Sydney Metro has emphasised its mission to to deliver safe and reliable journeys for customers who rely on public transport services in North West Sydney.
Since the historic opening of Australia’s first driverless metro in 2019, the Metro North West Line, operated by Metro Trains Sydney, has delivered more than 42 million customer journeys and has retained an overall customer satisfaction index of 98 per cent.
On March 14 this year, a systems communications failure resulted in customers experiencing an unacceptable level of disruption.
About 180 customers on three trains were affected by the incident which began at 4.36pm. Metro Trains Sydney staff progressively assisted customers off trains and on to stations platforms from approximately 45 minutes to two hours after trains were first delayed.
Sydney Metro acknowledges that the delay in disembarking passengers was not acceptable. Following an investigation into the incident, it confirmed improvements to Metro Trains Sydney practices which include:
- Improved staff deployment to respond faster to incidents
- Recruiting an extra four customer information officers to improve information on service changes and disruption
- Recruiting an incident planning manager to build operator capabilities
- Additional major incident drills and exercises
- Increased flexibility to respond and recover from an incident when there is a service disruption.
The Metro North West Line has improved the way people move around Sydney, giving people in the North West access to fast, reliable public transport for the first time.
In the month following the incident the operator delivered more than 99 per cent of services in headway tolerance and more than 98 per cent of journey times were below 37 minutes.