Anti-pigeon defences
And now for something completely different: anti-pigeon defences.
Pigeons can get everywhere, making nests, leaving droppings. These ones seem very interested in the next trains from Caulfield.
It’s probably gone mostly unnoticed, but over the past few years, various methods to prevent them roosting have become commonplace.
In the case of Caulfield station, they’ve put in a lot of netting that cordons off parts of the platform roof areas, including the tops of the signs. (I haven’t checked if they’ve fitted the sign above, which is in the subway.)
Solar-powered road signs now often have spiky bits on them, as do increasing numbers of shop signs, including big ones like this. (I think it looks a little odd up close.)
On this building in Centre Road, Bentleigh, there are fake owls around the top. I’m not sure how effective they are.
But despite these methods, sometimes the pigeons still win.
Tags: Bentleigh, birds, buildings, Caulfield, Metro trains, pigeons, Woolworths
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Coin deposit reduces dumped shopping trolleys – why don’t they all do it?
Since Woolworths introduced gold coin deposits for trolleys at Bentleigh, you almost never see their trolleys abandoned in the streets. The same can’t be said for Coles Bentleigh, who appear to have some trolleys requiring a coin, and some not — I don’t understand the logic of this. On a walk last night, we passed three (non-deposit) Coles trolleys in quick succession on a single block of Jasper Road.
It seems pretty clear that (like the drink container deposits used in some states), coin deposits reduce the problem. I wonder why Coles don’t go ahead and implement it fully, especially in suburbs like Bentleigh where their major competitor already uses it.
Abandoned trolleys can be reported online for Wesfarmers/Coles group chains (Officeworks, K-Mart, Bunnings etc) here or for most other chains (Woolworths/Safeway, Target, some IGA) here.
Tags: Coles, supermarkets, Woolworths
15 comments
How much ground level parking is there in Melbourne’s CBD?
What’s the ultimate waste of space in a city centre? Ground level, single level parking.
Along with the access space required to get cars in and out, it’s wasted space because apart from perhaps $20-30 per day in revenue, it isn’t used for anything.
This post from Gordon Price compares a few cities — the contrast between Houston and Toronto is particularly stark. (There are more in this discussion thread at Skyscraperpage.com.)
How would Melbourne stack up? I’ve had a go at it, by plotting the red onto a Nearmap image, and scouring Nearmap at high resolution, then checking Google Streetview to see if a carpark was ground level parking, or a multi-storey (which at least piles cars on top of each other, meaning more efficient use of the land — even if it is still parking and is fugly) or parking on top of buildings.
I’ve only done within the Hoddle Grid. Have I missed any, or made any errors? Leave a comment.
You’d have to say that in summary, there’s not much. The tiny carpark near Lonsdale/Elizabeth Streets that I used to watch from on-high has vanished, and is being developed.
The parking at the back of The Age building (Lonsdale Street, behind Spencer Street) will, I’m told, vanish when the whole property is re-developed in the nearish future. The back of The Old Mint building (Latrobe/William Streets) is the other prominent area.
There’s a small amount of parking in front of the William Angliss Institute building. This is a perfect example of why it’s such a waste of space. Ten cars accommodated, taking up about half the open/garden space in front of the building.
Apart from that, the remaining surface parking is mostly in the grounds of churches — St Paul’s, St Francis, Wesley Uniting. (Scots Church and others have multi-level parking.)
And of course… there’s street parking, particularly along the non-tram streets such as Lonsdale, Russell and Exhibition.
See, in a city centre that has around half-a-million people a day visiting it, you can’t afford to have lots of people bring their cars. If you try and find space to leave hundreds of thousands of vehicles, that doesn’t work — not to mention the traffic congestion it creates. Bringing them in by more efficient means (particularly mass transit) is the only way it can work.
PS. Thanks for suggestions. The map has been slightly modified.
At Brighton beach last night
We were trying to escape the heat, which really wasn’t successful — apart from right next to the water, it was as warm by the beach as it was at home. (For you out of towners, it reached about 40 degrees yesterday, with a low of 24 overnight.)
But we did meet this critter. Very cute.
Tags: Brighton beach, seals, weather
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How many people watched the fireworks in different cities?
Happy new year. This was the view last night from Footscray, looking along the Maribyrnong towards the City. By the time they’d finished, there was something of a smoke haze. (From where we were, we couldn’t see the spire fire.)
I was curious how many people turn out to watch fireworks for New Year’s Eve in different cities around the world. Here’s some figures I found looking around on Google News, and watching SBS News.
(I’ve tried to stick to post-event figures, not expected attendances, and have only used cities where an actual hard estimate was given, not a vague one like “hundreds of thousands”. Got a cite for other figures? Let me know.)
Obviously in the northern hemisphere it’s winter, and cold weather would put people off. But watching the footage and reading the articles, it’s clear that these events are major drawcards for tourists as well as locals.
In many cities NYE is obviously a major event — including in Melbourne — and takes a lot of organising of fireworks, street closures, emergency services and transport.
It’s funny to think that just twenty years ago, there was no official marking of New Year’s Eve in Melbourne. I remember going into the city for the countdown in about 1993, waiting for midnight (no fireworks that I recall) then hurriedly catching the last tram home at about 12:05am.
1999 into 2000 was the first time I recall it being a major event, with all-night trams and trains (for the first time?). Then it seemed to get some momentum in terms of crowd numbers, with more and more each year, but the organisation fell short, with no all-night transport except Nightrider until the now infamous 2003-04 debacle.
Since then things have been a lot more organised, and as the city has grown, people have also responded to the event, with about double the crowd last night compared to 2003-04.
Someone made some comments the other day about New Year’s Eve bringing people together, a shared experience that strangers can enjoy together. That might be misty-eyed, but I like the sentiments. Certainly I wished some strangers a happy new year last night.
Tags: New Year's Eve
6 comments
The new Swanston Street superstops – do they work?
Last week the first of the new Swanston Street tram superstops opened. On Monday I went down at lunchtime to have a look, and came across Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, City of Melbourne planner Rob Adams, and Yarra Trams’ Michel Masson all down there having a look, and talking to the media about it.
Robert Doyle fronts the media — note the man incorrectly crossing the tracks behind the tram
It’s good to see this space finally being rid of cars, and the priority given to the main users of Swanston Street — pedestrians, tram passengers, and cyclists. And of course it’s great to get some more accessible tram stops in the CBD — the first for Swanston Street that are actually within the Hoddle Grid.
During the first couple of weeks, they’ve got people dressed as lifeguards and umpires etc using some humour to direct people to the right spots.
This is important because the space needs to deal with tram passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists. Thankfully motorists are (theoretically) out of the equation, though at one stage I observed a motorcyclist unwittingly ride in.
The real problems here are that (a) they’re a unique design — in fact one keen observer reckons they’re unique in the world –and (b) they’re not intuitive.
For pedestrians, it’s simply not obvious that the space where you board the trams is not where you should walk along. For cyclists it’s a little clearer where they should be, and from what I saw, they seemed to realise they needed to stop and give way to passengers getting on and off trams.
I haven’t been there at the relevant times, but I’m particularly curious to see what happens when large numbers of tram users getting on and off (such as during the University peaks) intersect with large numbers of cyclists.
Even after adding small “bicycle” markings onto the bike lane, pedestrians and passengers seem confused. Maybe they’ll learn, but it will take some getting used to — something acknowledged by Masson and Doyle (and Adams I assume). I’d expect some further tweaking, but I doubt there’ll be any major re-design any time soon.
Like anything else, it requires the critical mass of people to know how to use them, and then (most) visitors will hopefully just follow everybody else. Whether this will happen, only time will tell.
And in the mean time, work will begin on the next two stops, further south.
A steam train passes
This afternoon I heard steam train whistles, and after some digging, discovered it was R-class R707 headed down to Frankston, and that it would be coming back a little later.
Happy to take a break from the sorting out of paperwork that I’d been doing, I took a punt at the time it would pass back through Bentleigh, and headed down to find a vantage point, settling on a spot near Patterson station.
The train seemed to be coasting through here; it’s probably downhill from the Patterson Road bridge to the Brewer Road underpass.
You’ll note the people on the bridge; they were some of the (other?) trainspotters in attendance nearby.
Steam trains regularly run around Melbourne and Victoria, generally organised by Steamrail and 707 Operations.
The Age’s Liveability survey – and where it fell down on transport (Service quality matters more than infrastructure)
The Age last Friday released its liveability survey of Melbourne suburbs. Top five were pretty predictable: South Yarra, East Melbourne, Armadale, Hawthorn East, and Toorak.
From what I can tell, it’s an update to a survey done in 2005, using the same methodology. This time however they didn’t put out the full breakdown of figures, which is a shame.
I don’t have major arguments with the overall list; I suspect most of the critera are reasonable. Of course, people obviously need to take into account their own preferences and what they consider to be “liveability”. (For me it’s very much about walkability of a neighbourhood; easy non-car access to amenities, which has flow-on effects in less traffic, more less concrete jungle, and easier interactions with neighbours and other locals, and also implies some level of usable PT.)
The problem with the scoring
But I need to point out that the survey’s transport scores are not perfect.
You can see this from the description of Toorak, which says that virtually no bus services helped to drag down the score. As the original 2005 articles noted: The study awards a score between 0 and 5 for proximity to train, tram and bus services — giving a total score out of 15.
The problem with this type of scoring is that a suburb with lots of bus stops served by infrequent buses, but no trams, would score equally to a suburb with lots of tram stops served by frequent trams, but no buses.
The 2005 figures for instance show Toorak scored 5 on trains, 4 on trams, 1 on buses = 10 for transport. Huntingdale scored 5 on trains, 0 on trams, and 5 on buses = 10. Essendon North scored 1 for trains, 4 for trams, 5 for buses = 10. But in reality these suburbs have quite different levels of usable public transport, especially for non-CBD trips.
Infrastructure vs services
Proximity to stops does not necessarily mean usable services.
In Melbourne, most buses operate nowhere near as frequently as trams, nor do they come close in operating hours. Many bus routes operate only half-hourly on weekdays, hourly on weekends and evenings. Typical tram routes operate to 3-4 times this frequency.
In some extreme cases, a bus route may only operate once a day. Did The Age’s survey give Hawthorn points for this bus stop?
(The answer, as it happens, is no, at least in 2005. Perhaps that route didn’t operate to Hawthorn back then.)
Infrequent buses make services virtually useless for most people, and while individuals may happen to be able to use the service because it coincides with a trip they need to make, at a time they need to make it (or they have no choice, because they can’t/don’t drive), those infrequent services can’t be thought of as enhancing the liveability of a suburb.
In contrast, frequent buses (such as the services Smartbus routes offer, at least on weekdays) are useful to a lot of people, do get plenty of patronage, and do enhance mobility and liveability in a suburb.
As far as the survey goes, this is one of those cases where in public transport, they’ve thought only about the infrastructure, not the quality of service. Service quality was touched-upon in some of the accompanying articles to the 2005 survey:
At weekends they catch trams to the city for shopping or to hang out in restaurants and bars. Even on the weekends there’s no need to check the timetable. “You know there will be a service every 10 minutes or so,” she says. “I just assume that it will be there for me.” — Getting around never a problem
A better measure
A better measure for a survey like this would be something that tried to quantify not just the proximity to stops, but also the quality of the service in terms of departures per day or week, as well as the variety of destinations served, so as to give an indication of how usable the local public transport is — and preferably in a mode-agnostic manner (though many would argue that trams and trains are more desirable than buses).
Difficult to do, of course, given timetable data is not publicly available. Shame.
(By the way, The Age’s 2011 interactive map isn’t up to much. You can barely tell which area is which, thanks to almost no labels.)
