Watch the news tonight.

Update lunchtime:

Press release: PTUA calls on politicians not to duck public transport issues.

Pic from the field:

Update Wednesday morning:

Despite petrol at record prices and traffic congestion, most people still don’t use public transport. Its share of the market sits stagnant at about 8% or so.

Why? Because most people will only choose PT over driving when it’s convenient: when it goes where you want to go, and when it’s frequent. How frequent is Melbourne’s PT? Here are the figures for the number of routes running every 15 minutes or better:

Say, for example, you want to go out at the weekend, and you don’t want to have to wait around too long, and you don’t want to check a timetable and time your trip to match the services. Well you’d better hope your trip is along one of the few routes that are running frequently:

All those spaces beyond the marked spots on the map are filled with suburbs: houses, shops, people. But no PT frequent enough to be competitive with driving.

This is why most people drive everywhere. It’s no wonder the roads are so congested… even on weekends.

See all the figures and maps.

Took the day off today, but was too busy to blog. Back tomorrow hopefully.

PS. Thursday morning: Here’s why.

Up for a little light reading on why public transport is important, and what needs to be done to make it better? The government is coming out with its Transport & Liveability Statement next week, but in the mean time, the PTUA’s book from 2002 “It’s Time To Move” is now available for download as a PDF.

After all the pressure on the government recently, it’ll be interesting to see how far the TLS goes to fix the problems, or at least resolve the roads vs PT spending imbalance.

PS. A random Melbourne PT fact that occasionally comes up in conversation, to which people respond with surprise, so just thought I’d mention it here: on the top of the fare gates at city railway stations are yellow lights. These flash when concession ticketholders go through, so any inspectors present know which people to ask for concession cards.

The next time you hear the government making excuses as to why they can’t extend train and tram lines, and how they have to provide a “balance” between freeway and public transport expansion, keep this in mind:

(Current and past ten years dollars spent on freeway expansion: $7.2 billion. Rail/tram network expansion: $225 milion. Full figures here.)

Six days to go until the Commonwealth Games…

(Based on the Rexona advert. Pic from CPT.)

I (with my PTUA hat on) got an invitation to the swimming, plus a breakfast function hosted by John Thwaites. We had a chat about it and decided that given it wasn’t a lobbying opportunity, it wasn’t appropriate for an organisation that regularly criticises the government to accept the tickets.

Besides — 7:45am on a Saturday? You gotta be kidding. That’s serious sleeping-in time. So I turned it down.

By the way, regular train users: given how bad Connex was in February, if you have a monthly or longer ticket, send it in for compensation. A free Daily ticket isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing.

I’ve done a lot of TV interviews on location, but never in a studio, until today. Community TV station Channel 31 did an interview for tonight’s “C News Focus” story on public transport. The interviewer guy asked a couple of curly questions, so hopefully I acquitted myself well. It airs at 10:15pm.

A few observations:

If I look uncomfortable, it’s because they asked me to put the microphone lead inside my shirt.

The interview went for 6 minutes, but they were intending it to go for 5. So it may get edited down a bit.

They put some makeup on me, but they didn’t try and hide the pimple below my mouth. I’m hoping it was out of shot most of the time.

A lot of people get pretty bad channel 31 reception. Amusingly, so does their office, with big TVs in the foyer tuned to their channel appearing very fuzzy.

PS. 11pm. Not too bad. Having watched it, the only glaring slip-up I noted is that the host made a comment about the PT system costing $1.8 billion per year, and I didn’t pick him up on it (because I didn’t have the correct figure in mind at the time). This is not the case — it’s about $500m a year. It should be cheaper (it was only about $374m a year in the 90s) but it certainly isn’t $1.8b. The higher figure appears to come from an opinion piece by a road lobbyist in The Age last week, which inflated the numbers.