You literally do give nearly everyone free parking because only 1% of parking spaces are paid.

“Anthony Albanese … is encouraging people to take public transport where they can”… by reducing the relative cost of driving. Right.

There’s at least 60,000 jobs in Laverton/Truganina industrial area. It’s barely served by PT. Folks with a 15 min drive to work would face a 75+ min PT journey. This is a scenario repeated over and over across Melbourne’s suburban industrial areas. Free PT won’t get these folks out of cars.

Again this is super useful policy for inner city greens and entirely irrelevant to most working class people who live in suburbs where public transport simply doesn’t serve their needs. Absolute class blindness by the Greens here, per usual.

The most car dependent areas of Melbourne and Victoria - i.e., the places that are most exposed the fuel price shocks - are the least able to benefit from free PT, because there’s not sufficient quality and quantity of PT for them to be enticed away from their cars to.

Announced this morning: Free public transport in #Melbourne and across Victoria for the month of April. It'll clearly benefit those who can use or switch to the PT network. Not so much the people who don't have a usable service they can use.

Today is Melbourne’s West Deserves the Best workshop day, organised by Friends of the Earth, to agitate for better buses. I’m observing the occasion by using PT to get there, which will take 100+ minutes, about 30 of which is waiting at connection points. Driving would take 25.

Now, more than ever, the Victorian government needs to act on the numerous historical and current proposals to fix suburban buses, aiming for a standard that would allow people to choose to drive less, to sell the second household car, and ideally to opt out of car ownership altogether.

Woah will you look at this petrol station sign?? Crazy!!

So what’s the deal with these extra short running services on the C’burn line to Essendon?

Bachelor of Not Actually Learning Anything.

I’m not saying that this is the most carbraned thing to happen in the last twelve months in Australia, but I’m not not saying that.

what the heck is an acre and why the heck is a 2025 publication citing their findings in such a dumb non-standard unit?

Another very good example of how woefully inadequate service is a much more important determinant than bargain basement fares in whether people will switch to PT from driving, especially when paired with ubiquitous underpricing of car-based transport.

Take public transport, ride a bike.

Given that free PT is once again entering the chat, it's worth re-upping this Climate Council analysis, which shows just how little of the Australian population is covered by "frequent, all-day" PT service, and how the PT haves and have-nots are also the socio-economic haves and have-nots.

80% of the Australian population doesn’t have access to public transport that would be useful enough for them to stop driving. Focus on that instead of making it free.

“He used to rev the engine whenever he left the driveway. Now he just sort of rolls down the hill in neutral,” one neighbour said. theshovel.com.au/2026/03/18/d...

Exactly this. The people who are most exposed to fuel price rises are those who don’t have an alternative. If the Greens could see past the kale curtain, perhaps they would understand as much.

“handouts to Clive Palmer and Rio Tinto are growing faster than the costs of helping Australians with a disability”

My unpopular opinion is that this is an **incredibly** marginal upgrade that largely addresses elite anxieties about Melbourne’s position in the world (oh oh but you can pay with credit card in Canberra!) and doesn’t actually make public transport more useful (i.e., fix the friggin’ buses already).

The first rule of gay demonic realms membership is that you under no circumstances reveal to the heteros the existence of the demonic realms. Friggin’ snitch.

Liveable Melbourne means contending with jerks who are intent on using their cars to block the tiniest strip of the street that our collective carbrain has deemed to be for pedestrian use.

If a PT project is underused: “what a waste of money, PT is such a money pit, let’s never invest again”. If a road project is underused: “amazing, great job, we’ve solved congestion, let’s build more of these”.

Petrol prices need to be six, seven times higher. I will not be taking any questions.

Question: what proportion of Victoria’s flour etc is milled at the Kensington mill?

My dodgy estimates that you should consider calculating yourself... 🚅 Madrid to Barcelona HSR: AU$25,000,000/km 🚅 Sydney to Newcastle HSR: AU$310,000,000/km

There's a more specific comparison to Spain under "the density myth" 🚅 NTL-SYD's 624/km (² not specified) compares favourably to BCN-ZAZ's 244/km². 🚅 But BCN-ZAZ is almost all a surface alignment and not a tunnel. 🚅 Spanish HSR construction is way cheaper as a result and in general.

"N/S/W is actually denser than the UK, Japan, France, and Spain if you only count the urbanised area and then carefully compare that to the whole area of these other countries" Solid logic. No comments. Give these people 200 billion to build a subway between Sydney and Newcastle.

The utterance of "A.I.'s inevitability" is one of the most stark pure performatives I've seen in my time working in higher ed. Every time it is uttered, it is clearly not reporting a fact about the world but instead actively trying to create the reality it narrates. We can and must refuse.

Surprise xtrapolis ii at flinders street station

Despite having selected the “sustainable” option for my super, the top investment in my account was Transurban. That is until AI mania took over.

Interesting report out of the UK proposing to "reconfigure and upgrade an existing set of services into a coherent, clockface, integrated network" for the countryside between Sheffield and Manchester, drawing on Swiss PT planning principles.

Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus.

Perhaps I'll step this back a touch and acknowledge how the Unimelb campus is gated in some ways: 👎 Poor permeability on Swanston St due to tram superstop and turnbacks 👎 Grattan Street resuming its role as a traffic sewer 👎 Royal Parade being a ultrawide traffic sewer ... I'm sensing a theme here

Based on the number of graduating students and general tourists who have their photos taken with Medley as a backdrop, there must be something special going here. (As an aside, the reason that Melburnians reckon Unimelb is "gated" is because they can't drive their cars through).

Cohesion. My @smh cartoon.

🚟 Melburnians demand trenched rail instead of elevated, 🚟 Govt builds railway trench with potentially developable, but in the meantime nasty, concrete platform, 🚟 Melburnians seethe enviously five years later at how nice rail-over-road is elsewhere in the city. 💯 Perfect, no notes.

Dignity is making statements that amount to incitement to genocide. Disgrace is protesting that. Gotcha.

‘Take them away, crush them’: Australia faces an oversized yank tank surge that some say poses a health emergency Fixed it for you.

I love that he wrote an article like this and is still convinced that men, including himself, get to where they are based purely and unambiguously on merit.

All bicycles included in draft plan for mandatory helmets and high-vis, Department confirms irishcycle.com/2026/02/04/a...

This ought to fix the problem of students protesting against institutional ties to a state credibly accused of genocide and apartheid!

The stations between Sunshine and Watergardens on the Sunbury line have recently received a huge increase in service, with 10-min headways until 9pm. The connecting bus situation is still pretty dire, though. Improving this is critical if we want to get the most of the munnel.

According to both PTV and Google journey planners, a journey from Footscray to ACMI at Fed Square takes longer via the Munnel. It's 19 mins on a Werribee train and 25 mins on a Sunshine-Dandenong train. Why? Very long egress times from the Town Hall platforms.

Exhibit 123412 of PTV/Transport Victoria not understanding the importance of connections between different PT lines. The new 241 bus intersects with the 57 tram at Abbotsford St in North Melbourne, but the eastbound stop is at the next cross street, 290m away (5 mins for an able-bodied person).

The travel modelling that underpinned the Metro Tunnel and other railway expansions and extensions assumed that Melbourne would have this bus network by 2031. Red: 50 "SmartBus" lines, 10-minute headway. Green: 128 "direct" lines, 15-minute headway. How much of this has been realised?

Today dot gif.

We absolutely need to talk about the Atlas network more and more and more, especially regarding how they campaigned against the Voice to Parliament referendum.

How dare they legally use public roads for their intended purpose?!?