Some pics from a tour of the Exhibition Building a few weeks ago. You start off on the ground floor, with the guide giving a brief history. It was interesting to see the building empty – I’d previously been here when it was busy – for exhibitions or to get a COVID vaccine. Here’s a ... [More]
A remark on social media inspired this: a quick comparison of suburban train punctuality in Australia. We have suburban rail networks in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, and all of them publish monthly punctuality data. So here’s a quick graph comparing them since January last year: Some caveats: Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide consider “on-time” ... [More]
Obviously, travel demand in cities is in turmoil just at the moment, but leaving the 2020-2022 blip aside for a minute, and looking again at pre-COVID travel in cities… As a follow-up to comparing Melbourne’s public transport patronage to Sydney’s, I thought I’d look at all the big capital cities. The five biggest are also ... [More]
On Friday, The Age reported that Infrastructure Australia has put out a report that asks what sort of city we’d like to have in 2046: The Expanded Low Density scenario – similar to Los Angeles – sprawling, dispersed suburbs, even more car-dominated than today The Centralised High Density scenario – similar to New York City ... [More]
The recent anti-motorway protests in Melbourne are nothing new. In fact the very same area was subject to protests in the 1970s, when it was proposed to link the Eastern Freeway to the Tullamarine Freeway by way of an aboveground link, by converting Alexandra Parade to a freeway, ploughing through neighbourhoods in Collingwood, Carlton and ... [More]
Sometimes in the city, it’s a bit like a Where’s Wally book. City of Melbourne figures indicate the average daily population for the CBD and surrounding council area is 844,000. But Christmas shopping is a very busy time of year. City of Melbourne has some very clever pedestrian monitoring systems, which can tell us just ... [More]
Here is my collection of Australian public transport smartcards. The ones I’m missing are Adelaide, Canberra and Tasmania — all of which have been introduced since my last visits there. Notably Perth’s SmartRider is the only card that is blank on the back, which is why the card number (which I’ve blacked-out) is on the ... [More]
Given the Flemington/Showgrounds line isn’t running this morning, and the Stony Point line has planned bustitution, I’m going to go ahead and declare that we have Metro Bingo this morning due to the storms. And no, it’s not much better on many of the roads. Good luck to everybody (myself included, shortly) trying to get ... [More]
Another in my series of old photos from ten years ago… In 2004 the situation with crowded trains hadn’t really hit as a big political problem, which is why it took until 2006 for the government to decide not to scrap all the Hitachi trains after all, but expand the fleet. It was certainly occurring ... [More]
One of the great things about Melbourne’s CBD (the Hoddle Grid) is that it’s so easily navigable. There are lots of parallel streets and laneways, so when walking around it’s pretty easy to take an alternative route, and still not get lost. You can use this to avoid Chuggers. Charity Muggers are notorious for getting ... [More]
Just a little tip — because it seems a lot of people don’t know this: For metropolitan services, you can touch-on a Myki and travel with any balance which is non-negative, that is, zero or above. It doesn’t matter if the card balance is less than the fare. This means if you find yourself needing ... [More]
Hearing the news of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine has an added dimension for someone who grew up in East St Kilda. Lots of street names in the area come from the Crimean War — from the British forces, names of battles (which in turn are mostly named after locations), and even Florence Nightingale is ... [More]