New at my Patreon... On High Street in Thornbury we noticed a striking old building - a surviving tram depot from the days when the local council ran its own cable tramway:
All #trams travelling along Collins St towards Spencer St have been stopped at William St due to a protest so I will walk the rest of the way to work #Melbourne
11:30pm in #Melbourne and it is 29.9 degrees. It will be another hot night, but the last hot night of the summer as a mild change tomorrow morning will bring temperatures down to the mid twenties.
A heat wave in March is not unprecedented but the change in season that comes with the equinox next week should mean that we won't experience 35+ degree temperatures again until next summer. I say 'should' because in this topsy-turvy climate change world strange things happen. #environment#MelbWeather
It was 25.4 degrees when I woke up at 6am. #Adelaide has broken records during this heatwave. Their heatwave is going for 7 days - ugh.
#Melbourne airport has broken its record for hottest minimum temperature.
No. 12 trams have been cancelled between Spencer St and Victoria Gardens due to the extreme weather. Yet other trams are travelling along the same tracks. Have they been cancelled because the trams on that route are too old? #MelbWeather#environment#trams
Some good news for anyone who loves RMTransit's public transport explainer videos, but doesn't like Google and YouTube.
Looks like @RM_Transit now has an account on PeerTube here, which you can follow from Mastodon: @reece
(If you're the first to follow the account from your instance it will initially appear empty. Videos will start appearing in your feed after you follow.)
This George Street tram is useful, but IMO the CBD stops are too far apart. It's a fair walk if you happen to be halfway between some stops (eg QVB and Wynyard). #Sydney#Trams#Tram
A new piece by me for Explore - in Lisbon I caught a bright yellow tram to historic neighbourhoods, as part of tour utilising both tramways and walking...
If they want us to come back to work in #Melbourne offices they need to put on a lot more trams and install windows that open. This morning's tram ride has been quite unpleasant and I was waiting at the tram stop before 8am.
I am not against going into the office a couple of days a week but am thinking of working from home all next week. #trams
@AnnaAnthro I've wondered myself what is the theoretical advantage of trams over buses. I've seen a claim that trams can move more people per hour, which I guess might be true, but isn't obviously the case to me.
I’m simultaneously sad that my years living in Edinburgh were pre-tram, but glad I missed the years of construction chaos whilst the network was being built.
Today I've been writing an article about a tour I took in Lisbon, which involved a trip on one of its excellent little yellow trams. They are the best.
Pleasantly surprised to have one more story published in 2023... and this time I'm exploring the delights of Melbourne beaches BY TRAM (ie the only way to travel). Includes dining tips. Enjoy!
To put it politely, this is greenwashing. To put it impolitely, calling these busses "green" or "zero emission" is a whopper of a lie.
If you read about these busses at the company's website, they're very careful not to reveal the source ("colour") of the hydrogen. https://www.transitsystems.com.au/hydrogen-bus-new
They're using grey hydrogen. "Grey" Hydrogen is not Zero Emission. It's made by extracting hydrogen from fossil gas, and there's no effort put into capturing the carbon during the processing.
These busses are just as polluting — considerably more polluting when you consider inefficiencies and losses due to processing, transport, and storage — as a bus powered by any other fossil fuel, but the pollution happens at a processing plant far away. The pollution is out of sight; out of mind.
@BinChicken There is no "zero emission" transportation on ruber wheels, since they'll inevitably emit particles from their brakes and microplastics from their tires whilst accellerating and decellerating.
That being said, hydrogen is a waste product of the fossil fuel industry and would otherwise get burned off via the safety fire...
Not to mention that the same "pollution out of sight" also applies to #battery-electric vehicles.
For those unfamiliar with it, Lemmy is basically a federated version of Reddit, distributed across multiple servers like Mastodon. (For anyone who wants to delve further, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, and aussie.zone are three popular Lemmy instances.)
From Mastodon, you can follow any Lemmy group by following its handle, exactly the same way that you would follow a Mastodon account. Any new posts to that group will then begin appearing in your Mastodon feed.
Even better, if you start a thread on Mastodon, you can also post it to a relevant Lemmy group just by including its handle in your post. (Please note this only seems to work with the first post of a thread.)