NSW Rail queues

Catching public transport is an important part of keeping up with my Podcast subscriptions. Normally it's pretty tolerable, but this morning, a Monday, the queues were crazy.

This is Chatswood station. It's being upgraded at the moment so that explains some of the chaos. You can't see it clearly in the picture but there are two queues of perhaps a hundred people each, one at the window and the other at the automated ticket machine.

Here's my humble suggestions to improve things:

• Introduce contactless pre-paid cards, like the Hong Kong Octopus cards (from Western Australia I understand anyway).
• Of course, make the ticket gates take those contactless cards.
• Replace the bad ticket machines with ones that are easier to use and faster to operate. The current ones are terrible and also unreliable.
• Ban marketing people distributing their brochures at the narrowest part of the exit during peak hours.
• Consider having some all standing carriages for peak hours.

I'm no expert but I do catch public transport and have experienced it in several countries.