Red Tape Hot Box on railroad bureaucracy

Thanks to one of our readers, Michael, I have received yet more evidence showcasing the dark side of a large state-owned enterprise that claims to be unprofitable. (Guess which one?) This is its claim, but is it really so? Not exactly. As Michael has seen for himself, the all-stations train to Radom, a favorite of Varsovians who own działki (allotment gardens) to the south of the city, has been shortened yet again, from nine coaches initially to six, and most recently to three. Now the Saturday mid-morning train heads through the cabbage fields fit to burst with passengers. Why is this popular service getting chopped? Because no one is using it.

Pardon me? It's as packed as a rush-hour tram at Plac Bankowy. Uh, nope...officially, it's under-utilized. This train - and many other suburban services run by PKP - is a good example of bureaucrats making decisions totally oblivious of what's happening on the ground. The Warszawa Wschodnia-Radom train stops at 27 stations, of which only 14 have ticket offices. Boarding a train at an unmanned station, passengers are requested to go immediately to the first compartment of the first carriage to buy their ticket from the guard. In this compartment, the guard is busy writing out tickets by hand. Whenever Michael heads out of town with his family and their bikes, they have to go through the entertaining ritual of buying their tickets from the guard.

"Two adults, two children's tickets with 37% discounts, a family discount, a summer excursion discount, four bicycles, from Warszawa Dawidy to Czachówek Górny..." The poor guard consults his route book to calculate the number of kilometers between the two stations. He then checks their children's legitymacje (school IDs), checks how much a bicycle ticket for the distance will cost, totals it all up and then meticulously works out the discounts... Meanwhile, the train has stopped at various stations and is moving into Piaseczno where half the passengers get off (most without paying) and more get on.

You get the picture. Buying a ticket on this service is for frajerzy (suckers) only. Sit at the rear of the train, and the chances of the ticket collector coming to check your ticket fall away to roughly zero. And should one ever appear, everyone knows the score: PKP stands for Płać Konduktorowi Połowę (pay the conductor half).

But back at PKP headquarters, the bean-counters see a different story. No one is buying the tickets, therefore no one is using the service. So we cut the frequency from one an hour to one every 90 minutes, to one every two hours, we cut the number of carriages from 12 to nine, from nine to six, from six to three...

All that foregone revenue. If only PKP could be bothered to collect it, the debt-generating machine might even show a turnaround and make some money. This absurd situation could never happen in the private sector.