How is it that Andrew Lezala (pictured above), CEO of Metro Trains Melbourne, has managed to experience such great success with that city's metropolitan railways? How has he lifted on-time performance to 94 per cent, added over 1500 services per week and taken all-important customer satisfaction figures to a five-year high?
It is all about thinking of the previously separated parts as a single system, he says, then building it better from the ground up. At the Australian Engineering Conference in Brisbane this November, Lezala will discuss transport systems for connected cities.
“Getting the basics right is about assets that don't fail,” Lezala, who in the past has held the roles of President of Daimler Chrysler’s world-wide metro business and President of Bombardier’s international Services Division, says. “It's about timetables that work, because if trains are regularly late then people are no longer going to use the system. It's an every-second-counts philosophy with the staff.”
“If you get the basics right you can deliver a good service. Then you can start doing the more advanced stuff. You can work on providing better and more individualised information and more comfort. You can work on the multi-modal transport that gets people to the trains. You can develop high capacity signalling and high capacity trains.”
Metro has been innovating in the customer information space. Over 220,000 registered Metro users now receive messages pushed to their smart phones to notify them of the on-time performance of the specific rail service they take to work, school or university each morning. The next step is to develop functionality to inform customers of which train is best to catch in order to arrive at their destination in the shortest amount of time.
A smart metro system could only be developed once the basics were in place and the various parts of the system – maintenance, timetabling, IT, HR, etc – were all working as one. The next step is to begin to manage what was previously outside of Metro’s control – the other forms of transport that feed people in to the railway.
“If you have a good, efficient train system but people can’t get to the stations, what’s the point?” he says. “And it is very important that this system is easily utilised. In cities like Melbourne and Sydney just a tiny proportion of people use public transport compared to cities like London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore. But our rail systems must continue to grow and prosper. The roads won’t be able to take another two million people in ten years.”
The future is about a broadening of the system with the development of a central ‘brain’, an organisation that manages all mobility, from roads to buses, ferries and trains. “We’re not looking at this simply from the point of view of single assets such as railways or bus systems,” he says.
“We’re talking about a centralised nerve centre that knows where every single asset is, knows the condition of the networks and can piece together an optimal mobility flow at that particular moment. We need to optimise an entire city’s mobility by cleverly using every asset.”
At the Australian Engineering Conference, Lezala will be discussing his experiences and learnings and painting a unique picture of the future of major infrastructural projects.
Lezala will also be issuing a unique and surprising challenge around his topic of transport systems for connected cities. He will be asking engineers to put their minds together to begin to develop a realistic and affordable solution for the much-maligned idea of a Sydney to Melbourne high-speed rail line.
For the last three decades the proposal has been seen as an empty and often amusing political promise. But Lezala believes a commercially viable solution is absolutely possible, and he has figured out how it could work. It simply needs input from the engineering world.
“Anybody can design and build stuff, but engineers design and build to a price,” he says. “What is the price? To be commercially viable, the Melbourne to Sydney high-speed line must come in at $10 to $15 million per kilometre, depending on the topography. I will propose a solution and it is very simple, but it needs design and engineering and innovation, and that is exactly what this industry is best at.”
To learn more, secure your spot at the Australian Engineering Conference where Andrew Lezala will discuss Transport Systems for Connected Cities.