-----Original Message-----
From: Roderick Smith [mailto:rodsmith@werple.net.au]
Sent: Thursday, 18 January 2018 3:54 PM
To: 'transportdownunder@yahoogroups.com'
Subject: daily digest, Thurs.18.1.18

Roderick.

Metro Twitter, Wed.17.1.18
14.30 Because of a collision in Swanston St, Swanston St trams to
south-eastern suburbs are diverting via La Trobe St & William St between
Stop 7 RMIT University & Stop 20 Domain Interchange. A limited shuttle
service is operating between Stop 20 Domain Interchange & Stop 11 Collins St
[which lacks a crossover]. Passenger may consider Flinders St trams,
Collins St trams, & Bourke St trams to connect with diverting services.
- 15.06, normal operation has resumed.

January 16 2018 'No other choice': NSW train workers to strike for 24 hours
over pay dispute .
NSW train workers will strike for 24 hours on January 29 after negotiations
over pay and conditions fell apart.
The Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) announced the strike on Tuesday, saying
it was the result of Sydney Trains and NSW Trains management "refus[ing] to
negotiate a fair and reasonable enterprise agreement".
More videos Constance sorry for the 'mess' but no refunds.
The state government has rejected calls for Sydney train passengers to
receive fare refunds despite two days of chaos on the city's rail network.
Workers will stop work at 12.01am on Monday, January 29, and continue until
midnight, on a day some students will be returning to school after the
holidays.
Alex Claassens, the union's NSW secretary, said commuters were given as much
notice as possible to make alternate arrangements.
"There's never an ideal time to take this kind of action, but the reality
is, we have to," Mr Claassens said.
"The Transport Minister and management haven't left us with any other
choice."
The strike announcement comes after a horror week for the city's rail
network, which left thousands of commuters stranded in peak hour.
Sydney Trains chief executive Howard Collins had warned if drivers refused
to work unplanned or rostered overtime, it could cause fresh chaos.
Train workers will strike for 24 hours on January 29 over a pay dispute.
Photo: Kate Geraghty .
Mr Claassens said the union had been attempting to negotiate an enterprise
agreement on behalf of 9000 workers for more than six months, but the NSW
government and trains management refused to bargain on pay and basic
conditions that impact workers' safety.
"The terrible way management and the NSW Government are willing to treat
their hard-working employees has been laid bare for everyone to see lately,"
he said. "All workers are asking for fair working conditions and wages in
return for the work they do."
A staff shortage caused major delays last week, including leaving commuters
packed at Wynyard Station. Photo: SEVEN NEWS .
He said the government could stop the strike at any time in the next two
weeks if they returned to the negotiating table with a "fair agreement".
Rail workers are unhappy about the current enterprise agreement and have
voted to take industrial action as they continue to fight for a 6 per cent
pay rise and improved working conditions including rostering and claiming
days off.
Transport minister Andrew Constance with Sydney Trains CEO Howard Collins at
Martin Place on Monday. Photo: Kate Geraghty .
While Mr Claassens acknowledges the proposed 6 per cent rise is "a bit out
there," he says members want decent recognition for their work.
Transport minister Andrew Constance denied negotiations have broken down and
said the strike was "ridiculous", "an escalation" and "weird behaviour" by
the RTBU.
"They will shut down the city in taking this step," Mr Constance said. "This
is not putting customers first, this is putting interests of union bosses
first, well above the customers.
"The government is willing to make a pay rise offer to Sydney train drivers
and NSW train drivers. It's in accordance with the wages policy, that is a
2.5 per cent per annum increase.
"In terms of the rest of the enterprise agreement, roll it over ... that's
what's on the table."
Mr Constance urged the union to call off the strike and "put commuters
first".
"We have a Fair Work hearing under way, we have a discussion that is going
to happen between Unions NSW and Sydney Trains on Thursday, and we'll go
from there," he said.
"The RTBU are no longer leading this negotiation, Unions NSW are, and that's
appropriate."
The strike comes after workers voted overwhelmingly in favour of taking
protected industrial action last week.
On Monday, the union announced it would take two forms of action. Workers
will wear union campaign material including badges from January 19, and an
indefinite ban on overtime will be in place from January 25.
Figures released by the union show 94 per cent of voting Sydney Trains
workers were in favour of striking for up to 72 hours, while 90 per cent of
NSW Trains workers who voted were in favour.
An overwhelming majority of workers who voted in the ballot were also in
favour of stopping work for a week or more.
Related Articles:
Cost of investigation into transport leaks climbs .
Sydney rail workers vote to take industrial action over pay .
Rail unions warn industrial campaign to start this Friday .
Sydney Trains short of drivers as crunch day arrives .
102 comments
<www.smh.com.au/nsw/no-other-choice-nsw-train-workers-to-strike-for-24-hours
-over-pay-dispute-20180116-h0j6g8.html>

Connecting regional Victoria: the challenges and opportunities. [spin and
worse. RRL was grossly underengineered, and was built because Victorian
management and signal engineers can't cope like Japanese ones do. Now they
want more because RRL can't cope].
As a large metropolis like Melbourne grows it is important that it has
strong links to its regions. Melbourne is growing at a faster rate than any
other city in Australia and, while the city is a popular place to live,
having strong and stable infrastructure that connects the city to its
regional hubs can help spread growth to these regions, or help ferry workers
from the regions into the CBD where they need to work.
Growth in regional Victoria is slowing. There was 28 per cent of the state's
population living in the regional areas in 1996, but this figure has slipped
recently to 23 per cent, with growth becoming more focussed on the city of
Melbourne.
But Victoria's regions are easily accessible and linking them to the state
capital provides many opportunities. "Victoria has a real advantage with the
number of large regional cities that are within convenient access of
Melbourne," says Stuart Moseley, chief executive officer of the Victorian
Planning Authority that aims to ensure that regional towns and cities are
successful at attracting new residents, for their own economic health and to
take some of the pressure off Melbourne's population growth.
Moseley does not see these towns and cities as just dormitory towns, simply
existing to feed the CBD with out-of-town workers but rather as important
components of an increasingly serious interplay and dialogue to be had
between the regions and the city.
"I heard that more people get off the train in Bendigo in the morning than
get on it to go the other way and that is a great example of how quality
transport allows people to move in both directions," says Moseley. "This
compact diversity that Victoria's regions have is a great opportunity both
for those regional towns and for Melbourne."
But the reality is that much of the regional movement will be based on
heading towards the city at present. "You have to accept the inevitability
that people are going to need to travel but also create opportunities for
them to work close to home," says Damien Augustinus, executive director
Plenary Group. "It is about creating centres of job activity across a range
of areas, including regional and rural. Dandenong showed that moving
government office into certain areas has then sprouted additional commercial
activity."
The state is off to a great start with the Regional Rail Link, the
multi-million dollar rail infrastructure that built dedicated tracks for
Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat services, but there is more needed to truly
bring the regions closer to the state's commercial hub - including making
sure that the key infrastructure building ends up in the hand of local
businesses and workers. "Not only because it gives them a vested interest in
creating something that is good for their own community," says Augustinus.
"But it creates the jobs and produces local skills that can then deliver the
broader sorts of social infrastructure that you need in those regions."
Those regional towns that are closer to Melbourne need to beef up
connections and those towns that are further afield need to increase their
populations, whether they use their position as a historic town, or simply
offer more affordable housing.
"These towns are growing via a mix of people heading out of Melbourne and an
influx from interstate. Additionally, there is an opportunity for migrants
to find a home in regional Victorian towns, if the Federal Government gets
the immigration levers right," says Moseley.
Phil Dreaver, managing director of road project joint venture, Netflow, says
a key way to keep smooth connections with the regions is to make sure that
country roads are kept well-maintained and safe.
"We have country roads that are narrow and people are doing 100 kilometres
an hour in each direction without median barriers," says Dreaver. "Road
upkeep is vital to ensuring traffic flows safely on country roads."
The basis for much of the future development is outlined in the state
government's Regional Network Development Plan that aims to bring a
coordinated approach to regional connection and avoid ad hoc infrastructure
plans. This Plan widely consulted those in the regions it affects and they
said they wanted smarter, more regular and more reliable connections -
connections that will allow these important regions to be a real part of
Melbourne's meteoric growth.
Netflow is the joint venture between Cintra and Plenary with a focus on road
projects in Australia and New Zealand. It brings together two of the largest
developers and managers of infrastructure globally to provide competitive
offerings for road projects including static and dynamic tolling, user
recognition and managed lanes. Netflow harnesses Cintra and Plenary's
extensive in-house capabilities in design and construction, traffic and
revenue analysis, project management, finance, road operations and
maintenance, customer service, and tolling technology. Netflow is contracted
by the Victorian Government to deliver the $1.8 billion Western Roads
Upgrade project - Victoria's largest single investment in arterial roads to
date - in Melbourne's west.
<http://paidcontent.theage.com.au/wbho/infrastructure/article/connecting-reg
ional-victoria-challenges-opportunities>

Cities of the future: smarter, greener and connected.
This is advertiser content for Netflow.
All around the world people are trying to imagine what living in the future
will look like. Visions of future cities vary widely but they have one thing
in common, they seek to improve our quality of life in the face of rising
populations - Melbourne alone is set to double in size to 8 million by 2050
- and the challenge is limited resources and smart, sustainable use of them.
Cities like Songdo in South Korea are looking to technology to solve city
problems. Here, in a city that has been built on reclaimed land near Seoul,
rubbish is sucked directly from individual homes forgoing the need for
rubbish bins and rubbish trucks that are also cluttering the streets.
In Japan, the Shimizu Corporation has sought to solve the problem of rising
land prices, overcrowding and the potential rising of the world's oceans by
planning an underwater city. The Ocean Spiral imagines 5000 people living in
a sealed transparent ball that sits on the ocean surface to allow in
sunlight but spirals half a kilometre towards the sea floor.
Less futuristic but equally socially progressive is a city like Singapore
that has 80 per cent of residents in public housing and very few with cars,
given that the city makes you pay heavily, up to $100,000, for the social
cost of owning a vehicle.
All of these projects are trying to work out what a future city looks like,
and population growth is a key concern. Almost 50 per cent of the world's
population currently lives in cities, and by 2050 that is expected to rise
to 75 per cent.
Closer to home, Stuart Moseley, chief executive officers of the Victorian
Planning Authority, is tasked with envisioning future cities for Melbourne
and regional Victoria, but has a less radical take on the problem.
"I take the view that cities have been with us for millennia and haven't
changed a lot," Moseley says. "The biggest change was the invention of the
motor car and I'm not sure that we have another disruption to our urban form
that is going to be that sweeping - but I think we have lots that will make
our cities work more efficiently and potentially better."
One of the main drivers of a future city will be our use of technology and
Moseley says there are two distinct camps when it comes to the impact this
will have: those who believe technology will completely disrupt our current
urban models and those who think it will complement the current systems we
have in place.
"Let's take driverless cars," says Moseley. "One view of it is we will be
able to shift away from thinking of transport as having to own a car and
instead think of it as a service you buy. We won't need to house cars, we
can simply dial up a car when we want one.
"The other view is that we will still want to retain our cars but we will
become smarter about using them," he concluded.
Whichever way we go the flow-on from this would change how road space is
used; it could do away with the need for parking and parking stations, free
up time to work in the cars instead of driving, or change road usage.
"I think the world is going to change significantly when it comes to how we
use roads in the next couple of decades," says Phil Dreaver, managing
director of road project joint venture, Netflow. "Driverless cars and ride
sharing are going to change the usage and demand patterns for roads. We need
to think about how you facilitate allowing autonomous vehicles on a road
with vehicles that are driven. When it comes to highways, if you have
vehicles that are GPS-run the way they use highways will be very different;
for example the tyres will likely always be in the same spot on the highway
so you won't get even wear across the road, so you might need a more
targeted maintenance strategy.
"Then you get to the next level where you have vehicles talking to traffic
lights and vehicles talking to each other, so the network should become more
efficient and you should be able to travel at higher speeds and closer
together because accidents will be reduced without people behind the wheel."
The provision of infrastructure is also set to get a boost from technology
according to Jackson Docherty, director for business growth at Victoria
Polytechnic. Docherty looks at the effect of technology in growing cities
and points to technology making builds faster and less labour intensive,
while also growing jobs.
"Things like 3D modelling are allowing buildings to be realised much more
quickly," he says. "That means that some industry jobs might disappear but
we have seen that there is actually an increase in jobs overall."
Peter Ryan, chief executive of WBHO Infrastructure, sees that the cities of
the future are going to be about using the space we have more intelligently.
"We are already finding that services - and I'm talking power,
telecommunications and gas - when we are asked to build infrastructure works
there is a great trend to either elevated structures or tunnels. This helps
avoid the acquisition of land and to invest in more green space."
Greener, smarter, faster and more efficient; this is an exciting vision of
the future and one that Melbourne can play a leading part in, if we get our
growth right.
Netflow is the joint venture between Cintra and Plenary with a focus on road
projects in Australia and New Zealand. It brings together two of the largest
developers and managers of infrastructure globally to provide competitive
offerings for road projects including static and dynamic tolling, user
recognition and managed lanes. Netflow harnesses Cintra and Plenary's
extensive in-house capabilities in design and construction, traffic and
revenue analysis, project management, finance, road operations and
maintenance, customer service, and tolling technology. Netflow is contracted
by the Victorian Government to deliver the $1.8 billion Western Roads
Upgrade project - Victoria's largest single investment in arterial roads to
date - in Melbourne's west.
<http://paidcontent.theage.com.au/wbho/infrastructure/article/cities-future-
smarter-greener-connected>.