Of course they are, but blame the unions.
Southern awarded yet another 'most moaned about rail firm' gong
Grumbling Brit commuters are more likely to moan about Southern than any other train line, according to the latest national passenger survey (PDF) from the UK's transport watchdog. Southern retained its top spot for most dissatisfied passengers in Transport Focus's survey of more than 27,000 passengers – a fact that will come …
COMMENTS
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 26th July 2017 10:58 GMT Alister
Blame them for insisting the tax-payer funding non-jobs. Blame them for going on strike in order to maintain that.
Or possibly you should read how Southern have been basing service levels on their staff having to work every off-day they have, and do double shifts as well, instead of Southern employing sufficient staff to support the service levels properly.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 26th July 2017 08:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Yes, please don't come to Hull
My experience of Hull, living on the Anlaby Road and working at BP Saltend Plant was:
1. My car window was smashed and my tax disc stolen
2. Armed robbery, purse taken
3. Tooth chipped on kerb when tackled to the floor by 3 men who stole my laptop case
4. Cars blaring horns when I stopped at red lights
5. Open drug dealing
6. Good trains
7. Halfway decent broadband
-
-
Tuesday 25th July 2017 13:32 GMT Daedalus
Life is tough
Must be hard to keeping millions of moaning Williums and NIMBY's happy. It probably takes a month to get permissions to change a light bulb, let alone run better track. But let's face it, if you had convinced yourself that it was worth all that money to live in the sticks and work in the big city, wouldn't you feel like moaning if things didn't go right all the time?
-
Tuesday 25th July 2017 14:06 GMT tiggity
random luck
"We consult more than 50000 passengers a year"
"Passenger opinions of train services are collected twice a year from a representative sample of journeys..."
So, might not be 50000 unique passengers, and with all surveys, depends who can be bothered to fill in and return them
Disclaimer, I & partner have commuted for many years (we travel to different destinations & typically at different times), neither of us have ever been asked to fill in a survey
-
Tuesday 25th July 2017 15:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: random luck
"Disclaimer, I & partner have commuted for many years (we travel to different destinations & typically at different times), neither of us have ever been asked to fill in a survey"
For my sins I've been taking the thameslink on the wimbledon loop for the best part of 20 years now and in the last ten years of a huge swelling of commuter numbers I've only ever seen the survey monkeys handing out the forms between 10:00 and 15:00 - i.e. the times when none of the regular commuters are on the trains, there are seats available and air temperature and humidity has finally dropped below that of a brothel in the middle of an Alabama swamp.
In the hours that the majority of customers care about - the 07:00 to 10:00 and 16:30 to 19:30 rush hours where you need a scrum forward to help you get on board the cattle truck - survey monkeys would need a bulldozer to a) make any progress through the train b) give them a sporting chance of not being lynched by passengers when the automated voice on the tannoy says "please make sure you use all the doors!" for the umpteenth time as if that'll magically solve all capacity problems.
My station actually dropped from 4 trains an hour in the morning to 3 trains an hour last year because southern couldn't make them run on time.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 26th July 2017 06:35 GMT wolfetone
Re: If you want good trains
Public transport isn't anywhere near as good as a car.
I can drive door to door to London from Birmingham for about £30, in the comfort of my own car, my own company, my own tunes. I can take whatever route I wish, I can stop off where I wish.
On a train it cancost less, but quite often can't. Not for four people anyway. Even then I have to get some sort of transport from my home to the train station, and then get some other method of transport when I get the train to London. Plus you can't choose who you share a carriage with, you might get lucky and get quiet people or you could end up with a bunch of clowns who are shouting and laughing and generally being dicks.
The time saved even isn't that much. It can take about 2 hours from Birmingham to London, on a fast train it'd be 90 minutes but then you pay more for that. For the cheaper trains it's 2 hours.
So yeah, Clarkson's right. The trains just aren't better than the motorcar.
-
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 26th July 2017 03:55 GMT gandalfcn
Tories
Interesting the Tories are ideologically opposed to public ownership of public utilities whilst happily encouraging foreign governments to profit off the UK taxpayer. I suggest there is something going seriously wrong in the UK and people have not yet woken up to having been suckered by snake oil sales people.
-
Wednesday 26th July 2017 11:16 GMT teebie
Not overall satisfaction
Looking at the report on the transportfocus site, sections 3.1 and 4.1 are labelled 'Overall satisfaction'
If you look at the section this is short for 'overall satisfaction with the journey'.
I have been asked to fill out these surveys several times, but never on a train that was late, or on a day when the station was having problems.
So, "overall satisfaction" doesn't mean overall satisfaction with the train company, and the measure they use is easy to game to make the company look better than it is.