Really enjoyed this article. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting an e-bike myself, to make it easier just to get to neighbouring suburbs (the kinds of places I otherwise have to get the bus to), and while this article does make it sound appealing it does also nail the obstacles: traffic and car-centric street design…
Good points made here! I’d certainly be “interested” in learning to ride a bike but it’s too damn unsafe for distances any further than I can already walk. It also makes the great point that bikes are more useful for local trips, like maybe a few suburbs away, rather than the huge radial trips into the city and out again that planners always plan for. I’m not surprised, either, that people in the outer suburbs also express high interest in cycling if safe paths are provided, because many of those areas are not designed at a walkable scale. Like, if the nearest shops are 30 minutes’ walk away you won’t do that, but if it’s at least safe to cycle, you could cover that distance in 10 minutes and not need to drive. Obviously it’d be better for every single neighbourhood to be walkable in the first place but baby steps, yo!
This past week I had some work that took me to the southern part of the Frankston line, a section of which has just been grade-separated (lowering the railway line below road level so cars don’t have to wait at level crossings). I took some pictures of the newly rebuilt Bonbeach Station (and a shot of the view towards the beach from there, just because 😊). Honestly I thought it was pretty nice – the station is a lot closer to normal ground level than the stations further north at Ormond/McKinnon/Bentleigh, and the sandstone-like walls soften its appearance from those other stations’ imposing industrial chic. Relevant to my interests, too, the rebuilt station is further south and thus closer to where I actually had to go to work!
On a sorta related note: the station also had a friendly NZ woman working there to talk to people about the new station, and she was also rather keen on telling me how amazing all the grey and drizzly weather was 😂
Ughhh, I HATE how lousy our bus service is. Yesterday, 10 minutes late (so I raced to the stop for nothing). Today, 2 minutes early (so I missed it). The next one isn’t for 45 minutes so I had to ask Viv to ditch WFH for a while to come drive me… 😡
At a series of protests held on Wednesday, activists urged greater funding for public transport and walking and cycling paths, arguing that a promised “green revolution” away from cars during the Covid pandemic has failed to materialize in most cities.
Nancy Henderson, a protester who lives in Glasgow, said that cycling flourished during lockdown but that many people have switched back to cars as they don’t feel safe cycling in traffic.
“That’s an issue with electric cars, people will still feel unsafe with them around,” she said. “It doesn’t actually change the issue of congestion and the number of cars on our streets. Going electric doesn’t change the blight of cars in our cities. We are still isolated in our little booth, not communicating, not meeting other people.”
I can’t say I’m surprised; it’s always seemed like those to blame for aviation-related emissions are not really ordinary people who jet off for the occasional holiday,1 but business travellers who fly multiple times a week (and as this article says, especially those with private planes).
Of course, I think wherever possible, high-speed trains should be used instead of planes, being considerably less polluting as well as way more pleasant to travel on. Australia could eliminate the need for sooooo much flying if we had a high-speed line connecting every city from Adelaide around to Brisbane. But not everywhere is easily accessible without flying (think about islands, or relatively isolated cities like Perth…). Sometimes I see “environmentalists” online basically arguing to abolish aviation, but it’s not really a huge problem if people occasionally take a long-haul flight, or a flight to one of these isolated/island places. The bulk of the emissions are from frequent flyers, who are predominantly concentrated on short-haul routes like Melbourne-Sydney that could easily be replaced with trains.
Although note, the article also says that only 11% of the world’s population flew at all in 2018 (as a representative, recent pre-Covid year), so this definition of “ordinary people” is definitely skewed towards the “ordinary people” of relatively affluent, developed countries. But still. ↩︎
The Lac-Mégantic rail disaster was the derailment of an unattended 73-car freight train carrying crude oil on 6 July 2013. It rolled down a slope from Nantes, Quebec, gathering speed until it came off the tracks at the town of Lac-Mégantic and the crude oil ignited. Most of Lac-Mégantic’s downtown was either destroyed in the explosion or subsequent blaze or had to be demolished afterwards, …
Via Rail is a Canadian state-owned company which runs intercity passenger rail service in Canada. The bulk of its services are concentrated along the so-called Windsor-Quebec City corridor. They also provide service between Toronto and Vancouver via Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg; between Montreal and Halifax via Moncton; and some shorter routes connecting smaller towns and cities with the main …
Good blog post about how Melbourne’s highly radial railway network (which is itself the backbone of our public transport network, certainly the high-frequency part) is not well-optimised for cross-suburban trips. This is unlike Sydney, which has numerous connection points outside the inner city and even a couple of lines that don’t touch the CBD at all (the T5 runs north-south in the western suburbs, and the new “metro” line runs east-west across northern suburbs).
The post does say that we don’t need to wait until the Suburban Rail Loop is built to make improvements – we can reform bus networks to create more high-quality “feeder” routes, we can optimise timetables for efficient connections between different modes, and we can make less radical infrastructure improvements (in comparison to the SRL) like dedicated busways and tramways, to ensure those modes can run at higher speeds.
To be fair, what I keep hearing from Brisbanites is that their current public transport services fucking suck, haha. Some may say it’s a little excessive to win an Olympic Games bid just to win an argument to improve them, but desperate times call for desperate measures
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.