Here’s another in my series of old photos from ten years ago – December 2013.
Upgraded lighting at bus stops? Alas no – it was just an antique shop display adjacent to a bus stop.
A less glamorous stop: the Elizabeth Street tram terminus – still lacking platform stops even in 2023.
It was less than a year until the 2014 State Election, and these protestors gathered on the steps of State Parliament to rail against the East West Link, which was eventually cancelled by Labor after the election.
The reverse view, looking at trams on Bourke Street. At the time, route 86 was all high floor trams.
Further west, Bourke Street Mall. It must take a special level of self-importance and/or a complete lack of awareness to park your motorcycles like this in the middle of a tram platform stop.
Transdev liked to customise the Out Of Service displays to include their logo. Ventura also does this; and possibly other operators too.
Ads covering windows were a big problem on Metro trains. Thankfully since then they’ve been prohibited, but they remain a problem on trams, buses and V/Line.
Thankfully some ads, like this one for Luna Park, avoided covering the windows.
A more serious (but shorter term) problem: summer timetable changes, which this poster is advertising, included some pretty drastic cuts, which caused severe crowding in some cases. After some PTUA campaigning, some cuts were reversed – and more importantly they haven’t repeated this level of summer cuts.
5 replies on “Old photos from December 2013”
With the protesters against East-West Link, the government (and Transurban) imposed the West Gate Tunnel on the western suburbs, and these protesters went missing in action, which I mentioned earlier this year.
And with buses on New Year’s Eve, it is still hourly (when it should be at least half-hourly). And while in the inner-east and inner-south east gets frequent trams on New Year’s Eve (as frequent as every couple of minutes), the western suburbs has to deal with hourly buses. Hopefully, this will change in 2025.
Yeah, the momentum against East West Link just didn’t transfer to West Gate Tunnel. I think a big part of that was WGT was seen as less “evil” because it doesn’t involve mass demolition of homes and a massive interchange in Royal Park.
Traffic-wise, it’s likely to be just as bad, bringing a lot more congestion into West Melbourne. But often that’s not what people see as the main impact.
Meanwhile North East Link will bring more traffic into Clifton Hill, and I’m betting will result in renewed pressure to build EWL.
Most of the ads I come across on V/Line trains seems to be V/Line advertising itself!
@Daniel Bowen – I reckon WGT will be a whole lot worse than EWL traffic wise. EWL joined two sections of freeway whereas WGT dumps a whole lot of extra freeway traffic in the West Melbourne area on the edge of the CBD.
I guess we will see when the WGT boondoggle eventually opens.
@Ross, I think EWT would have also brought a lot of traffic to the inner-city, but there’s no denying WGT is especially designed for it.
For anybody wanting a simple diagram showing where the traffic will come out, check the link below. Half the lanes head north to Citylink; half head towards the CBD.
https://bigbuild.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/595494/WGT-project-scope-map-2.pdf