The latest performance figures for Tyne and Wear Metro have now been released on posters situated at each station on the network and they show that performance is down both on the previous four weeks and the same period in 2018 – and this comes before the recent four day closure of parts of the network after a major overhead problem.
This four week period is from 1st to 27th April 2019 and during these four weeks 80% of trains are reported as arriving on time (within three minutes later or within 30 second earlier that timetabled). This is a fall of 3% from the previous four weeks and is 5% down from the same time in 2018.
As always with these posters two “issues” that have affected punctuality are also listed on the posters – how they decided which two issues to include on these posters are not known! In this case on 5th April a train failed at South Gosforth causing delays – with this station being at the junction of the Airport and Coast lines any failure does cause issues to both routes of the network – and on both 8th and 27th April passengers were taken ill on trains. The poster also has a section on what they are doing to prevent similar incidents with the usual line about how much more they are spending on train maintenance to keep in service train failures down to a minimum included. There is also a strange line about how they are working with the emergency services to ensure passenger wellbeing although how this will prevent passengers becoming ill on trains is unclear.
The latest “how you view us” stats are also included, with these coming from February 2019. Over the course of the year 2000 passengers are asked about how the service and other aspects of travelling on Metro and according to the February 2019 survey the overall satisfaction rating is down as 7.3 (out of 10). Amongst the other factors passengers are asked about staff availability is down at 5.2 (again out of 10) with nothing coming higher than station facilities (and overall satisfaction) at 7.3.