My street is a leafy side-street, well away from industrial land. We see the supermarket trucks rolling through our suburb, but other than that, few big freight vehicles are seen. In fact a bigger volume of freight probably goes through Bentleigh on the steel trains from Hastings than on trucks on the streets.

Not so for residents of the western suburbs, particularly the inner-west. Even in streets that are residential (and have always been so), the juggernauts go through constantly.

So it’s easy to understand why the Eddington report’s Truck Action Plan was greeted with acclaim. It says they’ll get trucks off residential streets. Sounds great, doesn’t it.

Well, it is, and it isn’t. The off-ramp on the Westgate to give trucks access into the port without going down Francis Street, for instance, sounds extremely logical. Shame an on-ramp can’t be provided too, but evidently the gradients would be too steep.

But another part of the plan involves road widening along Ashley Street and Ballarat Road, and flagging that as a truck route in and out of the port.

Some of Ashley Street is industrial, and you can see along there that VicRoads have obviously been planning this for a while. Much of the street has plenty of space for widening.

But Ballarat Road though is a completely different story. Most of it is residential. Throw in some churches, shops, a couple of new apartment blocks, and heritage elm trees… it’s going to get messy. Not that VicRoads hasn’t been planning ahead here too — around Droop and Gordon Sts, it’s very apparent that they’ve already bought a number of properties, ripe for flattening (if they haven’t been already).

(pic: whereis.com)

Cunningly, VicRoads say they’re not currently buying land for this. At least, not in response to the Eddington report. Of course not! They can’t respond to the Eddington report until the government says they’ll go ahead with that part of it. Besides, some of it is already bought!

So anyway, not all of the Truck Action Plan sounds so good anymore. It’d be great to get trucks out of residential areas, but not so much use moving them to other residential areas. All credit to Yarraville-based MTAG, who seem to recognise this.

We all know widening the road will lead to more traffic. Not just truck traffic, traffic in general. (OK, maybe we don’t all know this. The Premier seems to think motorways are actually environmentally friendly!)

How about spending some money on getting more freight onto rail, instead? Y’know, like, in line with the government’s goal of 30% of port freight on rail by 2010. (Currently: 15%, and dropping!) Most freight heading out of Melbourne would be more efficiently sent by rail. Even local Melbourne freight would benefit if trains took it from the port to localised freight hubs (as has been proposed in some circles) in industrial areas like Dandenong, Altona and Somerton.

And if in the longer term the main port is moved to Hastings, won’t most of the trucks go with it?

I love the concept of commuter cycling. While my trip to work is a little too far, I love the idea of riding to places like my sister’s house or my mum’s house or my dad’s place (all just a few km away) on the bike.

I love the idea of taking the whole family out for a ride, and as oil prices continue to climb, seeing lots of other people taking up cycling too. If it happens in a big way, the roads could be less busy, the air less polluted, and people would be fitter.

And then I see reports like this: some moron in a car deciding he doesn’t like being delayed by a group of cyclists, deliberately intimidating them, and then causing an accident before driving off.

There’s just no getting around the fact that you’re vulnerable on a bike. And one dickhead who doesn’t like the look of you can wipe you out in a second.

Call me a wimp if you like, but while I do enjoy recreational cycling, I continue to prefer — most of the time — walking, PT and, when I have to, driving.

Source: Australian Transport Safety Bureau. Figures also included pedestrian fatalities, but I figure that’s skewed as pedestrian trips are almost always much shorter than those by mechanical transport. Be nice to find some more up-to-date Australian figures, too — these are from the 80s. My Googling didn’t find anything better.

Update 8am Friday: James makes a good point — wouldn’t per travelling hour be a fairer comparison? Yep, here it is. Note cycling is about as safe as car driving in these terms.

Perhaps sometimes it’s a disadvantage knowing too much about all the transport options. When mild interruptions occur, it might make one more inclined to take the alternatives, even when ultimately it doesn’t really save any time.

Take, for example, Tuesday morning’s commute.

It started with two SMSs. The 8:36 and the 8:52 from Glenhuntly to the city, both cancelled. Two in a row means the following couple, the 9:01 and 9:13, would be crowded. (In theory they might stop some expresses to fill the gaps, but this doesn’t always happen).

So I decided after the school run to drive to Carnegie instead. Good ol’ dependable Dandenong line (!).

8:45am. Roadworks behind the library, so had to go a slightly different way, and I noticed where I sometimes used to park is now 2 hour parking, so I ended up a bit further from the station than planned. But no bother.

Walk to the station and… the host lady is saying there’s a problem. A car collided with a train on the crossing at Murrumbeena. And that was compounding an earlier delay with a sick passenger. “It’ll be at least half an hour. I’m really sorry”, she said. And while once a disgruntled passenger might have shot the messenger and cursed her and the rest of Connex and the powers that be, instead I heard one tell her “it’s okay, it’s not your fault.” Maybe instead they were silently cursing the car driver involved.

I didn’t feel like traipsing back to my car, so I walked to the nearby 900 bus stop, to catch it to Caulfield.

8:52am. My eyes narrowed as I got to the stop. The automated Smartbus sign claimed that the 8:57 and the 9:12 buses were both expected in 30 minutes. These signs aren’t known for their accuracy, but given the number of people already waiting, I pondered for a minute what I should do next. After a minute or two the sign was still claiming 30 minutes.

I decided to keep walking. It’s not that far to Caulfield anyway, and I was betting that because of the train disruptions, causing localised traffic problems around crossings, as well as heavy passenger loads, the buses might indeed be 30 minutes away, and might be so crowded when they arrived that nobody could board.

Someday someone in authority will dictate that all urban roads need to have proper footpaths. Until then, there are spots like on Dandenong Road between Carnegie and Caulfield where it’s just grass on one side. And they call this the 21st century. But no matter — what was more of a concern was that as I walked, I began to see city-bound trains passing me. D’oh! I should have waited at Carnegie.

9:05am. It took less than 15 minutes to get to Caulfield. Up on platform 3, a stopper was arriving. Packed. I could see the sign on platform 1, claiming an express was two minutes away, so I jogged down the ramp to switch platforms. And because the day had been going so well, you can guess what happened next, right? Yep. Train Controller Murphy switched the express from platform 1 to platform 3. Seriously, this kind of stuff is like nothing else for getting people onto the roads.

A bunch of us jogged back to platform 3, and got onto the train, which was, at least, express, overtaking the earlier packed stopped along the way.

From there it was smooth sailing. I decided not to change onto a Flinders St direct train — on days like this it’s better to stick with the one you’re on, which is confirmed to be actually getting somewhere. Was at Parliament by about 9:30, just a walk down the hill to work.

I can’t help thinking it would have all been easier if I’d just done the usual plan and gone to my usual station in the first place. But hey, at least I got some extra exercise.

And remember: we’ve only still got level crossings like the Murrumbeena because the programme to get rid of them all was cancelled in the 70s to pay for freeways instead.

It was easy to find a taxi this morning in the city, but more difficult to find a driver — or at least one who would take you anywhere.

Taxi drivers were protesting about driver safety, blocking the intersection of Flinders and Swanston Streets. Quite a few empty cabs were parked nearby.

Despite claims of massive traffic disruption, most people seemed to be working around it okay. The trams have a fairly-well established plan for this kind of thing. Buses too would have been diverted. The trains weren’t affected — in fact it made it easier to get out of the station and across the street.

Cars? Who cares. Only a minority of people drive into the city anyway, and usually it’s cars blocking other cars. Not that that stopped the radio traffic people from moaning about it.

Fair enough that the cabbies should protest. Everyone has a right to feel safe at work. Tram drivers have metal cages to lock them away. So do many bus drivers. The transparent protective screens proposed (and already used in Sydney and other cities) seem a good idea. And if my memory serves me correctly, the authorities have been talking about this for a decade or more.

In the end it seems the government has seen sense, with safety screens to be fitted, and other measures to be taken. By 2pm the blockade was disbanding. When I went past at 2:30, all the leaflets had been picked up, and it was like it had never happened.

(If you’re wondering, the PTUA does not normally get involved in taxi-related issues.)

The Age yesterday ran a report on the PTUA’s submission to the Garnaut inquiry on climate change, with the headline being “Ban new freeways: transport group” — above another rather good article about cars not being on average any more efficient than 40 years ago.

It didn’t take long for the rev heads to spot the report, and as you might expect, they launched (within their own little forum) a tirade of abuse: everything from tree hugging, whale saving, dread locked morons to mungbean chewers and tree huggers. It was pretty clear none of them had read the Age article or the original press release, let alone the study itself.

Green groups (real greenies, that is, not just us sustainable transport advocates) also spotted the Age report, and a version of the story got a run in the West Australian. And there was a chat between yours truly and John Barron this morning on ABC News Radio. (MP3, 9Mb, 4 min 53 sec)

Perhaps to some people it sounds counter-intuitive: that building motorways doesn’t solve traffic congestion, but makes it worse. But not if you think about it. When each new road opens, people consider their travel options, and if it’s markedly easier to drive, many of them do. They drive longer, and in greater numbers, because they can, and the new road fills up. The end result is we have more space dedicated to roads, more cars on the road for longer, and more congestion and pollution.

Maybe we should turn it around: What proof is there that building motorways does help congestion? The quick answer is that there’s nowhere in the world (except perhaps Houston, where they spend billions on it every year, and oh, look at their greenhouse emissions!) where this has turned out to be the case.

The French have worked all this out, and last October President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged to stop building motorways and put the money into railways instead, to improve freight and passenger rail.

Anyway, this is only a small part of the report. What the rest of it is pointing out is that while transport isn’t the majority of greenhouse emissions, it is growing fast (up 30% in the last 15 years) and as part of an overall push to reduce emissions, action needs to be taken on transport. Hybrid cars will only help to a certain extent (and actually rely on stop-start congestion to be efficient), oil is running out, and other fuels are unproven (with biofuels in particular causing emissions during production, and resulting in food shortages).

Good to have sparked some debate about it, anyway.

Lines? What lines?

(Outside Officeworks, Highett)

No time to park properly! Emergency stove purchase!

(Outside Clive Peeters, Braybrook)

I know 774’s traffic and train updates are done directly in the studio (I saw it happen when I was in there the other week). Channel 10’s are done from a helicopter — you get to see the lady in it as she talks.

What about the other radio stations? Many of them make it sound like someone’s on a mobile phone somewhere, but do they really go to the expense of having someone out there in a chopper (which would only let them see a portion of the traffic), or is it just someone on a phone from an office somewhere reading off the VicRoads TrafficInfo web site?

1. Contrary to this report in the Geelong Advertiser, the term “bustitution” has been around for years. I don’t know who first coined it.

A number of regular services to and from Geelong have been replaced by coaches through April, giving rise to a new term being coined by the Public Transport Users’ Association - “bustitution”.

Association Geelong secretary Paul Westcott said yesterday that while some delays and faults were understandable, one of the most frustrating things for passengers was a lack of communication.

Paul says the reporter hadn’t heard the expression before, and was quite taken by it.

2. When you’re creating a little museum quiz (as seen on billboards at stations at the moment), you should at least try and get the multiple choice answers right.

I don’t pretend to know everything about Melbourne, but thanks in part to a book I’ve had since I was a junior gunzel, I do know that Melbourne’s first electric trains ran in 1919, starting with Sandringham to Essendon:

As the Sandringham line was a very busy one during the early years of the [20th] century, it was chosen along with the Essendon/Broadmeadows line, with which it was through-worked, as the first line to be electrified. It was opened for electric traction as from 28 May 1919. — The Electric Railways of Victoria, Dornan/Henderson, 1979.