I was planning on writing a blog post on the potential of close to 40+ railway stations being completely rebuilt via the fifty level crossing grade separations the state government is intending on doing over 8 years — most of which are adjacent to railway stations. But last Thursday night’s PTUA member meeting with Ian ... [More]
Category: transport
All forms of transport, including gunzelly
Yesterday it was discovered (by Rod S) that Bing Maps has loaded the Melbourne/Victoria GTFS public transport timetable data, and thus you can now plan PT trips on Bing. Who uses Bing? Almost nobody I suspect — it was found by mistake! It looks pretty good. Most trips I’ve tried provide a good, solid, logical ... [More]
Melbourne’s expanding fleet of low-floor trams are being allocated to tram routes that lack wheelchair-accessible stops, while accessible tram stops are being built on routes that have no low-floor trams. — The Age: New accessible tram stops not on the level for those most in need in Melbourne Let me present a prime example. This ... [More]
I was thinking about what makes good cities work effectively, and it occurred to me that a prime example is the Restaurant Tram. That day we took the Restaurant Tram, we made our way from the train at Southern Cross Station to the pick-up point next to Clarendon Street. The convention centre (Jeff’s Shed) was ... [More]
Categories
Transport choice
The RACV has again cited choice as a reason to go ahead and build huge road projects, including the East West Link which the Andrews government has a clear mandate to scrap. (Remember, a survey showed only 38% of RACV members support East West Link.) Ah yes, choice. Let me give you an example of ... [More]
The metro rail tunnel concept is about ten years old, having first publicly emerged in late-2005. In some quarters, it’s been seen as an unnecessary white elephant — an expensive way of providing for extra passenger capacity in the CBD, when other cheaper ways were available to cope with increased patronage. But time has passed, ... [More]
East West Link is now that it’s dead, buried and cremated (to coin a phrase). Though I’m not sure that’s how you destroy zombies. Some closing thoughts on the project… The $339m payout is less than a single year of the expected $345m annual Availability Payments that would have been paid if it had been ... [More]
Here’s a quick followup to Tuesday’s post… that had a summary of 1939 vs 2006 vs 2015 timetables in the 5-6pm peak, but here’s the line-by-line breakdown. to 1939 2006 2015 St Kilda 10 Port Melbourne 5 Williamstown 7 3 3 Altona/Laverton 2 See Werribee 3 Werribee 1 4 5 St Albans/Sunbury 2 5 9 ... [More]
This video is inspired partly by a shot in the House Of Cards titles, and partly by something my dad used to tell me — that you could stand at Richmond station in the evening peak and see trains on every track coming out of the city. He may have been exaggerating a tad, but ... [More]
Last year the Coalition announced they were going ahead with an unsolicited proposal: to upgrade the Dandenong line. In summary, it included: grade separation of 4 level crossings, 3 stations associated with those rebuilt, planning and early works on 5 more grade separations, high capacity signalling, 25 new trains, a maintenance depot at Pakenham, and ... [More]
Information is power, so they say. So it follows that good accurate information on public transport services is needed to make the most of them. Back in 2005, before the first wave of Real smartphones prompted by the iPhone, Google launched Google Transit. The idea is simple: with access to all of a region’s public ... [More]
This morning The Age published more detailed train service data than we usually get to see. Some information is routinely published, but we rarely get an insight into the breakdown between AM, PM and off-peak punctuality, for instance. In some ways the data was no great surprise — in the first week of March, hundreds ... [More]