Where is that damn train?

Flinders Street Station, 1920s (or maybe 30s?)

(From the Public Record Office Victoria)

Flinders Street Station, 2007

Yeah the angles don’t match, but I reckon it’s not bad given that I took the new picture last year, before seeing the older one.

AND it’s exactly the same platforms in shot. AND in both there’s a train on platform 9.

(As far as I can tell, the old picture, being from before 1955, is out of copyright. Anybody in the know — and a few who have that knowledge lurk here, I know it — care to confirm or deny that, before I get into trouble?)

A Herald Sun article last week quoted figures showing that ditching cars and switching to PT could save you between $4,000 and $10,000 per year. (Seriously, it’s not just fuel — if you take into account finance, rego, insurance and repairs, it adds up fast.)

Problem is that somewhere in the sausage factory that is the media’s editing process, the reason for the PTUA pointing this out was lost. It’s no use telling people to ditch their cars if all they have is crap PT. It’s up to governments to provide a viable alternative, and as new figures showing Sunday bus patronage up 44% proves, when the PT option is there, people actually use it.

Separately, a new study called Unsettling Suburbia notes the outer suburbs are suffering through car dependence.

So what does it take to get lots of people willingly out of their cars? There’s a bunch of things (which even have a nifty acronym: SCARCE — standing for Safety, Comfort, Accessibility, Reliability, Cost and Efficiency), but the number one is waiting times. If the waiting time is too long (and at present it’s often more than the total travel time by car), then people will keep driving.

And it’s not just a matter of providing frequent services into the CBD and inner-suburbs, during peak hours. As the Unsettling Suburbia report notes, that’s already pretty much in place, and PT dominates that market. The problem is all the other trips — around the burbs, and outside peak hours. Little wonder that with only around 15% of Melbourne’s population going into the CBD on a typical working day, cars dominate for other trips.

No, what we need is a whole network of frequent services, running seven days a week, and into the evening, so you can travel from anywhere to anywhere, at most times of day, without having to wait. In other words, genuinely competitive with car travel.

And that’s what’s behind the call for services “every 10 minutes to everywhere” — trams, trains, and main road buses running every 10 minutes, right across Melbourne.

(If the animation’s already stopped, Right Click and select Play to play it again.)

Every 10 minutes is often enough that you’ll never wait very long, even without checking timetables.

Every 10 minutes is often enough that even if you walk to the stop and just miss the bus/tram/train, another one will pick you up in less time than it takes to go back get your car.

Every 10 minutes means operators don’t have to work hard at trying to co-ordinate good connections between services, because you’ll never wait very long anyway, no matter where you’re travelling.

And interestingly, every 10 minutes is about how many buses you need to carry 20% of the passenger load of the typical suburban 2-lane arterial road. In other words, to reach the government’s own 20% target, they need to run services every 10 minutes!

It’s also not as expensive as it might sound, because most of the rail/tram infrastructure and fleets are in place. The major cost is extra buses, and more drivers… and even that is small compared to the 18+ billion dollars worth of major transport projects proposed by the Eddington report.

It’s the type of thing needed to get people to happily reduce the number of cars in their household, and not suffer for it. On the contrary, everyone would benefit economically, there’d be reduced traffic congestion, and a big cut in transport-related emissions.

• Campaign web site: Every 10 Minutes to Everywhere.

In an ideal world, you would hope that when a new estate is settled, they’d provide good quality public transport into it from day one, so that people don’t move in and establish car-oriented travel patterns (eg buy one car per adult, and from thence-forth drive everywhere).

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. The Aurora Estate (north of Epping), supposedly the model of green suburbs, was meant to get a train line, but hasn’t yet. Amusingly VicUrban claimed this was no problem: “Aligned with the 2030 planning principles, Aurora has had a bus service since inception”.

Yeeees. That bus service is the 575. It runs hourly, even in peak hours. It stops at 7:30pm. On Saturdays it stops at lunchtime. On Sundays it doesn’t run at all.

Hint: that is nowhere near good enough to encourage people to not drive.

…

Over in Edgewater, which thanks to dog walks with Marita I’ve seen develop from a flat pile of dirt (as it still mostly appears in Google Maps’ satellite pictures) to an almost fully-occupied estate, apart from the nearby 472, they’ve also just got the 409 bus. Thankfully it’s a tad better than what the good people of Aurora got: it actually runs 7-days-a-week until after 9pm.

But it’s still lacking, both in service quality and launch publicity.

1. It only runs every 40 minutes. Even in peak hour. Not great.

2. They put the new bus stop signs in, but nobody got the council to allocate bus zones for the bus stops, so they’d be guaranteed somewhere to stop.

3. The new 409 and the existing 472 both go from Footscray via the local school then past the Edgewater cricket club. But they take different routes to get there, and they appear to depart from different stops at/near Footscray station. And ideally they’d be timed to alternate along the common part of the route to cut waiting times.

4. Evidently they didn’t tell anybody in Edgewater about the new route. Instead of doing a letter-box drop “Hey! You’ve got a new bus service! Here’s the timetable, and a couple of complimentary tickets so you can try it out!” or a big advert in the local paper, they’ve relied on word-of-mouth. And we all know how well that works.

None of this is very hard to do. Some of it costs real money, that’s true. But it can turn something that’s merely ordinary into something genuinely worthwhile and beneficial.

…

On the bright side, at least the new Edgewater bus hasn’t been met with the outright hostility the residents of Yarraville and Altona have been dishing out. Some of them, having ignored the community consultation phase, were outraged to have buses going down their streets, and have set up blockades! (Someone should tell them that public transport access adds value to their properties… though that’s specifically trams and buses trains… a topic for another post.)

In the Altona case, maybe those protesting should spare a thought for the residents of the local retirement village, now disappointed to find the new bus service has been canned. And maybe they should hope and pray that they are never dependent on public transport.

Despite the cold, there’s a surprising number of people on the Sunday morning 9:58 to Frankston.

Two uniformed sailors heading perhaps to the naval base at Crib Point after a night out (this train connects with the Stony Point train);

a lady who insists on standing all the way to McKinnon, papers in her hand, perhaps revision notes, she reads them intently;

a middle-aged couple, he with an iPod, her with a book, to occupy them;

a man with a cold and a big bottle of orange juice;

a girl in a plaid warm woollen coat and dyed red hair;

and me, among others.

Spot the difference…

The problem here is all this text is replicated in the Eddington report without attribution or credit.

I reckon if a journo or a student tried that on, they’d rightfully get rapped over the knuckles.

(Apparently originally noted in Crikey yesterday; brought to my attention this morning.)

PS. Channel 10 graphics from tonight’s 5pm news:

PPS. Wednesday’s Age.

The Melbourne Press Club have put up the MP3 recordings of last month’s “Public Transport: Ticket to Where?” debate. Their web page is a bit confusing (you have to click on the Quicktime logos), but here’s a summary of the MP3s:

• 1. Introductions — Not really worth listening to.
• 2. Paul Mees — You can’t see the slides, but it’s worth a listen. The bus stops he’s referring to are pictured here. Towards the end he refers to the Department of Transport’s new org chart.
• 3. Jon Faine talks to Mees
• 4. Brian Negus (RACV)
• 5. Bernie Carolan (Metlink) — his reference to “all our eggs in one basket” refers to some guy in the paper that morning.
• 6. Jon Faine talks to Bernie Carolan, and audience questions — Myki, buses, Commonwealth Games, Rail capacity
• 7. Audience questions — rail capacity, my question to Brian Negus, and some guy rambling on about connections to Tasmania?!
• 8. Audience questions — oil prices, plug for Jon Faine’s Melbourne to London road trip

Happy listening.

The CSIRO says petrol could reach $8 per litre by 2018, due to supply peaking, then declining. (Of this, even at a cost of $10 per tonne of carbon, only 25 cents would be an emissions charge.)

Jayne’s history blog notes that this month in 1940, “Petrol rationing was introduced, with motorists permitted to travel only 2,000 miles per year.”

Paying $8 per litre might do the same thing, of course. But it’s probably worth considering options to protect the supply and prices for people in regional areas. Even with the best public transport network in the world across capital and regional cities, they are likely to be stuck with car travel.

My current estimate, based on my roughly 100km driving per week and theoretical fuel consumption (7.98 litres per 100km in the ol’ rustbucket Magna) and $1.60 per litre, is I’m paying $638 per year on petrol. At $8 petrol, in my current car (which I’m planning on trading in for something smaller, soonish, like, when I get around to it) and current driving habits (which I’m expecting to reduce after 2009) it would be $3,194. Yeouch.

Work it out yourself:

• For cars up to 2003, get your vehicle mileage from Fuel Consumption database. Take the consumption figures and multiply the City figure by 0.37 and add the Highway figure multiplied by 0.63 to get the theoretical combined figure.
• For cars post-2003, use the Green Vehicle Guide, which will give you the combined consumption figure.
• Annual fuel cost = Kilometres per year / 100 * Litres per hundred km * Cost per litre

Here’s a handy thing Metlink is beta testing at the moment: apart from having online timetable displays that show you the whole day on one page (at last!) you can also get a timetable for your individual stop.

To get them, go to the Metlink web site. You can search for the route number, then use the beta timetable view (unfortunately at the moment it appears not to work in Firefox, so use IE or something else). You can click the timepoints to expand to the full list of stops, then you can click on an individual stop to get a page for that stop. Then click on “Stop timetable” and it takes you to a PDF that shows all the times for that specific stop.

Or you can use the Maps, Stations, Stops page to search for railway stations. It seems a little patchy at the moment for bus and tram stops, so the first method might be easier.

A caveat though: the bus and tram times between timepoints are only estimates, and may not be entirely accurate — even before we get into the issues of traffic and general service reliability! So I’d be rocking up to the stop a few minutes early, just in case.

Handy to have though. I’ve printed out my station and closest bus stop timetables (at least in the direction I usually travel) and have stuck them to the fridge.

(There’s various sources of real-time information, too.)