All forms of transport, including gunzelly
I’ve written about this before, but just so it’s absolutely clear, I’m going to include a picture[1] with the text: When turning left or right at any intersection (except a roundabout) you must give way to any pedestrians crossing the road you are turning into. — source: VicRoads: Driving in Victoria — Rules and Responsibilities, ... [More]
You want to know why Melbourne’s trains are so crowded? Well, that might be because in the last decade, patronage has gone up 77%, but services have only increased by 17%. And the trams too? Patronage up 36%, services increased 5%. Just for completeness, here’s a graph of all the patronage figures from 1999-2009. Source: ... [More]
A number of traffic lights used for crossing the “little” streets in central Melbourne don’t have green/red men. Some do, however, particularly along Swanston Street where there are heavy pedestrian flows and — I suspect — more people likely to be just following everyone else like sheep, and not looking for cars before they cross ... [More]
I got to have a short ride in the new X’Trapolis train introduced into service today. The government calls it “Train 2”, however the journos prefer call it after the month it was meant to be in service, eg “The January train”. For all the consternation about a reduction in seats, seeing it in the ... [More]
For $1.35 billion, you’d hope there would be some benefits to Myki. Here’s one: if you take a little care, it can be used from within a wallet. So you need never take it out, unless an inspector needs to see it. At least once this has enabled me to validate and jump on a ... [More]
I’ve got a spare Myki card that I’m testing online topups with. $1 at a time, to see how long they take to come through. How it should work is this: You make a payment via the web site The web site and central database sends out a message to all the Myki vending machines ... [More]
What’s so special about King Street, in Melbourne’s Central Business District? Well, it’s the only main street in the Hoddle Grid which has absolutely no scheduled public transport running along it. So you might think, given the rhetoric is to help people get onto PT, especially for trips into the CBD, that they’d avoid giving ... [More]
The Metlink Revenue Protection Plan published by The Age on Saturday had some interesting points. Some notes I made while looking through it (some of which were not included in the article): Page 12 seems to accept that in most cases, more staff will reduce most types of evasion. Can’t argue with that — most ... [More]
Seems some people can’t see the trees for the forest. A HIGH school has banned bicycles because it has no bike shed and it doesn’t want to encourage students who refuse to wear helmets. Hume Central Secondary College’s policy has puzzled health and cycling groups amid growing concern about childhood obesity. … In the same ... [More]
Metro Trains boss Andrew Lezala remarked on Tuesday at the Parliamentary Select Committee on Train Services that he hoped to see rail patronage double by 2020. “Our overall plan is to double patronage on the railway during the life of the franchise, which requires a major increase in the system’s capacity.” I think there’s two ... [More]
This is not progress. This is the corner of Flinders Lane and Spring Street, in the CBD. Should be a priority pedestrian area — it’s certainly flagged that way under the SmartRoads strategy. But the zebra crossing that was here before has been removed and replaced with a traffic light. Which means that while before ... [More]
For a while now, VicRoads has been working on a plan to allocate different priorities to different roads around Melbourne. Rather than the free-for-all we sometimes see now, some roads would be setup to emphasise pedestrian priority, some bus, some tram, and some would be “preferred traffic routes” and lesser “other traffic routes”. I suspect ... [More]