It used to be that the fashionable bridge for high vehicles to crash into was the Spencer/Flinders Street rail overpass — eleven hits in five years. But it’s been usurped by the Montague Street tram bridge. At lunchtime on Tuesday I went down to have a look. Certainly no shortage of warnings signs. In this ... [More]
Category: transport
All forms of transport, including gunzelly
We survived! Ten days of bustitution is over… well, almost. Just to be clear — because some of the information is either vague, misleading or missing: The Frankston line is running again, including to Bentleigh station. Bentleigh station will close for demolition and rebuilding in June. But Mckinnon and Ormond stations are closed and demolished. ... [More]
A few more observations on the Bentleigh/Mckinnon/Ormond update — sorry to obsess over this, but it is a huge project directly affecting my local neighbourhood, and similar works will come to many areas of Melbourne soon… Some more pictures of construction Just south of Bentleigh station some serious work is going on re-routing a storm ... [More]
The second big (longer than a weekend) shutdown for this project has commenced, so where are we at? The project summary Click here for my long post on the project details, or here’s a summary: Originally just removal of the Ormond level crossing was funded by the Coalition. The project was expanded to include adjacent ... [More]
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Finally Melbourne has Google Transit
So, today Google Transit (Maps) enabled public transport planning in Victoria, including right across Melbourne. Hallelujah. This has been a long time coming. Google Transit and the GTFS file format originated about ten years ago, and quickly took hold in North American cities, as well as elsewhere around the world. Around the same time, the ... [More]
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Dandenong line capacity boost undersold
On the weekend I was chatting about the Dandenong skyrail proposal to rellies at their house near Hughesdale station. They are keeping an open mind; they are not immediately under the rail line, and they can see the obvious benefit from getting the level crossings removed quickly, but are concerned about some aspects, which it ... [More]
From time to time I’ll refer to the Frankston line on Twitter with the abbreviation FKN. I’m not just trying to get a cheap laugh. Well okay, perhaps I am, but what people might not realise is that’s actually the official station code for Frankston. Good morning #Bentleigh. They're not lying about the 30 minute ... [More]
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What if Bentleigh had got Skyrail?
A few people have asked me about this in the past few months — what if Bentleigh had got “skyrail”? It’s interesting to consider, though it was never going to happen. Firstly, the timing was wrong. The Coalition had fully funded the Ormond level crossing for removal in May 2014, with designs already having determined ... [More]
LED displays are quite common on public transport. For instance in Melbourne they are used for destination signs on many trains, trams and buses. They are also used for street Smartbus indicator signs, and for non-CBD railway station “PIDs” (passenger information displays) showing next train departures. While they are generally pretty easy to read, they ... [More]
Ian Woodcock (RMIT) and John Stone (Melbourne Uni) have a new report out comparing level crossing removal methods. The Age has a story on it this morning, and hopefully the full report will be online very soon. UPDATE: Here it is. I did manage to get a sneak preview, and looks at various case studies ... [More]
This point seems to come up for discussion online regularly, but I don’t know if the information is easy to find, so I thought I’d have a go myself. There are regular claims from those pushing it that East West Link (stage one, Eastern Freeway to Citylink) is needed to prevent traffic chaos. The problem ... [More]
It wasn’t planned this way, but this week’s posts seem to have been all about pedestrians/walking. Along with rules about not parking over footpaths (and vehicles needing to give way to pedestrians when crossing footpaths), some people seem to be unaware that there are rules about keeping vegetation clear of footpaths. Able-bodied people can duck ... [More]