The walk to the station is doing you good
Seems some people can’t see the trees for the forest.
A HIGH school has banned bicycles because it has no bike shed and it doesn’t want to encourage students who refuse to wear helmets.
Hume Central Secondary College’s policy has puzzled health and cycling groups amid growing concern about childhood obesity.
…
In the same newsletter, she [Principal Bronwyn Meek] complained about the dangerous congestion caused by too many cars around afternoon pick-up time.– Herald Sun: Hume Central Secondary College bans bikes
Meanwhile, a study by BusVic concluded that users of public transport get an average five times more walking time per day than those who use private transport.
- Public transport (all users): 41 mins
- Public transport, no private transport: 47 mins
- Private transport (cars, taxis, motorcycles), but no public transport: 8 mins
- Overall Melbourne average: 15 mins
And they looked at which areas of Melbourne have the lowest average minutes per day walking and cycling. Hardly surprising that it’s the areas which have the poorest public transport, where people are dependent on their cars for most trips.
And people wonder why there’s an obesity crisis.
I may not always enjoy the walk to the station, but I know it’s good for me, and because it’s built into my daily routine, it always happens.
I’m just lucky I live in an area where I’ve got that choice.
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9 comments
Doubling patronage (without peak hour pain)
Metro Trains boss Andrew Lezala remarked on Tuesday at the Parliamentary Select Committee on Train Services that he hoped to see rail patronage double by 2020.
“Our overall plan is to double patronage on the railway during the life of the franchise, which requires a major increase in the system’s capacity.”
I think there’s two important points to make here:
Not peak
It does not mean piling double the number of people into trains at peak hour, going into the CBD.
Travel into the CBD at peak hour is already dominated by public transport. It’s just the last hold-out rev-heads who fight their way through traffic to their employer-paid $16+ per day parking spots, as well as those whose lack of access to decent PT dictates that they drive. (They might change their minds if they get a train to Doncaster, for instance.)
(Source: Central City Users Survey 2008, page 62, weekday figures)
Peak hour is all about 9-5 workers and students. Melbourne City Council estimates show by 2020 these segments will grow from 431,000 per day to 520,000 — about 20% growth. (That’s entire City of Melbourne, not just the CBD.)
About half of all people come in by train now, so if every single one of those extra people was also coming by train in peak hour (unlikely), that’s at most a 40% increase in peak train passenger numbers — a long way from the 100% growth Metro is aiming for.
Other groups such as visitors will increase too, but they are less likely to be travelling in peak hour.
By far the biggest potential growth market (and Lezala realises this) is in off-peak travel: daytime, weekend, evening, and to destinations other than the city centre. Plenty of people are moving around Melbourne outside peak times, but because train (and other PT) services are pretty poor, most of them are moving by road — in fact some roads are now clogged seven days-a-week.
It’s all about providing more frequent services right across the week, which not only grows patronage at a time when there are heaps of spare trains and spare track capacity, it also helps spread the peak load.
And of course you also need frequent supporting bus/tram feeder services so people can get to the trains all day, given the car parks fill up by 8am, and so many people live beyond walking distance to stations, or are going to places not served by trains.
Timetabling in the peak
Secondly, he made the point that the timetables need a shake-up. One of the reasons peak hour trains are so packed (and conversely some have plenty of space) is we’re running a mid-90s train timetable with lots of bolt-ons added over the years. The extra services added have been slotted in wherever they could fit, and so the stopping patterns are all over the place, and the frequencies are uneven on many lines.
Take for example the times of AM peak hour trains leaving Carnegie, one of the busiest suburban stations on the Dandenong line:
…7:06, 7:10, 7:26, 7:30, 7:40, 7:43, 7:47, 7:57, 8:05, 8:11, 8:22, 8:27, 8:30…
They have different origin points, and serve different stations before getting to Carnegie, but in many cases they trail each other through the same stations.
I confess I haven’t checked these myself, but I’d lay odds that the 7:10 may be close to empty while the 7:26 will be packed, and the 7:40 is going to be much more crowded than the 7:47.
So you can see what he’s getting at when Lezala says the timetables need simplifying, with more regular stopping patterns and frequencies.
Expresses
And yes, I suspect some zone 1 stations will lose their odd occasional express services: at my station Bentleigh I’m betting the 8:06 and 8:17 Bent-Caul-S.Yarra expresses may well disappear.
But if it means more services overall, with more even frequencies (none of the 16 minute gaps you sometimes see now), I think that more than makes up for it.
Tags: Metro, public transport, trains
16 comments
Going backwards
This is not progress.
This is the corner of Flinders Lane and Spring Street, in the CBD. Should be a priority pedestrian area — it’s certainly flagged that way under the SmartRoads strategy.
But the zebra crossing that was here before has been removed and replaced with a traffic light. Which means that while before pedestrians had absolute priority, now they have to wait for the green man.
Worse, unlike every other intersection in the CBD, the green man doesn’t activate automatically. Neither does pressing the button when the parallel traffic has a green light get you a green man until the next sequence comes around.
So pedestrians are going to patiently wait ages to cross a tiny street, or more likely, they’re going to ignore the red man. Neither is a good outcome.
If there’s anywhere pedestrians should have priority, this is it. It’s clear that in this case, they don’t.
SmartRoads
For a while now, VicRoads has been working on a plan to allocate different priorities to different roads around Melbourne. Rather than the free-for-all we sometimes see now, some roads would be setup to emphasise pedestrian priority, some bus, some tram, and some would be “preferred traffic routes” and lesser “other traffic routes”.
I suspect it was inevitable that this would be launched under the title “SmartRoads“.
Here’s the glossy VicRoads video with Roads Minister Tim Pallas:
One of the positives is to encourage through-vehicle-traffic onto particular roads and off others, and with my sustainable transport hat on, hopefully it means better pedestrian facilities (eg crossings and low traffic speeds) and priority for public transport vehicles where it counts.
The detail about where the principal bike routes will be isn’t clear yet, and of course for cycling to really take off, these preferred routes need to be much more closely spaced than they are for cars.
The down side of the plan is that if you live on a road which is deemed to be a preferred traffic route, you’re probably going to see more traffic coming through. But then, it does seem to formalise trends which have been ongoing for some time now, so you may not notice a huge difference. It’s been obvious for some time now that the Nepean Highway and Punt Road are traffic sewers.
One of the big questions will be what happens when two priority routes intersect? Anybody who’s caught a tram that crosses Alexandra Parade, for instance, will know you can spend minutes waiting at the lights. Hopefully the view that the higher priority is the number of people moving through the intersection, not the number of vehicles, will be the prevailing one.
I saw a draft of this thing in 2008; things have changed a little bit since then. In my area (which is still under review), happily, there are no preferred traffic routes, though there are some “other traffic routes”.
I think this is a step forward; recognition that the car is no longer king, at least not on every single road, and that more efficient movement of people means giving priority to trams and buses, as well as pedestrians in some areas.
But the devil will be in the detail — and to take full advantage of it and really cut traffic congestion, the government needs to push much harder on upgrading the alternatives to car travel.
How will it affect your area? Download the maps from VicRoads.
Tags: driving, public transport, roads, traffic, Transport, VicRoads
12 comments
The quest for policies
Some of the letters in the papers (particularly the local paper) are obviously from cranks, but many are worthwhile, and this one in this week’s Moorabbin Glen Eira Leader just perfectly enunciates what I suspect a lot of people are thinking:
Libs need to state policies
IN RESPONSE to the letter by the Liberal candidate for Bentleigh, Elizabeth Miller (Opinion, February 2), I would like to point out the following.
As a public transport user I am well aware of the quality (or the lack of it) of our public transport system.
As an IT professional I have known all along the myki system would be a disaster.
However, what I do not know is who I should vote for in November. The Labor government was unable to improve public transport, or public health services, despite being in power for more than a decade.
The Liberals, on the other hand, haven’t proposed a single real alternative on any issue.
I haven’t even heard about a Liberal candidate for Bentleigh until now.
Stating the obvious and simply saying, “they are bad”, is really not enough.
What do you propose, Ms Miller?
How exactly is your party going to improve our transport? Will you have the courage to say that myki was a horrendous disaster and, yes, the money was wasted but we should just stop it now before we waste even more? What steps will you take to improve the health system? Will you look into the ridiculous stamp duties on property purchases before you announce some other grant?
What is the point of giving with one hand and taking with the other?
The list of issues is long and as a voter I would like to see some definitive answers.
Anna Heifetz,
Bentleigh East.
The opposition has stated one clear policy in the realm of public transport: that of security on every railway station, every night, which while expensive, would certainly go a long way towards alleviating fear of crime on the train network.
Other than that — well let’s hope that before too long they announce what else they’d do if elected, in that portfolio and all the others.
Tags: Liberals, local media, Moorabbin Glen Eira Leader, public transport, state politics, Transport
1 comment
Frequency vs no transfer
I was pondering the airport “shuttle” services.
Take the Frankston/Peninsula one. It picks up in Moorabbin about once an hour on weekdays. It gets to the airport 80-90 minutes later, charging $28 for an adult.
Across the street from the bus stop is Moorabbin station. The train runs every 15 minutes on weekdays, takes 27-34 minutes to Southern Cross, plus 5 minutes walking from the platform to the Skybus, and a maximum 10 minute wait for a bus, plus the Skybus trip itself (20 minutes), you’ll be at the airport in 52-69 minutes. Train fare $5.80, plus Skybus fare $16 = $21.80. And you don’t have to time your trip to fit in with an hourly service.
I know which one I’d prefer (not that the “shuttle” stops close enough to my place anyway, whereas the train does).
But no doubt some people would prefer to make the trip without a transfer halfway along, particularly if they have mobility issues and/or a lot of luggage.
By the way, given Marita waited about 20 minutes for a taxi from the airport at 10pm on Sunday night, it would seem there’s still a case for an airport train service.
- A kinda sorta similar post on the Human Transit blog
- My previous posts about similar issues on the railways: Frankston and Werribee
Tags: airport, buses
11 comments
Myki short term tickets
My aunt and cousin are visiting from interstate. Over dinner last night they were telling me that the most confusing thing about Metcard is the requirement to validate it straight after buying it at a railway station machine.
I saw a businessman (evidently an occasional user) make that mistake yesterday morning. He realised after walking past the validator that he had to go back.
It makes some sense to make Metcards like this, so they can be bought in advance. But over the 10+ years the system has been operating, it has proven to be one of its most confusing attributes for occasional train travellers.
When Myki is eventually fully running (sometime before the year 3000), if you don’t have a Myki card, you’ll buy Short Term tickets. Intended for occasional users including tourists, they will only be available for 2-hour or Daily fares — here’s what they look like:
On trams you’ll buy them from the machine and they’ll be already valid.
On buses you’ll buy them from the driver and they’ll already be valid.
At stations? Same as now with Metcards. You’ll have to touch them on to validate them/set the expiry time.
I think this is a mistake. I reckon that given they will be trying to encourage as many people as possible onto reusable Myki cards, they should make it so a Short Term ticket bought at a station is already valid for the day or 2-hour period.
They are not intended to be bought in advance or in bulk (that’s what Myki cards are for) and it would be less confusing for the occasional users who are most likely to be using them.
What do you think? Agree? Disagree?
(Footnote: It may well be that the same type of ticket will be used for once-off V/Line fares. I’ll admit it may be of some merit to make these valid only from the time/date of first touch-on, if bought in advance/over the counter, but that should be an exception to the rule.)
Tags: Metcard, Myki, public transport
24 comments
The fifteen minute network
During the school holidays, the kids and I will often leave the car at home head out to not just attractions in the CBD, but also to parts of the city we might not normally get to. Partly for the joy of exploration, but also partly because Jeremy is keen on hunting down secondhand video games, so we’re gradually ticking off visits to the various branches of Cash Converters around the place. (Though new discovery GameTrader is also worth exploring.)
We can get around fairly easily with PT on weekdays, as the network in my neck of the woods hangs together quite well for spontaneous travel because many of the main routes run every 15 minutes or better.
Even the government has figured out that this is appealing to people:
“This high-frequency bus service, with a bus arriving every 15 minutes during peak periods, is a viable alternative to the car.”
…
“In just a few months of service, we have already seen a 37 per cent increase in weekday usage along this route. That makes this SmartBus service the most popular bus route in Melbourne,” she [then-Minister Kosky] said. — Government press release, July 2009.
The problem is that the network of frequent services only serves some suburbs, and it really only applies on weekdays, which unfortunately is when white-collar workers like me are least likely to be wanting to go anywhere other than work.
Is every fifteen minutes perfect? Hell no. I think at least every ten minutes should be the target, but the key is that it applies all of the week, to all main routes, so you can get from anywhere to anywhere at (almost) anytime with a minimum of waiting.
So anyway, during the holidays just gone we headed to Northcote, where we found no good games, but I did get a couple of cheap CDs.
Another trip was to Frankston, where no games or CDs were found, but we had a nice lunch (this time avoiding the “I’m amazed they don’t get sued” Hungry Zak’s which we’d tried the previous time… a bit horrible). And as a bonus, within minutes of arriving I saw a guy try and swipe a can of drink from a shop, only to be chased and caught by the shopkeeper — classy, Frankston, classy.
On these and other recent excursions, we didn’t have to wait more than a few minutes to hop on trains, trams and buses. When it all works, it’s a very relaxing way to get around, and I get to talk to the kids way more than when I’m concentrating on the road. (Not to mention a quick trip down to Frankston for $2.02 full fare/$1.01 concession using a Myki or 10×2 hour Metcard is a flippin’ bargain.)
I’m more inclined to use PT for these kinds of trips for a number of reasons, but one I consider very important is that I’m getting my kids acclimatised to the world around them. I’m making sure they know how to get themselves out and about (not just on PT, but as a pedestrian too) so that at the point they’re old enough to (which isn’t far off), they can do it with ease. You just don’t learn any street smarts being chauffered around.
