After a third-class train ride, minister should fly economy

He has also taken an eight-hour train ride to the northeastern province of Surin and found that the toilets in the lowest-class train carriage were dirty and had little or no running tap water.

He also wrote on Facebook that Train 135, a third-class route, suffered a 30-minute delay and the carriages were not in good condition.

Now he should take the cheapest seat on the national airline to determine how the carrier can get out of financial trouble.

The minister’s staff had earlier set up a Facebook page to seek reactions from bus passengers about services during the period August 6-14. It didn’t take long before complaints started pouring in, and bus route No 8 got the highest number of negative comments. 

Passengers complained about the bad manners of the drivers and conductors, and drivers speeding past waiting passengers without stopping. Some drivers let passengers off in the middle of roads. Black exhaust fumes and engine problems added to the list of problems on this “unbearable service”.

If you remember, the minister earlier took a bus to work in Bangkok but had to get off and jump on a motorcycle taxi because of the long delays on the route.

Minister Chadchart’s plan to ride on the slow train to Surin wasn’t disclosed until he had completed the journey so that he could find out for himself exactly what the State Railways of Thailand’s service is like before reacting to its request to raise fees for third-class tickets by 10 per cent.

What he found out, by talking to train drivers and transport police, confirmed his suspicion that the service is far below standard. They told him about old locomotives, worn-out or broken train parts, a lack of qualified personnel and uneven distribution of assignments among the staff.

 Now that THAI has reported a net loss of Bt8.4 billion for the second quarter, the Transport minister should disguise himself as an ordinary passenger on all the airlines that compete directly with the national carrier – as well as take the cheapest seat on one of THAI’s flights – to come up with ideas on how to get the airline out of trouble. Also, as he told reporters, to determine whether it’s the result of management problems.

The minister might find that the country’s bus, train and airline services suffer from a common ailment: they are tied to politics and bureaucracy, and nobody – not even the country’s best administrators and managers – can turn them around under the current management structures.

Attempts to “privatise” the train and bus services have been made on a regular basis, to no avail. Moves to improve efficiency have at best been just lip service. The reasons for the failure of these transport services are no secrets. Management objectives have never been about improving the bottom line by giving top priority to customer service. It’s all about politicians, once in power, demanding the right to put their own people in the top posts in order to promote their own influence and benefit.

The national airline is supposed to be a publicly listed company, but the Finance Ministry remains the major shareholder and the Royal Thai Air Force insists upon its say in the management. In other words, the airline remains officially a “public company” that is controlled by political and bureaucratic interests. Paying passengers do not come first, as they should in a real business concern. This despite the fact that the national carrier has to compete head-on with all the other international carriers, which have to be run professionally in order to survive in the increasingly challenging airline business.

If Minister Chadchart takes a really long flight after his sufferings on the bus and train, he might find that there is a common solution to all the problems plaguing our transportation services: Get the politicians out and get the professionals in!