The Transport Woes of the Most Liveable (not for long?) City

NEW DISCUSSION THREAD STARTED BY ‘GROMIT’ on Friday 19/09/2008

Logged in without too much difficulty, which for me is a better than average performance.

I am going to start a debate on the transport woes of the most liveable (not for long?) city
We are about to get our 4th transport plan in 3 years from this government next month. Is this just more moving the deckchairs on the Titanic? I think so, the dry end of the Titanic is getting very crowded along with the trains/trams and buses.

The problem with a new plan, especially involving public transport systems such as trains and trams is the time needed to deliver the projects.

Most train and tram projects take more than one parliamentary term to develop and deliver which means there is no political will to commit to a project that the current political leaders might not be around to deliver and gain the political browny points. This is a universal problem with transport development.
The solution is not to do a big bang Eddington style tunnel project that probably ranks number 120 in the list of most pressing solutions and will take 10 years to deliver,the answer is lots of small incremental and integrated steps that deliver capacity benefit at each stage.

I will give you an example, why do you think people always stand in the doorways on a train when its full, answer is that is the only place to find a handhold when the train is rocking and reeling along our seriously degraded track. Solution – put more strap hangers along the aisle between the seats and spread people out a bit. Next step is to put more doors in the carriage and less seats. Most urban mass transport systems such as the Paris Metro and the London Underground do not attempt to provide seats for the majority of the passengers. Non of the journeys in our metropolitan network are longer than the longest journey on the London Underground, and each carriage has more doors so people can get in and out more quickly thus reducing the dwell time at each station leading to more on time running of the services.

If you live in Warrandyte wouldn’t you like a bus service that met each peak hour train at Eltham that started at 5-6am and kept going through to 7-8pm during the week and 10-11pm on Fridays and Saturdays. That’s an easy fix and would reduce the traffic to and from the city. the park and ride at Doncaster is fine accept you are still contributing to the traffic into the city.

I have lots of ideas and would like to further discuss them with the aim of getting these messages into the ears of our elected representatives