Train ‘roulette’ frustrates
It is Friday morning and I’m ready to play another game of train roulette.
A day after reporting on the difficulty of catching the 7.16am train from Petone to Wellington, I am again on the platform.
And once again the train is a no-show.
Pondering what to do, I get a text message from my colleague Katarina Williams, who had hopped on a bus after her train failed to arrive at Woburn.
Again she is angered by the lack of communication and reports that only three people were on the bus.
‘‘Everyone else is still waiting for the train on the platform,’’ she tells me.
At Petone, commuters are glued to their phones trying to work out what is going on.
Katarina texts me that her train replacement bus is nearly at Petone and advises me to catch it. It seems like the best bet, so I sprint across the road, just in time to jump on board.
Stuck in traffic on SH2, I wonder if waiting for a train to turn up might not have been a better option.
Ten or so minutes into our bus ride, a packed Wairarapa train chugs past us and then shortly after that the nearly-empty train – the one we had been waiting for – also passes us. When we arrive in Wellington, the friendly bus driver thanks us. My partner observes that catching the bus was the wrong option.
‘‘I guess we lost the game of train roulette,’’ she says. She also observes that at least the bus ride was free.
I arrive at work 25 minutes late. (Ed’s note: I count reporting this diary as working.)
Keen to understand what was going on with the trains, I again contacted Metlink’s spokesperson Stephen Heath to ask questions about my Friday experience.
It’s less than 24 hours since I asked Heath about my diabolical Thursday commute, prompting him to claim my questions were not backed by facts.
I also ask for an interview with Metlink group manager Samantha Gain, who was too busy to talk to me the previous day.
On Friday, Heath is more forthcoming and arranges an interview with Gain.
In the meantime, I decide to check out the comments on my Thursday story.
Most of the nearly 170 comments express frustration over Metlink’s reluctance to answer questions and the unreliability of the trains they catch regularly.
One comment jumps out at me. ‘‘Lack of reliability, poor communication, no accountability, no improvement. The current excuse is staff sickness. Pre-Covid it was signal problems. Prior to that it was the teething issues of the new trains. Before that, it was the ageing trains,’’ one reader replied.
Sadly, a number of people said they had given up on the trains. ‘‘I stopped taking the train [Johnsonville] because it was so unreliable and started taking the bus. Then they ‘improved’ the bus service and that became unreliable. Now I drive.’’
A reader who calls to thank me for the article begs me to take a look at Wellington’s buses.
METLINK GROUP MANAGER SAMANTHA GAIN RESPONDS
Always check before you travel. That is the advice of Samantha Gain, whose job is to make sure Wellington’s trains are on time.
The current problems facing the network are the result of staff illness, she says, and is adamant that, in normal circumstances, there are enough staff to run the trains.
She is apologetic and says Metlink is working hard to
OPINION: Remember how Big Tobacco used to sponsor the ‘‘Benson and Hedges Tennis Open’’ and the ‘‘Rothmans Rally?’’ When then Prime Minister Jenny Shipley finally closed the door on such deals, there were cries about whether sport could possibly survive being made to go cold turkey on its nicotine sponsorship addiction.
The same concerns reemerged last week after a player revolt by the Diamonds, Australia’s women’s netball team. Basically, the players refused to become human billboards for the Hancock mining company owned by billionaire Gina Rinehart. The revolt was partly for climate change reasons, and partly because of the company’s history of violating the rights and sacred sites of Australia’s indigenous peoples. In retaliation, Rinehart pulled her $15million annual sponsorship.
Netball will survive. Other sponsors will emerge, especially if the Diamonds excel at next year’s Netball World Cup in South Africa.
Similar concerns periodically arise here, over the wisdom of allowing petrochemical, gambing and alcohol industries to launder their images and promote their products to a huge and captive audience of sports fans. Because the immediate solution is a political one – asking taxpayers to pick up the tab until other sponsors can be found – the banning of tobacco sponsorship from sport remains the exception here, and not the rule.
Elite sport already receives hundreds of millions annually from Kiwi taxpayers, while ratepayers cough up most of the money required to build the stadiums in which the companies get to advertise their wares.
The All Blacks have had a long association with Steinlager, and are currently co-sponsored by the British petrochemical firm INEOS. When announcing its commercial deal with the Tui brewery, NZ Cricket crowed about the ‘‘leveraging opportunities’’ this deal presented ‘‘for two iconic brands – the Black Caps and Tui.’’
While breweries and fossil fuel industries dominate the player insignia and stadium signage in this country, grassroots sport is equally dependent on profits from the gambling industry. Do the wholesome benefits of sport outweigh the social damage that gambling wreaks in New Zealand communities ? Sure, taxpayers and ratepayers might otherwise have to pick up the slack – at least in the interim – if the more dubious funding streams were suddenly turned off.
Yet arguably, the same taxpayers and ratepayers are already picking up a sizeable tab anyway, for the significant social harms that gambling leaves in its wake.
As mentioned, the moral conflicts over the dodgy sources of sports funding have been with us for years, and they exist elsewhere. British cycling for instance, recently signed an eight year deal with Shell UK.
Obviously, the Olympics have become a temple of rampant commerce. This year, FIFA – the governing body for the world’s most popular sport – took the money and awarded the hosting rights for this year’s FIFA Men’s World Cup to Qatar, a known major human rights violator. That decision will cast a long and blood drenched shadow over this year’s tournament.
No country has found easy answers to such conflicts. In this moral vacuum though, professional sport is becoming a guilty pleasure.
Meanwhile, the Rinehart controversy has given the Diamonds a whole new set of motivations to win next year’s Netball World Cup.