Cathedral Arcade
Almost hidden away in the bottom of The Nicholas Building is the Cathedral Arcade.
I can’t say I frequent the quaint shops in there — I just use it as a shortcut — but that ceiling is quite amazing.
Street name clusters
On my day off yesterday we sauntered down to Jaycar in Cheltenham for electronic gadget goodness. I noticed looking at the map beforehand that a bunch of the streets are named after newspapers: Argus St, Herald St, Age St, Times St. No Sun St that I could see.
There are plenty of clusters of street names about the place. Some of the others that spring to mind include:
Murrumbeena has streets named after Australian cities — Brisbane St, Perth St, Adelaide St, Sydney St, Melbourne St, Hobart Rd.
Elwood/St Kilda — lots of writers and poets: Tennyson St, Dickens St, Milton St, Chaucer St, Wordsworth St, Shakespeare Gv, Shelley St, Byron St, Mitford St, Southey St… and of course Poets Gv. There’s probably a few others around there that more cultured persons than me might recognise, too.
Elwood near the beach: Spray St, Tide St, Beach Av, Wave St, Foam St. Maybe Docker St as well?
Caulfield South, around the area once called Camden Town, formerly occupied by a camp site for timber workers — Olive St, Poplar St, Birch St, Cedar St, Sycamore St, Larch St, Almond St, Teak St, Beech St, Maple St. Would Jasmine and Filbert count too?
Perhaps this sort of thing saved time when large numbers of streets had to be named, and it might save agonising over who in a local community should get a street named after them and who shouldn’t.
Thankfully most of them are more imaginative than what they ended up with in Parkdale: First St, Second St, Third St, Fourth St, Fifth St, Sixth St, Seventh St, Eighth St. Then they threw caution into the wind and made the last couple in the group Bethell Av and Stewart Av.
Attn: Melbourne City Council
On Thursday I noticed a Melbourne City Council City Of Melbourne worker wandering around Collins Street with a street sign under his arm, apparently puzzled as to where to put it up.
Today I noticed it had gone up. In the wrong place.
There is no way through to Howey Place there. If you follow it you’ll walk straight into a Kookai store, with no way out the other side. (Though you might come out with one of those bags of theirs that large numbers of women seem to use as pseudo-handbags.)
I reckon the sign should be about 25 metres to the east, where you can cut through Collins 234 (The Building Formerly Known As The Sportsgirl Centre), which takes you to Howey Place.
Whoops.
I’ve put a feedback note into the Council via their online form. We’ll see how long it takes for them to fix it.
Update Saturday 27/6. Noticed yesterday afternoon the sign had been moved to the correct spot.
How to move people efficiently
The most efficient way of moving people is using their own two feet.
Here’s the statistical measure:
(Graph from Teufel, D, 1989, ‘Die Zukunft des Autoverkehrs’ (The future of car traffic), Umwelt und Prognose Institut, Heidelberg — and used more recently in PTUA’s Response to Australia’s Future Tax System Consultation Paper. Here’s another representation of similar information.)
…and here’s a practical example:
Don’t bother with the sound, it’s crap due to some noisy machinery nearby. Sorry, it’s a bit jerky. Gimme a break, it came straight off the phone onto Youtube. Need to figure out how to fix that.
Anyway, you get the idea, right? The pedestrian sequence here shifts an order of magnitude more people than go through in cars each hour.
What do you call these intersections that allow people to move in any direction? It’s not a zebra crossing, nor a puffin, pelican or toucan… ah, found it — apparently it’s known as a pedestrian scramble. Not as catchy without an animal name.
Anyway, I do wonder why there aren’t more of them. As far as I know this is the only one in Melbourne, but other locations would really benefit, with Bourke/Spencer Streets being a prime candidate.
Elsewhere, these might not work, but there’s a lot more than can be done to improve pedestrian amenity and get more people walking.
Collins Street, 9am
I was hoping to find a decent JPG copy of that modified John Brack Collins Street 5pm that was in The Age a few weeks ago — the one where everybody’s wearing iPods — but haven’t seen it online, and I’m not sure I can get a good scan from the paper copy I have.
No matter, here instead is Collins Street 9am (this morning).
The kid on the unicycle had brought it up with him from Parliament Station, which got me pondering if 2008’s bike ban applied to unicycles.
McGills to close
Along with the now-closed Technical Bookshop, McGills was a regular geek destination when I was growing up, somewhere I could browse and purchase material for the two geeky pursuits of mine: technology and transport.
I held onto my 8-bit BBC Micro for longer than most people, and it was never the most popular platform, so by the late-80s, few shops still stocked the magazines. But McGills kept stocking BBC Acorn User, and I kept buying it from them regularly. Even after the 8-bit computers faded away, I kept going back when passing to look through and occasionally buy Edge or some other geeky mag.
Less regularly I also looked at transport journals. At home I have an issue of Transit Australia, the journal of the Australian Electric Traction Association, highlighting the opening of the City Loop. I’m reasonably sure I bought that at McGills. And in the days before Amazon, McGills and Tech Books were the places to look for obscure titles.
Even these days, with competition in magazines from the excellent MagNation, McGills still has an almost unique collection of interstate and overseas newspapers (it’s where I went to get Virginia’s rant about me in print), and one can often find nicer greeting cards there than from the mainstream card shops and newsagents.
They have been at that spot in Elizabeth Street for many decades. There’s a shot in the original version of On The Beach where you can see them (sorry the grab I found is so fuzzy). But the business itself has apparently been running since 1860.
But McGills in Melbourne will close in July, due to rent issues.
And so another Melbourne icon disappears.
- 1958 picture: McGills at 406 Lonsdale St
Common decency
I was saddened to see the -600x400.jpg)
damage to the Flinders Street Station stained-glass windows on the news, from the protests by Indian students today, but I think it probably shows just how angry they are about the crimes against them. I’d be angry too.
Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe said there was a perception that Indian people were easy prey for criminals.
“I don’t think they are (racist crimes) in general . . . We think the majority of these things occur through opportunistic activity,” he said.
I think perhaps Walshe is using too narrow a definition of “racist”.
He seems to be of the view that unless the motivation for the crime is the hate of a race, it’s not racist.
He might well be right that it’s not an inherent hate of Indians that’s behind it. But if criminals are targeting members of a specific race as victims, because they are believed to be more vulnerable and more likely to be carrying valuables, is that not racism?
racism — 1. The belief that each race has distinct and intrinsic attributes.
– Wiktionary
Sounds like it to me.
In any case, enough pussy-footing about.
Until this stops, how about getting teams of TravelSafe staff and police on every single train and every single station after dark on the most vulnerable lines (Sydenham and Werribee), as well as on stations at any other trouble spots.
If specific people in our community are being targeted, common decency dictates that we have an obligation to ensure they are protected.
And if you prefer to take the economic rationalist view, the overseas education industry is worth $15.5 billion per year, and is our third-largest export industry, and given its reputation is at risk, that needs protecting too.
PS. Wednesday: Here’s another interesting viewpoint: Dr [Yadu] Singh, who heads a committee at the Indian consulate looking at Indian student issues, labelled the reporting “irresponsible”. … He feared the outrage could mask the genuine issues faced by Indian students, who Dr Singh said were over-represented in robbery statistics in Melbourne and also faced exploitation by employers.
Walkability and churches
I found the video below on the Walkscore.com blog. Amusing, and quite thought-provoking (if a little preachy).
On this topic, I’m not quite sure why, but I had noticed there’s an enormous variety of places of worship in my suburb. Seems whatever your faith, there’s probably a local place for you. Seriously, within about fifteen minutes’ walk of my house, I found:
Assemblies of God
Churches of Christ Conference
Helenic Greek Orthodox
St Paul’s (Catholic)
Reformed Presbyterian
Baptist
Korean
Salvation Army
Uniting Church
St Raphael
Churches of the Resurrected Life
Progressive Synagogue
Temple Society
St John’s (Anglican)
Not quite everything covered, and it’s probably not that unusual in the average well-established suburb, but quite a collection.
How is it in newer suburbs? I wonder if some religious denominations have difficulty in funding places of worship in those areas. Then again, perhaps it matches the dwindling numbers of worshipers.
Walkscore gives an imperfect evaluation of how walkable a suburb is. It tries to work out where the schools, shops, restaurants, and so on are. (It doesn’t count places of worship.)
Walkscore’s data is imperfect because the Google map data (particularly for non-US cities) isn’t all there (but it’s improving), but also because it doesn’t take into account access to high quality public transport, which for most people, radically alters how much they can leave the car at home. The latter is negated a bit, at least in most parts of Melbourne, by the fact that a lot of commercial development is based around railway stations, so walkable access to lots of shops often means walkable access to trains as well.
This is borne out in the results for the various places I’ve lived. Elsternwick got the highest score, 97%, but other places I’ve lived such as Hawthorn had excellent PT access, which in an ideal world would score higher than 71%. Ditto, but less so, for Glen Huntly, at 72%. The lowest score was my mum’s place, 55%, which is pretty much accurate, and my current place gets 77%.
It appears that Walkscore is catching on in Australia, with some real estate web sites now using it here too.
It’s long been known that walking access to shops and other community resources adds to the prices of houses, but I suspect people are starting to realise that walkable neighbourhoods really are more liveable, quite apart from the benefits of reduced fuel bills, environmental footprint, traffic congestion and physical fitness.
