Fw: Sat.1.12.18 daily digest
  Roderick Smith


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Subject: Sat.1.12.18 daily digest

Roderick.
Sat.1.12.18 Metro Twitter.
Sandringham line: Bustitution Parliament - Elsternwick all day, and South Yarra - Elsternwick during Night Network hours.
- 16.15: 33 degrees, no airconditioning on the bus. Traffic, not moving. The driver won’t let us off. Geez. Help.  Run 122. Left Elsternwick at 15.50.
Bustitution Westall - Pakenham/Cranbourne all day.
Frankston line: All services will terminate/originate from Caulfield while upgrades to the network take place. Change at Caulfield for connecting services.
14.00 Cranbourne/Pakenham/Frankston lines: Major delays (police at Caulfield).  Trains may be held.
- 14.18 Now minor and clearing.
- 16.30 The airconditioning isn’t working on the 15.30 from Frankston to Caulfield; I think that it is 603M.
14.15 Pizza from 'Through the Oven' has just been delivered to Westall. If you’re travelling on replacement buses today, grab a slice on your way through.
- I passed through there mid-afternoon Saturday.  The late lunch most appreciated.  Thank you Metro.
16.54 Minor delays Frankston - Caulfield (an earlier operational incident).
Extra trains and trams will be running for the Bon Jovi concert tonight at MCG.  With a big crowd expected, remember to allow extra time [because we can't cope].
- Unless you are from Ballarat.
- or Cohuna, Orbost, Stawell, Bright or Titybong. In fact there is more chance of PTV not getting you there and back on the same day.  Who Says You Can't Go Home? PTV.
- If you’re on the FRANKSTON or Sandringham lines then you’re screwed. Thank goodness for Uber. PTV a joke.
- 22.51 Did you put the extra train on before the concert finished?
- 22.52 Airconditioning would be nice too. It is not on the Lilydale train just leaving Richmond.
- [management apologist] Possibly a fault in your carriage, as trains are set automatically to 22c all year round.  It’s also very humid outside and a lot of passengers in a train can further impact the conditions of the carriage.  Try tweet the carriage number to metro so they can log a job for the airconditioning to be checked.
- 22.59 Extra trains were arranged around the scheduled finishing time, but the concert finished about 30min earlier than we were advised it would.
- 23.02 So, should there be a few trains on the next 10 minutes at Jolimont?  People are queuing along Wellington parade to get on the train.
- 23.38 How about putting on a Mernda train from Flinders St...we have been waiting nearly 45 min.
- 0.31 Sounds like your livin on a prayer to get home.
- 0.58 You absolute liars...the PTV site says that Bon Jovi will take the stage at 8.00...you can’t blame your pathetic lack of organisation and inability to deal with large crowds on Bon Jovi. The show went almost 2.5 hours, which is standard for any concert.
22.41 The 22.19 Mernda to Flinders Street has been delayed by vandalism near Epping.  Trains in the immediate area are being held while we attend to the damaged train.  Other trains may be delayed/altered.
23.14 All trains are currently operating direct to/from Flinders St while MFB attends to an incident.
- 23.18 Try communicating with your ‘customers’ in person. No one knows what’s going on. I've been waiting for an hour in the city - thanks for nothing.
- 23.27 This is what your ineptness causes. [photo]
- 23.31 Supposedly fire at Parliament.
- 23.23 Six trains arrive.  None take passengers.  Dangerously-full platforms.  Guys on the mic taking pleasure in telling people that they are not getting home...you're a joke.
- 23.26 Make that seven trains arrive with out taking passengers. Guy on mic on platform 6 and 7 loving it.  Although he is hiding from people worried they are not getting home.
- 23.56 Thank you.  The announcement told us to leave the platform because of fire; beyond that, there were no communications.  Shouldn’t be hard to coordinate a microphone and a direction plan, giving people an indication of how to get home, or at least where to ‘evacuate’ to!
- 0.11 No announcement was made the whole time while we were on the platform. Everyone was confused. Not good enough Metro.
- 0.22 Why are we stuck at Jolimont on the Hurstbridge train?
- 0.47 At SC station there was minimal communication and minimal staff accessible. This led to me and a young female in my care feeling very unsafe. I understand that the incident needs tending. Please be equipped with more staff and greater communication in future though.
- [~0.50: I had come on an 0.08 from Sandringham to Elsternwick, with a 4 min connection into an up on pfm 5.  At Richmond at ~0.50 there was a down Lilydale in pfm 10, ie direct from Flinders St, which left as soon as I had boarded.  It was full and standing, and passengers told me that they had been there for an hour].
- 1.46 SILENT CARRIAGES?

Then and now: Travel back in time along Swanston Street
Herald Sun November 29, 2018.
It’s one of Melbourne’s founding roads.
Created as part of the 1837 Hoddle Grid, Swanston St charts the city’s transformation from a camp on the Yarra River to a metropolis of five million people.
Swanston St in 1860.
Swanston St in the 1870s.
A view of Swanston St today.
How Swanston St has changed over the years
Named after Hobart banker and leading Port Phillip Association member, Captain Charles Swanston, it was home to Melbourne’s first school.
Built by Melbourne founder John Batman in 1837, the bulk of the Roxburgh Ladies Seminary is thought to be underneath the Young and Jackson Hotel, which opened its doors as the Princes Bridge Hotel 23 years later.
Young and Jackson Princes Bridge Hotel in 1970.
and today. Picture: Google Maps.
Across the road, St Paul’s Cathedral stands at the site of Melbourne’s first public official service in 1836.
The land on the corner of Flinders St served as a corn market before the opening of a church, parsonage and school in 1852.
They were demolished in the 1880s to make way for St Paul’s Cathedral, designed by William Butterfield even though the architect never set foot in the colony.
The cathedral was finished in 1891 but work on its spires did not begin until 1926.
The construction of St Paul's Cathedral, on the corner of Flinders and Swanston, in 1887.
An aerial view of the cathedral in 1934.
St Paul's today. Picture: Google Maps.
The Melbourne Town Hall was originally slated for the site of today’s Parliament House but this proposal was changed and switched to the intersection of Swanston and Collins streets.
The building was finished in 1854 before being torn down in the 1860s, with a new hall finished in 1870.
In 1888, the council purchased the police court building next door.
Part of the town hall had to be rebuilt after fire ripped through it in 1925.
Laying of the Melbourne Town Hall foundation stone in 1867.
A historical view of the police court building and Town Hall. Picture: Supplied
Melbourne Town Hall today. Picture: Google Maps
The State Library of Victoria opened as the Melbourne Public Library during the gold rush in 1856, and was much smaller than today’s building.
Previously, the site housed a caretaker’s cottage and police buildings.
Various extensions were added to the library, torn down and replaced throughout the rest of the 19th and the 20th centuries.
The latest redevelopment is set to finish in 2020.
The Melbourne Public Library in the 19th Century, possibly the 1880s. Picture: Supplied
The State Library in 2016. Picture: David Caird.
A Gothic Revival-style church was completed on the corner of Little Lonsdale St in 1863.
Now known as CrossCulture, it was designed by architect Charles Webb to replace a 1840s-era church at the same site.
Webb was also behind the Royal Arcade, South Melbourne Town Hall and Windsor Hotel.
Chinese arch on Swanston St, near the corner of Little Bourke St, in 1901. Built for federation celebrations and to mark the opening of the first federal parliament.
Swanston St’s landmark Carlton and United Breweries Malt Store dates back to 1904, housing large malt tanks designed by Sir John Monash.
The site was abandoned in 1987 and bought by developer Grocon in 2006.
Three pedestrians — French student Dr Marie-Faith Fiawoo, and Melbourne siblings Bridget and Alexander Jones — died after a wall collapse at the site in 2013.
LIVES FOREVER CHANGED BY WALL TRAGEDY
The Queen's Arms Hotel was built on the corner of Swanston St and Flinders Lane in 1845.
The Melbourne City Baths opened in 1860 to stop people bathing in the increasingly-polluted Yarra River.
The current Edwardian Baroque-style building was finished in 1904 but had become run down by the 1940s.
There was a push to demolish the baths in the 1970s but restoration work the following decade included the addition of features like a gymnasium and spas.
Historical photograph of the Melbourne City Baths.
The baths turned 150 years old in 2010.
The site of the former City Square earned its place in rock ‘n’ roll history when AC/DC used it to film a 1976 performance of It’s a Long Way to the Top.
Opened between Collins St and Flinders Lane in 1980, the square’s centrepiece was the controversial Ron Robertson-Swann-designed Vault sculpture.
Also known as the Yellow Peril, the piece later moved to Batman Park and then the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
City Square was demolished in 2017 to make way for Metro Tunnel construction works.
Construction of City Square in 1979.
The City Square site is being dug up for the Metro Tunnel. Picture: Google Maps
The Coop’s Shot Tower inside Melbourne Central is one of just three remaining towers of its kind in the country, and the only one you can climb.
Built between 1889 and 1890, the 50 m tall structure manufactured lead shots until its closure in 1961.
After nearly disappearing from the city’s skyline in the 1970s, it now houses a retail store and museum.
An 84m-high conical glass roof also sits around the tower to protect it from the elements.
View of the Coop's shot tower in 1935.
The conical glass tower protects the shot tower from the elements. Picture: Supplied
QV, or the Queen Victoria Village, stands on the site of Victoria’s first hospital.
It started as a 10-bed cottage on the corner of Swanston and Lonsdale streets in the 1840s, growing with the gold rush before being rebuilt in 1912-13..
The Royal Melbourne Hospital, as it became known, moved to Parkville in 1944 before the Queen Victorian Hospital took over the buildings in the late 1980s.
The next decade saw the CBD site remain largely empty, something then-Premier Jeff Kennett labelled a “bloody disgrace”.
Much of it was sold to Nauru in the ‘90s but the country couldn’t afford the repayments and returned it to the Melbourne City Council in 1999.
The QV development was unveiled in 1999 and finished in 2004.
View of the Queen Victoria Hospital on the corner of Swanston and Lonsdale streets in 1948.
What the corner looks like now. Picture: Google Maps
The Manchester Unity Building was the site of one of Melbourne’s most chilling crimes.
On St Patrick’s Day 1978, jewellers Paul Pace and Keith Hyman, and customer Robert Wartman, were shot dead execution-style during a heist.
Convicted killer Alex Tsakmakis was the suspect but never charged. Tsakmakis was then murdered in prison in 1988.
The Manchester Unity building murders happened in 1978.
The corner of Swanston and Collins streets today. Picture: Google Maps
Constructed in 1932, the 132-foot Chicago’s Tribune Tower-inspired building was Melbourne’s tallest at the time. It was also the first with an escalator.
The site had been purchased for 335,000 pounds by the Manchester Unity independent Order of Odd Fellows in 1928.
Looking north at the corner of Swanston and Collins streets in 1936.
A major change hit Swanston St in 1992, with the banning of cars between Flinders and La Trobe streets.
The road partially reopened in 1999, between the hours of 7am and 7pm, before closing again to through traffic by 2012.
Undated photo of Flinders St Station, which opened in 1910.
Australia Day 2018 outside Flinders St Station. Picture: Jason Edwards
MORE MELBOURNE HISTORY:
SERIAL KILLER SUSPECTED OF TRIPLE MURDER.
HOW YOUR SUBURB’S MAIN STREET HAS CHANGED.
MELBOURNE'S BEST AND WORST MOMENTS.
WHERE TO FIND MELBOURNE’S OLDEST LANDMARKS.
WILL TUNNEL DIG UNEARTH MELBOURNE PIONEER’S COTTAGE?
FORGET ME NOT: MELBOURNE’S GLORIOUS BUILDINGS.
<www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/then-and-now-travel-back-in-time-along-swanston-street/news-story/aca064252f567fdf90bc741ff1b02c27>

Don’t assume more expressways and trains will fix traffic jams 1 December 2018.  104 comments.
When Marion Terrill, of the Grattan Institute, set out to find out how much commuting times had worsened in Sydney and Melbourne, she discovered something you’ll find very hard to believe. But it would come as no surprise to transport economists around the world.
Everyone is sure traffic congestion has got much worse in recent years. This is only to be expected since Sydney’s population grew at the annual rate of 1.9 per cent, and Melbourne’s rate grew even faster, at 2.3 per cent, between the censuses of 2011 and 2016.
Credit:Illustration: Glen Le Lievre
Both cities have grown much faster than the Australian population overall. People are crowding into our big cities, much to the disapproval of many people already living there.
Why are they piling into already-crowded cities? For reasons economic geographers call “economies of agglomeration”. One way for countries to get richer is for their businesses to pursue economies of scale; another way is for businesses and their workers to pursue the gains from agglomeration – a fancy word for piling things together.
There are three kinds of agglomeration economies. They come from matching (in a big city, people are more likely to find a job, while businesses are more likely to find the particular workers they need; there can be greater specialisation), sharing  (less idle capacity in, say, car parks, or waiting around for customers), and learning (more workers for you to see and imitate; knowledge and know-how shared face-to-face).
Sharing, matching and learning can occur in two ways. When a lot of firms in the same industry gather in the same city, or just because a lot of people and firms are located together, making the city large enough to justify, for instance, heart and lung transplant centres.
Of course, along with the great benefits of crowding together go the costs of crowding together - such as feeling terribly crowded.
There are more people per square kilometre living in the centres of our big cities than there were five years ago. Sydney’s population density has increased by 23 per cent – and Melbourne’s by a mere 46 per cent.
And surely more crowding means more traffic congestion. But this is where Terrill and the co-author of her report, Hugh Batrouney, found their first strange fact. Between the last three censuses, from 2006 to 2016, there’s been virtually no change in the distance between where people live and where they work, measured as the crow flies.
Next surprise came from the HILDA survey – household income and labour dynamics in Australia – which, among other things, asks people how long they spend commuting.
“Although the traffic really is heavier, making trips less pleasant, this doesn’t prolong the time of the trip as much as we think it has.”
In the four surveys between 2004 and 2016, for both Sydney and Melbourne there was no change in the fact that a quarter of workers had one-way commutes lasting no longer than 15 minutes. One half of workers had commutes no longer than 30 minutes.
When you take it up to the experience of three-quarters of workers, there was some increase over the years in Sydney, but only a small increase in Melbourne. Other figures, from Transport for Victoria, tell a similar story.
So, we all think the increasing traffic volume is leading to greater delay and, hence, longer commute times, but the best available actual measures of commute times say they’re little changed.
Find that hard to believe? Well, as I say, few urban economists would. Why not? Because it fits well with what they call “Marchetti’s constant”. Marchetti was an Italian physicist credited with discovering the empirical truth that the average time spent by a person on commuting is about an hour a day – 30 minutes each way.
The amazing truth of this “constant” has been shown by many studies of many cities around the world.
And it fits with another empirical regularity known as the “Lewis-Mogridge position”, formulated by those gents in 1990: “traffic expands to meet the available road space”.
The government notices that traffic is particularly congested on a certain road, so it builds a big new expressway. When it opens, the time taken to get from A to B falls dramatically. But when people realise this, more of them stop travelling to work by public transport and start going by car.
So many people do this that the speed gain disappears within months, even weeks. The time taken to get from A to B goes back to about what it was before the expressway was built.
The only change is that a higher proportion of workers are able to go by car. The traffic jam is often just shifted to another place on the road network.
Getting back to road congestion in Sydney and Melbourne, how can the gap between what we think has happened and what actually happened be explained?
One possible part of the explanation is that although the traffic really is heavier, making trips less pleasant, this doesn’t prolong the time of the trip as much as we think it has.
But the main explanation – both in Oz and in other countries – is that commuters adapt to the greater congestion.
They take evasive action by moving to a job that’s closer to home, or moving to a home that’s closer to the job. Or they stop going by car and start using public transport.
One thing that really has changed with our bigger cities is more crowded trains and buses.
It’s as though each of us has our own internal, unconscious regulator that draws the line at 30 minutes and, when that limit is exceeded, prompts us to take steps to get travel times back down to where they should be.
Terrill and Batrouney are clear on this: in neither city was enough new infrastructure built between 2011 and 2016 to explain why the huge population growth didn’t lengthen commute times.
The government didn’t fix it, you and I did. Which says we ought to be wary of thinking the obvious – and only - solution to greater crowding is great spending on transport infrastructure.
Ross Gittins is the Herald’s economics editor
Related Article Why Scott Morrison has had a change of heart on population.
<www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/don-t-assume-more-expressways-and-trains-will-fix-traffic-jams-20181129-p50j6e.html>

$146m Metronet revamp signals end of notorious Bayswater Bridge 1 December 2018.
Construction of the $1 billion Morley to Ellenbrook will begin next year with an upgrade of Bayswater Station.
The $146 million project also signals the end of the notorious Bayswater overpass, a cause of sheepish embarrassment for dozens of Perth truck drivers in recent years.
The Bayswater station upgrade is the first stage of Metronet's new Morley-Ellenbrook Line.  Credit: WA Government
Three main train lines will connect to the Bayswater station - the existing Midland service and new lines to Ellenbrook and Perth Airport.
Premier Mark McGowan said a bigger station, better road network and more public space was based on public feedback on the station design.
“Along with creating a junction for our new Metronet lines, it will pump vibrancy and activity into the Bayswater town centre to support more jobs and local businesses," he said.
Truck drivers will no longer have to negotiate the Bayswater overpass after the station upgrade.Credit:Will Sobey
Truck drivers will be spared a showdown with the notorious Bayswater bridge, with the 3.8m overpass claiming 15 trucks in the past year, with three incidents this month alone.
"Part of this project also involves raising the Bayswater bridge, which has trapped at least 20 trucks since I have been Premier,” Mr McGowan said
Part of the project includes lowering a section of Whatley Crescent between King William and Hamilton streets and a second underpass connecting to Beechboro Road under the new rail bridge.
The wider precinct will feature better connections for pedestrians and improved traffic management and street designs for motorists, while bus services will be integrated with local traffic and better connected to trains.
How the new Bayswater overpass will look once the upgrade is complete.  Credit: WA Government
Transport minister Rita Saffioti said the project was driven by locals and hoped it would transform Bayswater.
"We want to build something that balances community needs, transport outcomes, heritage and new commercial opportunities," she said on Saturday.
"It will be Bayswater Station’s biggest overhaul in more than a century ... and a vital first step for the Morley-Ellenbrook Line, which will connect the north-east corridor to Perth’s rail network for the first time."
Ms Saffioti said to expect further announcements on the Forrestfield Airport Link before Christmas.
Tunnelling for the new $1.8 billion project stopped in September after a sinkhole appeared, with fears projected costs could blow out.
A tender for construction works at Bayswater station will go out in early 2019, with work to commence late 2019.
<www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/146m-metronet-revamp-signals-end-of-notorious-bayswater-bridge-20181201-p50jmw.html>