25 May, 2006

Polish State Railways and the high cost of social mistrust

Travelling by rail in England with my son recently, I marvelled at the contrast between the work of a ticket collector in Poland and the UK.

The British guard asked me courteously to see our tickets, and seeing that I had two, thanked me and moved on. He did not inspect them close up as they do in Poland. He did not ask to see any proof of my 10 year-old son's educational status or age.

His bosses work on the assumption that if someone's got a ticket, there's a 99% likelihood that the correct fare has been paid. The ticket inspection task is about revenue protection. The guard's after people travelling without a ticket.

In Poland... "Prosze o bilet!" A command rather than a request (though levels of courtesy at PKP's guards are rising). The ticket is inspected thoroughly. Any legitimacja is checked thoroughly. The legitimacja szkolna is a joke. When travelling with my son and I'm asked for his legitimacja my stock response is: "There is compulsory education in Poland ['obowiazek szkolny']. Parents who do not send their children to school are imprisoned. That I'm here and not behind bars implies that my son does go to school. So why the bit of paper to prove the obvious?

The upshot of over-checking tickets on PKP is that ticket inspectors do not focus on revenue protection. My line out of Warsaw, run by Koleje Mazowieckie, is an excellent example. At all the unmanned stations between Warszawa Zachodnia and Piaseczno, passengers are requested to board the train at the first compartment of the first carriage to buy their ticket. The guard writes tickets out manually. Our regular ticket - "One adult, two children, three bicycles, from Warszawa Dawidy to Czachowek Poludniowy, return, coming back today". The guard needs to check the number of kilometers between the two stations, check my children's legitimacje, work out the tariff (family discount, excursion discount), tot it all up and write out the ticket longhand. The ticket will cost something like 13.67 PLN, and he's always short of change, so he's fumbling through his pocket for tiny coins worth a fraction of a penny. By the time he's written the ticket, the train has passed two intermediate stations. From the back of the train, where they can travel safe in the knowledge that no guard will ever have time to control, dozens of people hop on and hop off, knowing there's very little chance they'll ever be asked to pay.

And revenues are lost, management thinks no one's using the trains, services are cut back to save money, trains are cut from eight carriages to four - because the most elemental thought process has not been carried out.

It's a social mistrust thing. Over-checking costs. Management distrusts its ticket inspectors, controllers control controllers, the cost of revenue protection must be out of all proportion to the revenues actually collected.





Have your tickets ready please - passengers at the rear of the train travel free.
(This train is the all stations to Skarzysko Kamienna from Warsaw, pictured between Warszawa Dawidy and Warszawa Jeziorki, 19 March 2006.)

1 comment:

Edward Lucas said...

Nice comment. And thanks for sticking up for me against these appalling people on my blog

Edward