Some Suggestions for Better Network Maps

I’d planned to write a post on Melbourne network maps a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t quite get around to it. I’d actually been thinking seriously about the issue for a few months prior, ever since a friend lent me Maxwell J. Roberts’ great book Underground Maps After Beck, which documents the history of [...]

Paul Mees in today’s Age

I see that Paul Mees has an anti rail tunnel article in today’s Sunday Age. It’s typical Mees fare - he seems to get half way there in his claim that the Loop (defined in a broader sense of the inner city rail system) was built to handle more trains than it gets today, and [...]

The Eddington Strikes Back

Sorry about my blog absence of late - I’m in the middle of exams at the moment so haven’t had much time for anything interesting. I saw an article by Melissa Fyfe that appeared in the Sunday Age a couple of days back and it reminded me (as did Tom) that I never finished my [...]

Fast(er) rail in the North East?

Given that gauge conversion in the North East is going ahead, I thought it might be good to have a quick look at the prospects for making it faster than the planned 130kph line speed.
As I discussed in the previous post, rebuilding line to RFR standard costs around $1.5m/km. For the 200km North East project, [...]

Standard Gauge on the North Eastern Line - is it really going to cost $500m?

Last Friday’s announcement that the North Eastern broad gauge would be converted to standard gauge between Seymour and Albury was very welcome, if somewhat unsurprising news. The project has a great deal of merit indeed, and it is good to see it finally happening.
However, I was somewhat surprised to see that it’s going to cost [...]

Tipping Points in Public Transport Modal Share?

I was reading through an old post on Peter Parker’s excellent blog about service frequency and its capacity to change travel behaviour; and it got me thinking about the marginal modal share return to increases in service provision. Here, quality is fairly broadly defined - I’m basically looking at a combination of frequency, ease of [...]

Extending the Epping line to South Morang/Mernda and Aurora

Let’s face it - last week’s state budget was bad for public transport. Very little money was spent, and worryingly, some of the money spent was wasted. I’m talking about the $10 million that’s been earmarked for ‘design and development works’ for the South Morang rail extension. This is an absurd amount of money to [...]

Express running - hero or villain? Part 2

In part one, I concluded that the growth in express running has outpaced the growth in trip length, and that this was done more or less to make rail more more competitive with the private car.
Has it been the best way make rail competitive though? The DoI thinks so, and contend that “express trains are [...]

Issues with Epping-Chatswood in my recent rail construction costs post

You may recall that in my recent post on Calculating rail line construction costs in light of the Eddington report, I compared the projected Eddington costs to empirical data (namely Mandurah and Epping-Chatswood). Well, Greg posted today that these costs have in fact blown out quite substantially. Total cost for the project is now much [...]

Express running - hero or villain? Part 1

I was browsing through some Eddington stuff a while back and found some interesting information in Chapter 3 - Public Transport on a Roll. These sort of reports often contain great data on the rail system, and Eddington has been no exception. In chapter 3, there’s good information on the growth in average trip length [...]