During my time involved with the PTUA, there’s been a policy to not comment on issues outside Victoria, for three main reasons: It’s a Victorian organisation. There are local groups covering other parts of Australia. You make media comment on stuff outside your knowledge at your peril. It takes away effort from activism for and ... [More]
Category: PTUA
Continuing my series of ten year old photos… The Christmas tram in Flinders Street Grumpy Daniel Next, perhaps the most useless Melbourne public transport map ever produced. It doesn’t show the most well-known location, the CBD, and shows very few others. It also has numerous errors, including: Implies Sandringham is next to Clayton. Implies Glen ... [More]
Abbott’s outright refusal to fund urban public transport (while throwing billions into motorways) hasn’t won him any friends here. Make sure your vote counts.
From a conversation with my sister, an occasional PT user, I’m guessing there are some discounts around the place that people don’t know about. The good news is that with Myki being forced down everybody’s throats, if you can get over the hurdle of getting a card (now $6 full fare, $3 concession), it’s easier ... [More]
Tonight’s PTUA Annual General Meeting means today is my last day as President. I’ll miss a lot of it, particularly dealing with the media, and meeting/discussing/debating with industry and political players (the former in particular often providing information that should be out in public, but isn’t. (Over the years, I suspect, the media has been ... [More]
Yes it’s true. I have decided not to renominate as the PTUA’s President, and will stand down at the Annual General Meeting on October 11th. The Age: After almost a decade, Melbourne’s chief public transport complainer has finally had enough. PTUA: PTUA President to step down Basically, after nine years, I need a break. It’s ... [More]
One of the problems plaguing public transport in Victoria is the secrecy. Historically the Department of Transport has kept its cards very close to its chest. There’s a lack of information, and a lack of consulation. As some people sitting around a table during a parliamentary inquiry into train services a couple of years ago ... [More]
As if disrupted trains weren’t enough, now we have Metro apostrophe crimes. (from Channel 10 news 25/6/2012: Commute derailed) Metro was already having a bad Monday morning peak with the inner part of the Sandringham line suspended due to a maintenance train derailing overnight. Things didn’t improve when at about 7:15 the outer section of ... [More]
A few years ago they fixed what was probably Melbourne’s most confusing bus route, but plenty of others are still running confusing, spaghetti-like routes around the suburbs. Often your trip from A to B travels via the rest of the alphabet. A PTUA report out today tries to measure how much buses meander, by comparing ... [More]
Thanks to the miracle of advertising, we have a bank on a tram… …a tram on a bank… …and a bus stop on a bus stop. If you’re curious, the bus stop picture is portraying the 811/812 route on “Main Street”. Unfortunately the bus stop in the picture doesn’t appear to have another advert with ... [More]
Some people got just a little too hysterical last week when news of a security vulnerability in Myki came out. The story broke on Monday, but it wasn’t until Wednesday that the mainstream media got hold of it, with the Melbourne Times running it first, spreading rapidly to The Age, AAP, 3AW and others — ... [More]
One day in 2008, M and I went to a party, and I blogged about the trip there on mysterious tram route number 7. I concluded: In my book, in most cases the secret numbers shouldn’t be used. If a tram is travelling along a substantial part of the route, it might as well use ... [More]