t affected think it’s fair.
- Make community support a priority from day one.
- Make sure the organisation has the right skills.
- Count the losers properly.
- Research community sentiment throughout.
- Treat consultation as a chance to learn, not a box to tick.
- Listen to local members.
- Get an independent review.
- Give decision makers the full picture.
What Next?
Mistakes like these are what the Policy Reform Toolkit is designed to help you avoid. The basic version is free. Or take up my special offer to become both a Transport Leader supporter and get the Toolkit Premium version here.
Introduction
On 15 October, the NSW Government announced a new Sydney train timetable to start on 15 November. It looked like an easy win: 200 extra services a week, peak frequencies going from three to four trains an hour, and off-peak and weekend services doubling to every 30 minutes on average. Nine days later, on 24 October, it was cancelled.
How does a timetable with that many benefits get scrapped before it even starts?
Developing a new train or bus timetable is technically complicated. It can mean new infrastructure, changes to the fleet, significant operational changes and a major effort to tell customers what’s changing. With so much attention on the technical work, it’s easy to lose sight of one critical question: will the public support it? If they don’t, the timetable quickly becomes a political nightmare, and is quickly reversed.
I’ve been involved in successful timetable changes, and I’ve also seen others go badly wrong, like this one. I’ve built those lessons into the policy reform toolkit. In this blog, I’ll go through how the toolkit could have helped prevent this reversal, and what anyone working on a timetable or wider reform can take from it.
What was wrong with the timetable?
New timetables almost always involve trade-offs. Improved services usually create many winners, but reconfiguring services often creates losers too. This timetable had two groups of customers who lost out.
Airport customers. The changes made the service less convenient for people travelling to and from the airport. They make up about 2% of passengers. It wasn’t this group that set my alarm bells ringing when I first read about the changes.
T4 commuters from the Sutherland Shire. This ABC report explained that “the changes will also mean longer trips for passengers who catch T4 services from Waterfall, Heathcote, Engadine and Loftus, with additional stops adding about 12 minutes in the morning peak and 14 minutes in the afternoon peak.”
That’s an extra 26 minutes a day, for people who mostly use the service to get to work. These are regular, committed public transport users, and the change hit them every time they commute. That was the part that struck me as likely to be controversial, and it was what ultimately led to the timetable being unwound.
So should this have been picked up before the timetable was announced? I believe that if the policy reform toolkit had been used as intended, it would have been.
To be clear, I don’t know the details of what happened inside the NSW Government. My aim is not to assign blame. It’s to raise questions about the system the timetable was developed in, so that others can draw lessons for their own timetables and wider policy reforms.
Is a timetable a policy reform?
Strictly speaking, no. A timetable should be how policy decisions play out in operations. Those decisions might be to improve frequency, reliability, resilience or journey times. The timetable is how they reach passengers.
But the way a timetable is developed looks a lot like a policy reform cycle:
- organising for success
- analysis
- design
- stakeholder engagement, communications and consultation
- implementation
And like most reforms, it usually creates winners and losers. Whether it succeeds depends as much on public acceptance as on technical quality.
That’s why the policy reform toolkit is a useful lens. In the sections below, I’ll work through each part of the toolkit and highlight the questions I’d be asking to understand what went wrong with these timetable changes.
Organisation
Some context first. After a review, responsibility for train timetables recently moved from Transport for NSW to Sydney Trains. I’m not going to argue for or against that structure. What interests me is how the change was put into practice.
As I understand it, the technical timetabling skills moved across to Sydney Trains so that this expertise wasn’t lost. That makes sense. But a timetable is much more than its technical details. Someone in the organisation also needs to know that every timetable must be tested for public acceptability, and the organisation needs to be set up so that this happens.
When responsibilities move between agencies, it’s easy to transfer the obvious technical capability and leave behind the less visible knowledge. That includes spotting a change that will be controversial before it’s announced.
Risk management raises a second question. Given the trade-offs in this timetable, public acceptability should have been on the risk register, rated as highly likely with a potentially catastrophic impact. A risk rated that way should have triggered a serious mitigation plan.
Questions to ask:
- When timetabling moved to Sydney Trains, were the people with stakeholder, community and political experience of timetables kept involved?
- Was public acceptability on the risk register? If so, how was it rated, and what was done about it?
Analysis
Every timetable involves choices, and there’s rarely only one way to meet the same objectives. Different options will have different strengths and weaknesses. Choosing between them takes a holistic view, not just a technical one, and that includes asking whether any option carries an unacceptable risk to public acceptance.
From what was published, the impact on journey times for different groups was clearly understood. But I would have wanted a deeper understanding of who was losing out. For the passengers facing extra travel time: how often do they travel, and how many people are we actually talking about? A percentage of users can make a problem look small. A number of people, and which stations they use, gives a much clearer picture of how strong the reaction is likely to be.
Once the options have been analysed, they need to go to decision makers, warts and all. That includes the Transport Minister. Testing an option for political acceptability is ultimately their responsibility, and they can only do that if they see the trade-offs clearly.
What shouldn’t happen is the Minister being walked through an option that has already been chosen, or having its problems downplayed so the preferred technical option gets approved. Yes, I have seen this happen. It rarely ends well, because the problems don’t go away. They just show up later, in public, when they’re much harder to fix.
Questions to ask:
- Were alternative timetable options developed and considered by decision makers?
- Was public acceptability one of the criteria for comparing the options?
- Did the analysis quantify the losers in numbers of people and which stations they used?
- Was the Minister shown a genuine choice between options, with the negative impacts clearly set out?
Design
If the community acceptance issues weren’t dealt with during analysis, the design stage was the next chance to catch them. Once a preferred option has been chosen, the design work should include a clear plan for managing its negative impacts, not just its technical details.
There are often ways to soften the impact on the people who lose out. Targeted infrastructure investment can sometimes recover some of the lost journey time. There may be a way to keep a small number of faster services at the busiest times, or to phase the changes in. None of these may have been possible here. But the question needed to be asked.
Given the risks involved, a change of this size should also have an independent review. Crucially, that review shouldn’t only check that the timetable works technically. It should take a broader view and ask the kinds of questions in this blog: who loses out, how they are likely to react, and whether the plan to manage that reaction is good enough.
Questions to ask:
- Was there a specific plan to reduce the impact on T4 customers who faced longer journeys?
- Were options such as targeted infrastructure investment, keeping some faster peak services, or phasing in the changes considered?
- Was the timetable independently reviewed before it was announced?
- If it was, did the review look at community acceptance as well as technical feasibility?
Communications, Stakeholders and Consultation
Too often, consultation is treated as a box to tick rather than a chance to learn. It also tends to happen near the end of the process, when making significant changes in response to feedback has become expensive and inconvenient.
The most valuable time to test a timetable concept is at the options stage, while there’s still room to change course. And the most revealing feedback doesn’t come from where you might expect. I could predict with a lot of confidence how the people losing out would react. What I would really want to know is what the people who aren’t losing out think of the impact on those who are. If they think the trade-off is unreasonable even though it doesn’t affect them, that’s a red flag. You are going to have a problem with public acceptance.
Local politicians need the same attention. When I have seen timetable changes go wrong and get reversed, the unwinding has often been led by local members whose constituents are affected. Yet communication with these politicians is often overlooked or done badly. The negative impacts get glossed over to avoid pushback.
That is exactly when it’s most important to listen. If local members, especially those from the governing party, are uneasy about a change, that’s a strong sign the plans need rethinking. And if things go wrong and they feel they weren’t listened to, or that the downsides were played down, they will turn on the change as soon as a handful of residents start complaining.
Questions to ask:
- Was the timetable concept tested with the public at the options stage, or only after a preferred option had been chosen?
- Did the research capture what unaffected passengers thought of the impact on those who lost out?
- Were local members in the affected areas briefed early and honestly about the longer journey times?
- Were any concerns they raised listened to and acted on?
Political
In the end, this timetable change failed because it didn’t have community acceptance. Building that acceptance is mainly the job of politicians.
As a rule of thumb, the people who lose out from a change complain about a hundred times more than the people who benefit defend it. But it’s rarely the winners or the losers who decide whether a reform survives. It’s the people watching from the sidelines, judging whether the change seems fair.
I suspect a big part of the reason for the rapid reversal is that many of the politicians hearing complaints about longer journey times also thought the change was unreasonable. They didn’t feel they could defend it. If I had been in their shoes, I would certainly have been reluctant to support it.
Politicians and their advisers have to anticipate this kind of backlash and plan to avoid it. Public servants don’t always appreciate that role. There can be a tendency to focus on getting a scheme approved, rather than working with the political office to identify, research and deal with likely community concerns.
Political offices also vary in their capacity and experience. They may have too much on their plate to give a reform the attention it needs. They may be less experienced and not yet able to see the problems coming. Or both. This is where the best public servants can really help, by offering practical support such as:
- “Would it help if we ran focus groups to test how people respond to the changes?”
- “Would you like support briefing your political colleagues?”
Questions to ask:
- Did the Minister’s office fully understand the trade-offs, and who would be affected, before the timetable was announced?
- Was there a plan for how the government would explain and defend the longer journey times to affected communities?
- Did the department offer practical support to the political office, such as community research or briefings for colleagues?
Lessons for future timetable changes
I’m not suggesting Sydney Trains missed all of these. I’m not close enough to know. But each one would have reduced the risk of a reversal.
- Make community support a priority from day one. Public acceptance should be a key objective throughout the project, from the first analysis to implementation, not something considered at the end.
- Make sure the organisation has the right skills. Timetabling teams need people who understand community and public reactions, not just technical experts.
- Count the losers properly. Know how many people lose out, by how much, how often they travel and where they come from, not just what percentage of passengers they represent.
- Research community sentiment throughout. Qualitative research should test how people respond to proposed changes. That includes asking people who aren’t affected whether the impact on others seems fair.
- Treat consultation as a chance to learn, not a box to tick. Start consultation early, while there is still room to change the plans.
- Listen to local politicians. Brief them early and honestly. If they’re uneasy, take it as a warning sign.
- Get an independent review. Significant timetable changes should be reviewed independently, looking at stakeholder and community issues as well as technical feasibility.
- Give decision makers the full picture. The downsides of a change should be set out clearly for senior decision makers, so they can properly weigh them up.
It’s possible that all of this was done and the Minister decided to go ahead anyway. Given how quickly the timetable was reversed, though, that seems unlikely.
Conclusion
The NSW timetable reversal shows that technically good timetables can still fail. On paper, the changes offered a lot: 200 extra services a week, more frequent peak trains and much better off-peak and weekend services. But nine days after it was announced, it was gone. The problem was that nobody had properly checked whether the community would accept the trade-offs. For the customers losing out, the answer was always going to be no, and too many of the people watching from the sidelines agreed with them.
Any reform with winners and losers can go the same way if public acceptability is treated as a communications problem at the end of the process rather than a design consideration from the start. The questions in this blog don’t need complicated answers. Who loses out, and by how much? Would people who aren’t affected think it’s fair? Have decision makers been told the downsides as well as the benefits? Have local politicians been genuinely listened to? Asking them early is far cheaper than reversing a decision after it has been announced.
If you are working on a timetable change or any other reform, the policy reform toolkit is built to help you ask these questions at the right time.
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