Stuck Inside of Melbourne With The Metro Blues Again

Public submissions to the Eddington report have been released – some 2042 of them – and one wonders what effect (if any) they will have on the whole process. I doubt much of it will be read, let alone inform decision making within the government. But on a broader level, public pressure to improve public transport has become a key political issue for Brumby and co. and it’s likely that it will come to dominate the 2010 state election.

Intuitively, this seems to be a very positive step for public transport – but will it see better outcomes? Having sat on their hands for so long, it will be difficult for the state government to make meaningful improvements without the public complaining that those improvements should have been made 5 or 10 years beforehand. With potential political gains muted by a decade of inaction, the opportunity cost of spending that money on public transport becomes too high to bear.

On the other hand, the government may see fit to pour resources into public transport, as the apparently impending $20bn Eddington response suggests. But that’s also potentially problematic. The Ribbon-Cutting Effect, as detailed in Riccardo’s Training Track series is a key issue. There’s a real risk the current political pressure may result in a big new project, but the chances of investment occurring in the boring but necessary stuff are much slimmer. Just look at how the Dandenong triplication – arguably the rail centrepiece of Meeting our Transport Challenges, a plan that fell squarely into the boring but necessary category – has been quietly abandoned (not that the triplication was a sound idea but I digress). It is important to acknowledge that many boring but (to varying degrees) necessary track amplification works have been undertaken in Melbourne over the last half century – but what happened to the investment to actually run a decent service over the improved tracks? It never came.

Moreover, many of the problems in Melbourne’s public transport have come to be seen solely through the prism of the Eddington report, an inquiry that was never asked to investigate how best to improve Melbourne’s public transport, instead focussing solely on east-west congestion. I fear that Eddington’s public transport recommendations will be taken as the complete solution to Melbourne’s transport woes, leaving many necessary improvements out in the cold for another few decades. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.

Blogless

I’m off overseas for two weeks today and probably won’t have any internet access. But I’ll be back on the 13th and will be posting on branding, fare structures and goodness knows what else.

cheers,

Phin

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 network maps of the London Underground.

What amazed me about the book – aside from the detail in which the maps are reproduced and discussed – was how harsh Roberts was on Harold Hutchison’s attempts at map drawing. Now there’s no doubt that Hutchison’s maps were a big step backwards, that Beck’s removal was particularly mean-spirited and unnecessary and that London Transport made a general mess of the affair; but even Hutchison’s much maligned map is better than Melbourne’s maps today. What criticism would Roberts have for them?

In this post, I’m going to look at what I believe a good network map should convey, Melbourne’s recent experiences and finally some alternative designs.

What do we want in a network map?

Ideally, a network map should be simple and easy to read, yet convey important information about the network to an even infrequent user and be part of an integrated scheme to make the system highly navigable. If possible, the map should be readily recognisable and aesthetically pleasing, acting as an advertisement as well as a just a map (just as London’s does) – but I’d stress that this is difficult to achieve and may take decades to occur (just as it did in London).

Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Melbourne rail map should look just like the London Underground map, (the latter is much more complex), but we need to be mindful of what we’re aiming for in a map and base designs on the benchmarks I mentioned above. I’m not convinced this has happened in Melbourne.

Melbourne’s experience with network maps

Over the decades and various changes of management, Melbourne’s train and tram systems have had a variety of train and tram maps. None that I’ve seen have been particularly revolutionary. But when we look at the past quarter of a century or so – it’s clear that we’ve seen basically one predominant train map style (with the exception of the privatised pre Metlink mess and some of the early loop maps) and two main tram map styles (with the aforementioned early privatisation caveat). Below you can see the 1994 and current rail maps (note that that only real change between the 1994 map and those from the mid 80s was the change of zone system) and 1981, 1994 and current tram maps.

Melbourne’s train maps have primarily shown zone structure at the expense of other features, like individual lines. While I’d argue that this almost the least important thing to show on a two zone multimodal system, at least there’s the excuse that the rail network is reasonably simple and hasn’t cried out for line by line colour coding. But with Werribee being taken out of the loop (albeit only during peak) and Eddington’s rail tunnel perhaps occurring (although I’d be surprised if it actually went ahead), this excuse is no longer going to hold.

Melbourne’s current tram network doesn’t have any such excuses. It’s complex (more than many metros) and is basically all in zone 1, so there’s really no reason to colour lines based on zones rather than where they are going. Worse still, the Met was making a much less confusing map back in the 90s. Sure it wasn’t perfect, but it acknowledged that the tram network was complex and prioritised showing where the lines went rather than what zone they were. That’s an efficient choice to make when a map can’t show every piece of relevant information – it simply has to be prioritised.

This ought not reflect poorly on the designers of the map, they were probably just given a brief to integrate it better with other public transport as part of the Metlink programme, and how they showed zones probably wasn’t something they had control over. But if we want to show zones on a network map, we should do it the way the London Underground Map does – as part of the background.

Alternative designs

In many ways, Beck’s guiding principles should be instructive for Melbourne. Roberts summarises Beck’s design principles thus:
- Only horizontal, vertical and 45-degree lines are used.
- The centre of the map is enlarged but at the expense of the suburbs.
- A distinctive interchange symbol is used.
- Street details are not shown.
- Stations are denoted by tickmarks.
- Lines are denoted by distinctive colours.

Whilst I don’t think these ideas should necessarily be taken as gospel, they may provide some insights. My recent train and tram network maps incorporate some elements of this overarching design (although the tram map much less so). They aren’t by any means perfect, but hopefully they illustrate my point about navigability and ease of reading.

I’ve also been thinking about mapping based on service standard rather than mode, and Australian Rail Maps has a very well done Beck like rendition of Melbourne’s trains and trams on the same map. But in many ways, mode has come to say so much about service standard in Melbourne (trams = slow but frequent, trains = less frequent but faster and longer distance, buses = rubbish) that it would be hard to do differently. If I had my way and the outer reaches of routes 75 and 86 became heavier light rail, perhaps they should be shown on the rail map too – but there’s many questions about how that should be done and I don’t really have the answers. Furthermore, I don’t have any answers about how to go about a decent bus network map – I’d be interested to hear ideas on this one.

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 that there’s scope for squeezing more capacity out of the system. But then he goes and wrecks it all by failing to realise (and convey) that lots of little infrastructure improvements (like flyovers etc.) are necessary to get to this point – the same mistake he made with his Dandenong line paper.

What I find most strange is that he berates the new rail tunnel as an “excuse for doing nothing else for a decade”, but then he only proposes minor alternatives – namely taking crew changes away from Flinders street and reconfiguring carriage seating. Don’t get me wrong, I think that there’s plenty of valid criticism of the new tunnel (although I’d love to see north-south rail, albeit in a different form), and changing seat configuration and changing crews at suburban termini are very useful reforms; but you can’t ridicule DoT for doing nothing and then propose only slightly more than nothing yourself. If Melbourne wants a large scale modal shift to public transport, we’re going to need a lot of targeted infrastructure investment in both outer-suburban commuter rail and inner city metro as well as cultural reform.

I have a question regarding Mees’ article – he claims the loop cost $5 billion in current dollars. But I seem to remember reading that it cost about $350 million or so at the time. If we index that from say 1980 to now, it’s still only just under $1.2 billion. Have I got the wrong numbers here or has Mees exaggerated the cost by over four times?

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 Alternatives to Eddington series from a few months ago. The article suggests that Eddington (and the government’s forthcoming $20bn response) puts us on the brink of a transport revolution in Melbourne. For as long as I can remember, Melbourne has been on the brink of some kind of transport revolution – it just never seems to actually happen.

Cynicism aside, I was going to wrap up the Eddington series with a look at the prospects for a north south rail tunnel, but I’d already looked at the issue pre-Eddington and my ideas hadn’t changed. Moreover, we had some good discussion on the issues here, here, here and here; and Riccardo did a great series of posts on improving capacity on the Pakenham line. Recently though, I’ve been considering something more radical – getting rid of the city loop altogether.

Getting rid of the City Loop?

Although it is admired by many, the fundamental concept of a loop railway is flawed. For a detailed look at the substantial problems with the city loop, I recommend reading RIccardo’s excellent analysis of the issue. While critical of the merits of the loop, I’ve only ever seriously considered tinkering around the edges (by increasing through routing, making the loop unidirectional etc.) But ultimately the loop infrastructure is a sunk cost (pun very much intended), and we should look very carefully at what is most efficient now, rather than accepting existing operating practices at face value.

I’d never advocate closing the loop stations – that would be a terrible waste – but perhaps there is an argument to be made for substantial redesign. Instead of going around the city, the tunnels could be reconfigured to operate as a through route – with trains going from Richmond to North Melbourne and beyond without ever passing through Flinders St. This would require substantial redesign of the loop portals and would cost quite a lot of money, but it provides a potentially higher capacity and more efficient use of city rail infrastructure, allowing for a better range of trips and making the rail system useful for more than peak hour long haul commuting. A speculative plan of what I’m talking about is shown below:

As you can see, North Melbourne and Richmond become even more important for changing trains – for such a scheme to work properly both stations would need to employ effective cross platform interchange, which would require more flyovers. Of course for the plan to work all lines would need to operate at high frequency so that interchange wait times were as small as possible (not more than a minute or two on average).

Importantly, the link allows the north south rail line to operate independently of the rest of the network – a feature not present in the Eddington report. Furthermore, it makes the loop tunnels operate more efficiently than they are at present. Sadly, political considerations make it difficult – politicians seem obsessed with single seat journeys and bureaucrats seem to favour existing operating practices over new ones which suggest they had been wrong in the past. Still, with oil prices going nowhere but up, perhaps the transport revolution might eventually happen…

Once exams are finished I’ll finish the whole network map based on these ideas and should get it uploaded as a pdf soon.

cheers,

Phin

UPDATE – To better show the broader plan I’m advocating, I’m uploading the whole map, available here. Apologies to Harry Beck. Keep in mind it’s only about half finished – I should have it done by Tomorrow or Thursday.

UPDATE 2 – I’ve got the map finished, it’s available here.

UPDATE 3 – As requested by James, I’ve made another version of the map showing new and existing lines. It’s available here.

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, that’s $300m. Of course, that cost doesn’t include upgrading the existing SG line beyond its current 130kph limit, but given the line is already getting concrete sleepers and other works, a signalling and level crossing upgrade may well be all that’s required to make the line 160kph ready (but then again much more work may be required). The same should apply for the SG line from Seymour to Melbourne.

Buying rollingstock to service the line would also be necessary. The original Vlocity contract put the cost of each motor car at $7.04m (525/ 76) in 2002 dollars – or $8.05m in 2007 dollars. The most recent contract extension put the cost of each motorised trailer at $4.75m (38/ 8 ) in 2007 dollars. The project will see 15 carriages converted, as I understand it to be marshalled into 3 5 car sets. In Vlocity terms, that’s 6 motors and 9 motorised trailers, at a total cost of $91.05m.

RFR infrastructure standards and trains (but not service standards) are achievable without a great deal of difficulty, but it doesn’t mean they are worth it. There’s still only 5 trains per day going beyond Seymour – hardly a lot of patronage to justify additional investment. The reality is that freight is driving the investment on the line, and the industry simply isn’t demanding line speeds above 130kph.

There is little point in investing money to get line speeds over what freight demands for a measly 5 trains per day to towns where air isn’t a serious competitor. The only reason to go above 130kph would be as part of a bigger strategy for frequent high speed rail from Melbourne to Sydney. But 160kph would be woefully inadequate for such a service if it is to compete with air. Line speeds of 200kph would be required at minimum, all the way to Sydney.

Whilst 200kph line speeds and diesel traction still wouldn’t deliver the requisite 4 hour journey times (as discussed a while ago on Riccardo’s blog) to beat air CBD to CBD, they might still be a good start. The Deutsche Bundesbahn upgraded many conventional mainlines to this standard in the 70s, which made the introduction of ICE services that bit easier. But it has to be part of a broader plan for high speed passenger rail between major cities (not one horse towns) – in absence of such a plan, I’d much rather have the money go to increasing freight capacity by double tracking Albury – Junee and Seymour – Melbourne.

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 $500m. I’m not advocating a lower standard upgrade – ultimately the whole line from Sydney to Melbourne should have high speed rail up and running – but we should still be aiming to get value for money. The reason the cost surprised me was that $500m for 200km of 130kph track seems excessive when the (heavily criticised) Regional Fast Rail track upgrades cost $750 million for 500km of 160kph track (plus other costs of $96m, operating costs of $73m and $550 million for rolling stock). Clearly this isn’t where all the money is going, as the ARTC are generally very good at project management. As I conclude later in the post, a lot of the cost seems to be reannounced spending for other projects, meaning the actual standardisation works will cost a lot less.

What exactly is the $500m buying?

The project includes quite a bit more than just gauge converting 200km of track. The $500m provides for the following projects:

Wodonga rail bypass

The long awaited Wodonga rail bypass is part of the project. The state government had already set aside $85m for the project, and the feds $45m (see media releases here and here). This is old money – the $45m federal commitment Anthony Albanese talked about is actually Howard era spending. But it still takes up $130m of the project cost.

Extra passing loops between Melbourne and Seymour

The media release is pretty vague about what this entails, saying only that it includes “Upgrades to the standard-gauge line between Melbourne and Seymour, including the construction of new passing loops as well as upgrade works already being undertaken by the ARTC”. The ARTC is quietly sinking over $2 billion into Melbourne-Brisbane rail upgrades, including $420m for passing lanes and $400m for concrete resleepering. I don’t know whether much new work is going to be done Melbourne – Seymour on top of this investment. The Albion-Jacana-city line needs a big upgrade if the project is to work, but I don’t know whether this will happen and how much of the upgrade is existing works and how much is reannounced spending.

Refurbishing 15 carriages and converting them – along with 3 locomotives – to standard gauge

Gauge converting the locos and carriages should be reasonably straightforward and inexpensive, and I was under the impression that carriage refurbishment was already happening anyway. I couldn’t find any reference for N-set refurbishment though, but even if it were new spending, it shouldn’t cost that much. Using the $10m budget for refurbishing 55 H carriages as a guide, we see that it costs about $182 000 to repaint and retrim a carriage. Given that 15 carriages are being refurbished under the project, we’re looking at a bit under $2.75m all up.

New platforms for stations on the standard gauge line

Only 7 stations will need new platforms (assuming Benalla and Wangaratta have their short SG platforms replaced). The most logical way to go is to put new side platforms to the west of the existing stations, in the former goods yards. This would mean the closure of the existing SG track to the east of the existing BG stations.

It’s a sensible idea for two reasons: firstly, it eliminates many curves in the existing SG by taking it straight through at the stations; and secondly, the new platforms would all serve up trains, meaning you could probably get away with just a platform and a bus shelter.

Gauge conversion and upgrade of 200km broad gauge track

Without knowing to what extent the existing SG upgrades have been reannounced in this project, it is difficult to know how much this part of the project will cost. Given that the Wodonga rail bypass is going to take up $130m, there’s only $370m left over for the rest of the works, a substantial portion of which may simply be reannounced SG passing lanes and concrete sleepering.

A rough calculation puts the capital cost of RFR at $1.5m/km (750/500) not including rolling stock. That’s $300m for 200km of new track. Given the potential for such a substantial portion of the NE standardisation costs to be for other things (like upgrading the existing SG track) and the known cost of $130m for the Wodonga rail works, it seems the actual conversion works are going to cost considerably less than $500m. This is a good thing, because I would have been rather worried if they cost more per km than RFR.

I hope to post shortly on the prospects for increasing track speed beyond 130kph and buying new rolling stock using the RFR costs as a guide, and whether such a project would be worthwhile at all.

Cheers,

Phin

Melbourne Tram Network Grand Plan

Firstly, apologies for my absence from the blog over the past week – it’s getting close to exams and I managed to get several assignments due within a few days of one another. But I did get Adobe Illustrator a couple of days ago and I’ve been experimenting with it to create a new style of tram network map with the improvements I’ve looked at over the past few months.

I haven’t really discussed trams much recently – I’ve mainly looked at them as a secondary issue as part of heavy rail improvements. It’s not that I don’t like trams – on the contrary, they generally serve Melbourne quite well (with a few exceptions, like the longer services). But with a few targeted improvements, they could be even better. I’ve looked at a few such ideas already:

- Extending routes 3,5 and 6 to meet rail stations
- Extending route 48 to Doncaster (as part of a broader plan including heavy rail)
- Splitting route 72 and extending it north to Ivanhoe and south to Caulfield
- Splitting some of the St. Kilda Rd. routes into shuttles
- Reconfiguring routes 86, 96 and 112 to segregate street from light rail running, improve connectivity and enable faster running on the Epping line
- All night running on the busier lines on Friday and Saturday night

Others which I haven’t looked at in great detail on the blog, but which have a lot of merit, include:

- Extending route 67 to Carnegie railway station
- Setting off peak daytime frequencies to at least 10 minutes for the quiet lines and 6 minutes for the busy lines
- Setting night time frequencies to every 10 minutes
- An extension of thinktram to improve running speeds
- New longer rolling stock (already budgeted for)
- tram stop rationalisation in some areas

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I’d be very interested to hear further/alternative ideas. Anyway here’s the map of these improvements I made in Illustrator – it’s a pdf and is quite large, but is scalable which is a big improvement on my previous forays into making network maps. There may be a few errors and omissions (I haven’t put route 30 on yet), but it should be basically all there. The broader network map issue is one I’ll hopefully be posting on over the weekend, so we should be able to compare this map with the current (not very readable) one, as well as previous Met attempts.

UPDATE: I’ve fixed up parts of the map and included some of your proposed changes. The map is available here.

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 use, comfort, etc. Working out how patronage and modal share respond to investment in better quality public transport is an important factor in determining the optimal level (and nature) of the investment and the consequent service standard provided.

Current government policy is to make small, incremental improvements to public transport and hope that more people use it, both in actual trips made and as a proportion of total trips (modal share). This was a big part of Melbourne 2030 – government policy was for 20% of motorised trips to be taken by public transport by 2020, basically a doubling of its modal share. Now given that total trips are increasing – largely because the population is growing and employment is increasing – we will expect to see public transport patronage to increase even when it’s treading water in modal share.

So why did the government set such an ambitious target backed up by only moderate levels of investment. There are two explanations that immediately come to mind: firstly, that they were never serious about 20% by 2020 (probably the truth); secondly, that their expectations of marginal returns to investment with respect to modal share were that it was more or less constant. This would see every extra dollar spent on improving the quality of public transport improving modal share by the same amount every time. This is represented graphically below:

So has this happened? Whilst patronage on Melbourne’s public transport – and especially the trains – has been increasing substantially, the modal share for public transport has been going nowhere. Basically, the investment hasn’t done much to improve modal share.

An alternative Explanation?

Clearly, the state government’s story doesn’t explain what’s driving transport habits in Melbourne (pun intended). I’d propose an alternative explanation – modal share isn’t going anywhere because public transport ultimately has to compete with the car. Even though there’s been investment in public transport, and an argument could be made that the quality has improved slightly over the past decade, modal share isn’t going anywhere because public transport simply isn’t as convenient as the car for many trips. For modal share to increase substantially, public transport has reach the point where it is a better quality service than a car. This is the tipping point I alluded to in the title. This is expressed graphically below:

So, what are the implications if we accept this idea? Well, basically it means that public transport investment needs to be targeted to meet the needs of drivers rather than looking at public transport in a vacuum. An empirical example would be the Metropolitan Bus Upgrade Program, where lots of money has been put into upgrading bus frequency and operating hours. But if a bus route has been upgraded from an hourly frequency to a half hourly frequency (making it twice as good), there’s still no reason why choice passengers will use it – it’s still not as good as a car. Until they reach the tipping point where they are as efficient (from a user perspective) as cars, buses are unlikely to be a roaring success.

It’s not all doom and gloom and you don’t necessarily need vast sums of money to get anywhere – small improvements can make a difference and big improvements needn’t be that expensive (improving off peak rail frequency for instance). I suppose my point is that policymakers need to be mindful of what the investment is targeting and how it affects quality relative to its competitors. Spending $1billion on Myki won’t get us much closer to that modal share tipping point, but spending $1billion on frequency upgrades probably would.

For a most interesting in depth look at providing quality public transport, have a look at this document from Canada, kindly sent to be by Jason.

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 be spending on design when the DoI secretly costed the whole project at $18 million in 2003. Of course, the government lied about the whole thing and claimed the outrageous price tag of $348 million. Similarly, the Aurora line was costed by DoI at $76 million, but the government claimed a $300 million price tag to wriggle their way out of building it. Below is the Melbourne 2030 plan for rail expansions to Epping North (Aurora) and South Morang – Mernda.

So, in this post, I’m going to have a look at the options for getting rail to South Morang (and beyond) as well as Aurora, how much they would cost, and what to do with the Epping line to give these new extensions a fast and frequent service. I should point out that I think it’s terrible planning policy to allow sprawl along these corridors, but if the government is insistent on allowing it to occur (quite a lot has already been built), then rail projects in the area should be considered.

Basic extension costs

Admittedly, the $18m and $76m construction costs for South Morang will only buy basic extensions, and are unlikely to include Keon Park to Epping duplication. Using the per km construction cost of $13.7m from the Mandurah line, we find that the 3.25 South Morang extension (to Civic Drive) would cost $44.5m, and that the 5.9 Aurora extension would cost $80.8m. The Mandurah line costs are – if anything – rather too high (that project included some inner city tunnelling, underground stations, freeway widening etc which is not a factor here), but it is fair to say that the DoI costs were somewhat too low for South Morang and about right for Aurora. They are nothing like the $300m + figures the government made up.

A need for extra works?

Defenders of the state government claim that the true costs are much higher because Keon Park – Epping needs duplicating and a host of other non reasons. If you want proof, have a look here – I love ZH836301’s It’s metal on slices of concrete FFS comment. But let’s look at this logically, if we are extending services further, why should more trains necessarily be running on the existing line? (assuming that Aurora is run as a shuttle) The reality is that the single track wouldn’t be much more of a problem for South Morang services than it is for present day Epping services. Beyond that, the single track isn’t even at capacity in peak hour – have a look at the diagram below – taken from a 2004 DoI report.

Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t duplicate Keon Park – Epping (I think we should), it’s just that it isn’t really an impediment to getting rail to South Morang and Aurora. It’s only 5km of single track anyway
- even if you tore the whole lot up and completely rebuilt it to Mandurah standards, it would still only cost $68.6m! My gold plated estimate is still only 32.5% of what the government claimed it would cost!

There’s probably already the need to build rail all the way to Mernda – another 8.2km from the South Morang terminus at Civic Drive. Again, using Mandurah costs it would be in the order of $112.3m. Total cost for high standard double track rail to Aurora and Mernda, as well as complete reconstruction of Keon Park – Epping would be 44.5+80.8+112.3+68.6 = $306.2m. We should remember that this is an extreme upper bound estimate and it still comes in below the government’s made up number. Coincidently, this cost forecast is exactly the same as for the Craigieburn bypass.

Service standard

I posted on a service standard for the Clifton Hill group a while back, advocating 6tph to Epping, with every second train running express Clifton Hill – Jolimont. 6tph is probably fine but if the line is to go all the way to Aurora and Mernda, it’s clear that every second train expressing 4 stations on tracks limited to 55kph won’t really cut it. Trains going this far out really need to run express beyond Clifton Hill as well. Either a two tier service is required, or some stations could be closed.

I would generally recommend against even considering inner city stations for closure in Melbourne, even when there is a tram line nearby. I’m generally in favour of keeping both heavy rail and street trams on the same corridor because they are sufficiently differentiated to not be very good substitutes for one another. But the Epping line is different, it has not one, but two tram lines running basically right next to it as far as Thornbury. Furthermore, one of them (the 112) is ripe for upgrading to high standard light rail. So for this section, we have a somewhat closer substitute for heavy rail as well as a traditional street tram.

On top of this, when we look at the AM peak patronage data for the line, it’s clear that there’s not really much patronage between Rushall and Preston at all anyway. This is probably because of such strong competition from the high frequency 86 and 112 trams. Upgrading the service standard for the Epping line would go some way to fixing this, but whatever happens there’s still going to be two tram lines competing with the rail.

Given these factors, there’s probably a case for removing Merri, Northcote and Croxton stations and upgrading the St. Georges Rd. track to do their job. To make this work, there would need to be a proper train/tram interchange at Thornbury. The 86 and 112 would use the Preston Workshops track to cross over each other – that is the northern section of the 112 would connect with the 86 and the northern section of the 86 would connect with the 112. Thornbury station would be rebuilt directly below the tram line to provide fast connections to heavy rail services. A new station like this shouldn’t really cost more than $15-20 million. The light rail line would need to run every six minutes or better in order to get average wait time down to an acceptable three minutes.

St. Georges Rd. would need to become proper light rail – that means real traffic light priority, fewer stops built to a higher standard (under cover island platforms), a decent track speed and larger light rail vehicles (like the C2 class). This concept could be taken further by building about 700 metres of tram track (for the cost of around $7.6 million) along the old inner circle rail alignment between Nicholson St. and St. Georges Rd. As at Thornbury, the lines could be swapped, with the northern section of the 96 going down St. Georges Rd. and Brunswick St. and the 86/St.Georges Rd. tram using the Nicholson St. reserve track. As above, the reserve track would need to be properly upgraded. This would better segregate street trams from potential high quality light rail, as well as better integrating inner-northern tram services with one another. The full map of what I’m considering is shown below.

I’m not completely comfortable with closing three heavy rail stations in Northcote, but even if this didn’t go ahead, the tram reforms I’m proposing are absolutely worthwhile. The cost would be low (700 metres of new track plus building/rebuilding five junctions and proper traffic light priority) and upgrades like platform stops and new trams are going to happen anyway – it’s just a matter of targeting them to the right places.

UPDATE – Below is an 800m pedshed for St. Georges Rd. as discussed. It takes in everything between Clifton Hill and Preston.