It seems bizarre that anyone would think that reducing public transport fares is a good way to reduce cost of living pressures. It's not going to get people out of their cars because it's a minor saving on the already huge savings of not driving.
So this becomes a handout to people that can already take public transport.
$150 million could get you a lot of extra services. Either expanding services to places not currently catered to or expanding frequency on exisiting routes.
If you want people out of cars and on to public transport then accessibility, convenience and flexibility are what you need to target. Affordability isn't as important because public transport is already always cheaper than the alternative.
@mattcen Public transport can be a fixed cost too making each individual trip no additional cost.
But If this is the only public transport trip you would make then it's very unlikely you'd do it even at the lower price. A trip cost savings of $0.80 probably doesn't make up for the habit shift required.
But I do agree that they should bring back the short trip ticket.
I took a photo yesterday of the IOOF Building as I was passing the corner of Elizabeth and Collins Streets. It opened in 1973 as the MLC building, and I believe it was the tallest building in Melbourne back then. I like the modernist curve.
@timrichards It would be so much better without the boring building at street level. #Melbourne seems to do a lot of tall buildings that don't connect to the ground so you have to look up to even notice they are there.
"...most intersection are unsafe to have an automatic green man, as pedestrians j-walk and it creates a dangerous situation with possible filtered right turners. A scenario where people see a green man and run to cross the road creates one of the most dangerous situations, with regards to left and right turners.
Studies conducted by VicRoads and the Australian Road Research Board have proven the safety issues with the above."
I contacted VicRoads to ask about making a pointless pedestrian crossing green automatically when it's safe to cross and their response was very telling.
@augustusbrown It's the middle pedestrian/cyclist crossing across the tram tracks in the median when Punt Rd turns in Fitzroy St in St Kilda.
No interaction with turning traffic at all.
It's kind of pointless because it's just tram tracks, but it's also silly because it's always red even when the trams have a red and the cars have a green.
@airwhale Right, so you have the same dangerous pedestrian crossings?
If a pedestrian starts crossing when a driver has started turning them the pedestrian is likely to get hit.
@airwhale 30yrs of crossing roads in Melbourne and I don't trust drivers to yield. Most of the time it's fine, but at least once a week I'll have a driver approaching the turn across the pedestrian crossing at a speed where they're unable to yield and so I have to.
I would have definitely died a few times if I wasn't paying attention when crossing. I'd hate to be trying to cross while blind.
@decryption it's so weird to me that someone without a place to park a car would get a car, park that car illegally and then complain about how they don't have a place to park that car.
The level of entitlement is astonishing.
The most important take away is just how little space 16 cyclists take up while waiting at the lights. It's barely noticeable. It always seems like there are lots of cars, but when you count them there are actually very few.
You need really large numbers of cyclists before they're generally visible.
It's no wonder people say 'nobody uses the bike lanes' because if you're not actually counting it feels like nobody is.
Well argued. The current situation with housing is unsustainable.
"Decades of federal and state governments of both stripes walking away from public housing, drunk on failed neoliberal policy of outsourcing affordable housing to the private sector, has produced the current crisis."
@timrichards it seems kind of obvious that investing in existing housing will produce a better return than investing in new build housing especially combined with the planning NIMBY nightmare we have.
Existing houses are in rare supply, in nice neighbourhoods with services.
New build housing is usually in a field in the middle of nowhere, near nothing and just down the freeway from other fields that will soon have exactly the same houses.
I know someone that brought a new house in Tarneit and could barely get what they originally paid for it 6yrs later.