In a plan that takes the popular level crossing removal program but flips it on its head, the State Coalition have announced they will grade-separate 55 road intersections around Melbourne if elected in 2018. (Reports: ABC / Age / Herald Sun) Here’s an animation created by the Coalition: And here’s the list of intersections announced ... [More]
I described this on Twitter the other day, but I’ll expand on it here. I was heading out in the car on Saturday afternoon. Got in, beeped, looked behind me, slowly backed-out of my driveway. BANG! A cyclist riding along the footpath with his dog (roughly at running pace) collided with my car. I stopped, ... [More]
Believe it or not, sometimes I blog about things other than transport. If you want to look purely at transport posts, try this link. Commonwealth Bank (CBA) announced on 24th September that all their ATMs were free for use by customers of any Australian bank. The same day, the rest of the Big 4 scrambled, ... [More]
Southland station is almost here — it’s scheduled to open on November 26th. At last! The centre has been getting ready Importantly, a more direct pedestrian path, including zebra crossings, has been provided from the centre entrance to the railway station. Bravo! Wayfinding signage inside the centre already points the way to the station. Paid ... [More]
All of Melbourne’s suburban railway stations have step-free access to the platforms. Except one: Heyington. To get to either platform involves steps. Heyington is set into the side of a hill. From the street you go down some steps to the citybound (“up”) platform. Or if you want the outbound (“down”) platform, that’s down some ... [More]
ZOMG, for the first time since I started this series, I forgot to post photos for October 2007 in October. And nobody noticed. Not surprising; I suspect I’m the most amused by these. Here they are. First, here’s the classic pic of Flinders Street Station. Basically the same nowadays, but covered in scaffolding for the ... [More]
I ran a Twitter thread over the last fortnight, highlighting some of the ways that footpath space is misused, or mis-allocated. This blog expands on those posts. In some of these cases, capacity constraints are causing problems for large numbers of pedestrians. Able-bodied people are often able to avoid those hazards, though it does slow ... [More]
Census data for Journey To Work was released on Monday, and many are taking a good look at the results. In Greater Melbourne, overall about 16.3% of people are using public transport to get to work — up from 14.5% in 2011. (It actually depends how you define “Melbourne”, and how you analyse the figures. ... [More]
If they want to encourage people to walk, they should at least ensure it’s as easy as possible. But in many cases, traffic lights are programmed to make it difficult – even where fixing it wouldn’t disadvantage motorists at all. Example 1 Here’s the T-junction at Centre Road and Eskay Road, Oakleigh South. I’m walking ... [More]
One of the things I found fascinating about Brussels on our recent holiday was – in contrast to Cardiff – how they’ve gone out of their way to make life easy for pedestrians. Most striking was that there were zebra crossings. Lots and lots of zebra crossings. When I first spotted how many there were, ... [More]
A few weeks ago I looked at problems with Metro’s paper timetables. Now, can we talk about how hopeless the PTV web site timetables are? Most of the rest of the web site works quite well, but the timetables, a key part, really are horribly unusable. If you’ve got the patience, see how many steps ... [More]
PTV released their passenger load surveys for trams and suburban trains, with results from May 2017. They used to do these twice annually, now it’s only once a year. These surveys are used to measure crowding on Melbourne’s trains and trams in peak hour. As usual, cancellations and major delays are excluded. Why? Because the ... [More]