Living near busy roads
As reported in The Age, the US Health Effects Institute recently published a report on the effects of living near busy roads.
Its conclusion was that:
…there is sufficient evidence that exposures to traffic-related air pollution cause asthma exacerbation in children and suggestive evidence that they might cause other health effects.
…the zones most impacted by traffic-related pollution are up to 300 to 500 meters from highways and major roads
How do they define “major”? It appears they’ve used the metric of 10,000 vehicles per day.
The latest VicRoads Traffic System Performance report doesn’t give specific figures for particular roads, but does provide average lane occupancy figures (in terms of both cars and people), from which one can derive a very rough average number of cars on each type of road:
- Freeways 28,485 cars per lane per 24 hours
- Divided arterials 13,180 cars per lane per 24 hours
- Undivided arterials 11,063 cars per lane per 24 hours
- Undivided arterials with trams 11,361 cars per lane per 24 hours
But this is very rough. The vehicle count figures appear to include only cars, not other vehicles. Obviously roads around Melbourne vary enormously, and the lane occupancy figures apparently include buses and trams, so the number of vehicles will be a fair bit lower on better-served PT routes (such as the figure for roads with trams). And the level of congestion on each road would also directly effect the emissions, of course.
I do live near some main roads — about 100 metres from one, and about 400 metres from another. Fortunately, being in an area of Melbourne settled before the domination of the car, they are only one lane in each direction, and far enough out of the city centre that clear ways do not apply.
In VicRoads parlance, they would be undivided arterials. I suspect they are below the average in terms of traffic, but whether they are under 10,000 vehicles per day or not, I don’t know.
While Melbourne’s air quality is apparently quite good compared to some cities, obviously the air quality anywhere in urban areas isn’t going to be as good as it is in most rural areas.
But I’m thankful I don’t live close by to much wider and busier roads such as Nepean Highway (4 lanes in each direction), North Road (3 lanes in each direction), the freeways, or the fat outer-suburban roads like Springvale Road (3 lanes each direction).
And I’m rather glad for my nephew and my niece that my sister has moved from her house in East Brighton, which was less than 100 metres from the Nepean Highway. I must ask her if there’s been any noticeable difference in the kids’ health.
Tags: pollution, roads, traffic, transport
16 comments
Lego PT stereotypes
I’m probably reading too much into this, but here’s a PT stereotype: Lego’s Duplo bus. It appears that in the view of whoever designed this set, only old people and kids ride the bus.
Okay, okay, we all know that in some cases this is probably very realistic. Many services simply aren’t good enough to attract anybody other than those who have no choice: those who can’t drive, or can’t afford to drive.
The challenge is to make services good (frequent) enough that people who have a choice will use them. That’s what gets cars off the road. It’s also a way of improving safety at quiet times such as late evenings — by having services which are busy, and have a wide cross-section of the community aboard. (That’s what made the recent Mckinnon incident quite unusual.)
Happily in the bigger kids’ Lego bus set, there’s an apparently affluent white collar worker waiting for the bus. Maybe it’s a Smartbus.
I’m also happy to see that Legoland has some kind of integrated public transport; the logo at the bus stop is the same as the one on the trains.
Though of course that doesn’t mean everything’s timed to connect.
Like I said, I’m reading way too much into this!
PS. Tuesday afternoon: Speaking of cultural representations of public transport:
EXHIBITION: Jacques Tati from Bicycles to Spaceships: Tati + Hulot Transiting Modern Life
A unique exhibition coordinated by Louise Mackenzie
Open: 9.00am – 5.00pm Monday – Friday, 1 – 9 July
Wunderlich Gallery, Architecture Building
University of Melbourne [Link; go to July events.]
Tags: buses, Lego, public transport, trains
8 comments
Coupons
I’ve mentioned it before, but Joel Spolsky wrote a great article a few years ago about pricing, and noted that companies would ideally like everybody to pay as much as they are willing to for their products.
In economist jargon, capitalists want to capture the consumer surplus.
Let’s do this. Instead of charging $220, let’s ask each of our customers if they are rich or if they are poor. If they say they’re rich, we’ll charge them $349. If they say they’re poor, we’ll charge them $220.
Seriously, it’s a great article, and well worth a read, to learn about how pricing is done, even if you’re not particularly interested in economics.
One method for this type of pricing in the USA is for supermarkets and other stores to publish coupons in the newspapers and catalogues. If the time-rich (eg poor) people have the time to go find the coupons and cut them out and remember to take them shopping, they’ll earn an extra discount. Others won’t bother.
Recently Coles has been trying it here. The catalogue has some coupons with a barcode on it, and if you snip it out and take it along, you got an extra discount.
I wonder if anybody bothers?
Tags: Coles, discounts, shopping
10 comments
Bentleigh station looking grey
Metro must have been buying a lot of grey paint. All of the graffiti on the retaining wall opposite platform one at Bentleigh has been painted over, as have the sides of the platforms.
There’s been a similar frenzy of painting grey on the walls in the cuttings around South Yarra.
I wonder if people have noticed, and how long it’ll stay like that.
Tags: Bentleigh, graffiti, Metro
14 comments
When You Walk In The Room
Some songs evoke a particular memory, of either a specific event or a period of my life.
So it is with Paul Carrack’s version of Jackie DeShannon’s “When You Walk In The Room“, from 1987.
I bought the 45 (rpm, single) of it, primarily because the (quite amusing) video clip included all of the cast of Who Dares Wins — a sketch show of the time that I absolutely loved that included Tony Robinson (better known as Baldrick in Blackadder), Rory McGrath (who you still see pop up on QI and other shows) and some others who were very talented but have mostly disappeared into obscurity (at least from an Australian point of view).
I suspect the video clip’s high school crush theme also resonated at the time.
I’m not sure what happened to the record; it probably got chucked out years ago. I didn’t think I’d ever hear it, let alone see the video clip, again. But here it is, thanks to YouTube.
(Unfortunately the first and last few seconds/lyrics of the song are missing. Ah well.)
Julia Gillard, Prime Minister
I for one would like to welcome our new red-headed overlord.
One of the things about the Westminster system is that if the ruling party loses confidence in the leader, they can replace him. And for those of you watching from overseas, that’s what happened this morning: Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister since the 2007 election, got the arse.
Compared to the Hawke/Keating coup of 1991, the information revolution means that this time it was possible to track this what was happening in near real time. The place to be was on Twitter — in part for the amusing comments, but if you follow the right people — in this case the senior political journalists, it’s by far the quickest way to find out the latest developments.
In this case, the (unconfirmed at the time, of course) news of what had happened in this morning’s caucus vote came from The Australian’s Samantha Maiden, a good few minutes before it was officially announced:
Labor Mp text: it’s Julia no ballot #spill
(I’d love to tell you precisely what time that was compared to the announcement, but bloody Twitter won’t tell me that. Judging from an email I sent straight afterwards, the Tweet was at about 9:27.
Edit: Tweetdeck does tell me the exact times. The announcement was around 9:35.)
Congratulations, Prime Minister Gillard. Now, let’s see you act on the things people care about, and the reasons people voted Labor in 2007 — as well as the things we most definitely didn’t vote for.
In the former category, action on Climate Change is the biggie that Rudd dropped the ball on — and something Gillard specifically mentioned in her speech. In the latter, it’s time to accept that Stephen Conroy’s Net filter plan is something that nobody voted for, admit it’s a flawed idea, and to scrap it.
Update 6:30pm Spotted this advert for Jetstar in MX on the way home:
Poor advert placement?
Not sure this advert placement is a good idea:
Not that the exhaust actually comes out of that grill, of course.
And one should not overstate the pollution caused by buses.
Measuring just the CO2 emissions, a diesel bus emits about 1800 grams per kilometre. By comparison a diesel Landrover emits 295 grams per kilometre. At an average 1.2 people per private vehicle, that’s 245 grams per passenger kilometre. So a bus has to be carrying just 8 passengers (which is comparatively empty for a bus) to be more efficient than a diesel Landrover (or about 22 people to be as efficient as a Prius).
The number of people on a bus varies widely. It could be no passengers (just the driver), or if packed it could be 80-100. Some may catch it for many kilometres, some just a few stops.
And of course, you can’t just run the services you know will be packed. You get more people onto PT as a whole if you have a cohesive network, running frequently, and covering the hours that most people travel, so they can rely on it to be there whenever they need it. Smartbus is proof that more buses gets more people using them.
So while the advert (and specifically its placement) above may not have been a good idea, we do need more buses on the road.
Tags: buses, emissions, pollution
13 comments
The secret door
I only go into the post office for three reasons.
1. To buy postage (either stamps, or to send packages).
2. To pick up parcels.
3. To renew my post office box. (And in fact I think you can pay that online these days.)
I don’t understand the people that go to pay endless numbers of bills, not to mention buy the other crap they seem to sell in post offices these days — anything from printers and computer monitors to discount DVDs to racks and racks of Smiggle stuff — in other words, stuff you’d normally go elsewhere if you actually wanted to buy them. (All this is why, as I’ve said before, you’ll go in to find a slow-moving line of twenty people when all you want is a book of stamps.)
And of course it narks me somewhat that most post offices (pretty much all apart from agencies, it seems) are only open 9-5 on weekdays. Given my post office box is at such a location (which happens to be the most convenient to home), it means when I do get a parcel delivered, it’s difficult to pick it up.
Then I discovered the secret door.
The secret door is really a service window. It’s present at some post offices near the boxes. There’s a small bell.
Thanks to a tipoff (not from the post office people, I might add), I discovered that outside business hours, you can ring the bell and if you’re lucky, someone will open the window and you can pick up parcels. In my post office’s case, they seem to be regularly there well before 9am, such as 8:15 this morning when I came past on my way to the station.
That saves a bunch of hassle.
