But it appears that this problem is nothing new, as this August 2002 item from Newsrail is anything to go by.

It reads:

In mid-May four new ticket barriers costing $82,000 were commissioned at Flagstaff station. The new barriers increase the number of controlled exit/entry points at Flagstaff to nine.

M>Train City Loop Customer Service Manager, Mr Rhett Flannigan, indicated that the additional barriers had substantially reduced the length of queues during the peak period. Mr Flannigan said, “In the morning, we have gone from fairly long queues to no more than five to eight customers at any one time”.

Rob O’Regan explains the origins of the extra gates on his “unofficial Metcard chronology” page:

With electrification extended to Sydenham (Watergardens) in January 2002, the St.Albans island platform no longer functioned as a terminal. This meant the electronic barrier gates which had previously controlled all passenger movements for suburban trains were now only half utilized.

These were relocated during May 2002 to Flagstaff, where they complimented the existing bank of barriers to better handle the increasing traffic through the southerly entry/exit point.

As well as listing the other stations that had Metcard ticket gates.

Electronic barriers were ultimately installed at all five city stations as well as Footscray (Centre platform), St Albans, Essendon, Glenferrie, Camberwell, Box Hill, Mitcham (Down platform only), Ringwood, Glen Waverley, South Yarra, Caulfield, Dandenong and Frankston.

But the “nine ticket gates” figure has me confused – as of 2011 Flagstaff station had the following arrangement.

1 wide and 2 standard gates to the north.

And nine gates to the south – split across one wide and six standard to south-west, one wide and one standard to the south-east.

So did the 2002 changes shuffle ticket gates between the two entrances, with three more gates added at a later date – or did the 2002 figure exclude the northern entrance?

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I found my first example at Melbourne Central station, where arrows on a directional sign at concourse level can be turned on or off, depending on which direction the escalators are running in.

The reason for the sign – Melbourne Central has a number of escalators that don’t have a matching set alongside, meaning that they only operate in the ‘peak’ direction.

I then found a similar sign on the concourse at Flagstaff station, directing passengers down the escalators to platform level.

Again, the reason for the sign is the escalators – the direction of operation is changed in peak times to move passengers in the dominant direction, with passengers headed the other way only having on route to follow.

Finally, I found this illuminated ‘Degraves/Flinders Street Exit via subway’ sign at Flinders Street Station.

It directs passengers towards the ticket gates at the Campbell Arcade subway.

This exit sees little use outside peak hour, so is often closed late at night, hence the indication can be switched off to avoid sending passengers on a while goose chase.

Another Flinders Street Station footnote

Until a few years ago the Southbank and Elizabeth Street exits from Flinders Street Station were closed between 10pm at night and 6am in the morning – station signage pointing out the operating hours.

I wonder why the Degraves Street exit warranted an illuminated sign, but Southbank and Elizabeth Street had to settle for fixed times?

And on the subject of ticket gates

Myki ticket gates also have illuminated directional signs on them – green for open, red for closed.

As did the previous Metcard ticket gates.

However these indications aren’t very useful in peak times, when crowds of passengers block them from view.

A more useful solution is an additional set of open/closed indications located above the gates, such as this setup in Sydney.

The indications are also deceptive when the Myki gate develops a fault, displaying the ‘go’ indication on the approach, but the ticker reader isn’t active.

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Worked started on January 3, with lifts at Flagstaff and Parliament taken out of service, rendering the stations inaccessible to anyone unable to use an escalator.

These passengers are being directed to Melbourne Central station, where a wheelchair accessible taxi will carry them on the final leg of their journey.

Of course, alternate transport is no good if you don’t know about it.

Disabled train passengers have been left stranded at Parliament and Flagstaff stations, as drivers keep forgetting to let them know lifts are out of action.

Disability advocates are fed up with the lack of warnings, as the lifts have been down for nearly a month.

Metro Trains has told its drivers to broadcast warnings on the approach into the City Loop but they are still regularly failing to do so.

Sarah Nankervis, who suffers from a serious fainting condition that prevents her from using escalators or stairs, said she was recently caught at the bottom of Parliament station not knowing what to do.

“There was no warning on the approach into the city to get off at Melbourne Central,” she said. “I had to go up the escalators and doing that makes me really dizzy and there is chance I can faint.

“My disability isn’t as bad as some people. I’ve got friends in wheelchairs who couldn’t get to where they needed to go.”

Ray Jordan, of the All Aboard group, said Metro Trains had promised him there would be alerts on every train since work began to replace the lifts on January 3.

“I believe it happened in the first couple of days but then we just forgot about it,” he said.

“If you’re going to do this, you need to get it right and do it consistently. We understand there was a need to upgrade the lifts. But you need to have a backup plan and right now it isn’t working as it should be.”

Metro spokesman Marcus Williams said information on the upgrades was being provided through a “wide range of channels” including train ­announcements.

“Passengers requiring lifts and wishing to disembark at Parliament or Flagstaff should travel to Melbourne Central station where staff are on hand to provide a maxi taxi to either station for their onward journey,” he said.

Metro Trains told disability support groups earlier this month it would take up to two weeks for consistent messaging by drivers due to a “wider driver management and support issue”.

A senior Metro source said there was no reason why it should take a fortnight for drivers to follow the directions.

At least since the works started, signage has improved – I found this sign at Flagstaff station.

Plus the extent of the works has been clarified – Flagstaff station still has a working lift linking the two platform levels.

But there is still one question – why close the lifts at two stations at the same time?

This isn’t like a level crossing removal project, where it makes sense to work on multiple work sites while the trains are not running. The lifts at each station in the City Loop all operate independently from each other, so why not stagger the works, and complete each station in turn?

To prove my point

Sunday January 29th illustrated why closing the lifts at two City Loop stations at the same time was a bad idea – at Melbourne Central the single shopping centre lift linking the eastern station concourse with Swanston Street failed.

The workaround – taking the long way around through the shopping centre.

One lift failure at Melbourne Central – with a cascading effect on every City Loop passenger. I wonder if the extra usage thanks to passengers diverted from other stations contributed to the failure?

Diversity in access

Having multiple ways of accessing the platform other than stairs isn’t new.

Boronia station was rebuilt in a cutting back in 1998, and has stairs and a pair of lifts linking platform and concourse.

But by the mid-2000s this practice went out of fashion – the designers of Laverton, Coolaroo, Westall, Footscray, Thomastown, Epping and South Morang stations took the cheap option, and provided just a single lift to each platform, with no alternate access for people unable to use the stairs.

Laverton station is infamous for failing lifts and standard passengers:

Greens MP Colleen Hartland tabled a question in Parliament asking how many times the lifts at Laverton broke down between July 2010 and April 2011.

Transport Minister Terry Mulder told Parliament in his reply that they were inoperative on 105 occasions. And he said that a $15 million footbridge at Footscray station, also built last year without ramps, had lifts that broke down 117 times over the same period.

”It is quite clear that they didn’t put any thought into these two stations,” Ms Hartland said.

The stations were unsafe without ramps, she said, because in an emergency wheelchair passengers and parents with prams needed an alternative to broken lifts. ”They need ramps at these stations before someone is seriously injured.”

In response to these failures, at the 2010 State Election the Liberal opposition made a commitment that they would ensure all new railway stations would feature ramps as well as lifts. Ted Baillieu won the election, and duplicated access to railway platforms has been part of all projects since, from both sides of politics.

Footnote

During the first few days of the lift outage, audio announcements still included the January 3 start date in their spiel. Thankfully someone has realised that small bit of information is superfluous given that the work had already started, and the announcement has been trimmed down.

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It is part of a Victorian Government scaremongering campaign, which was launched after the national terrorism alert level was raised to “high” last month.

As a regular reader of my blog, you should know that that seeing ‘something’ is what I do best.

In this case, the thing I saw was a low bluestone platform on the edge of Flagstaff Gardens, next door to Flagstaff station.

So what can I say about it? It is actually a ventilation structure for the City Loop, with a vertical shaft ending about 13 metres below the surface, where another tunnel heads sideways towards the underground draught relief structure.

Foonote

The access hatch into the ventilation structure is both locked and fitted with an alarm – you didn’t think something like this would be just laying around unsecured, would you?

As for the cost of the “See Something, Say Something” campaign:

Final costs for the campaign are not expected to be available until next year’s annual department report.

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I’ll start the story at Flagstaff station when Myki gates were brand new – October 2012. Somehow they managed to all freeze up a few days later, with passengers having to touch on elsewhere.

On August 13, 2013 I found a single gate in need of reprogramming.

8 hours later it appeared the technician couldn’t fix it – the gate was blocked from use using a ‘DANGER’ flag normally used on broken escalators.

Jump forward to August 26, 2013 and the same gate was now physically broken, but station staff had some new Myki green ‘Temporary Unavailable’ flags to block the gate with.

A few uneventful months passed, until March 31, 2014 when somebody else managed to break the same barrier paddle.

The next morning somebody managed to break the second paddle.

A year then passed, until evening peak on April 29, 2014 when software faults rendered every gate dead in the water.

May 8, 2014 saw the ‘Temporarily Unavailable’ flags getting a work out yet again, when both sets of paddles got stuck in the gate.

Repairs got the gates working for about a month, until they failed again on Thursday July 3, 2014.

Not much happened over that weekend, because on Monday July 7 the ‘Temporarily Unavailable’ sign started to turn into ‘Permanently Unavailable’.

On July 8 I found a technician looking at the gate.

However that didn’t fix it – on July 9 half of the barrier paddle was stuck in the mechanism.

And by Friday July 11 things weren’t much better – the left paddle was flopping halfway out of the gate.

That is one full week for faults for one myki gate – how long until I find a longer streak of failure?

Footnote

Metcard gates were not immune to failure – over the years I did manage to find one where half of the paddle was stuck open. I’m guessing the Metcard gates were built of much sterner stuff!

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“Modelling at a railway station at the Figgins Diorama opening parade” / Photo by Rennie Ellis via the State Library of Victoria.

Fast forward to today and instead of fashionistas nibblings on wine and cheese, we have a detention cell for criminals.

A footnote

Figgins Diorama was an upmarket Melbourne department store, located in the former Mayfair Theatre at 167-173 Collins Street. Opened in May 1985, it only operated for 19 months before entering administration in December 1986, closing down soon after.

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