Oh, isn’t this exciting. Bracksy and Baillieu fighting over who can provide the cheapest set of public transport fares. Baillieu promised at the beginning of the week to make public transport free for most students and has now come out saying he will abolish Zone 3 as well. Sound familiar? Seems the Libs really are into recycling these days – digging out their promise from the 2002 election.
Not to be outdone, Bracksy has promised the same and raised him one by including some V/Line stations in the mix.
In this game of one-up-man-ship, public transport commuters will be the real winners… unless they decide to slash public transport funding in other areas (say, for proposed bus route improvements) to fund these crazy promises. I just hope Baillieu can get Bracksy to promise to extend rail to South Morang, electrify some of the existing lines that aren’t, extend tram routes to Doncaster Hill and Knox, and provide a whole lot of new bus services (all during the next four years). Oh… and a train line to the airport would be good too… and trains that go til 3am seven days a week… *excited gasp*
You got that all written down, Baillieu?
Train line to the airport even for out of towners would be nice!
In both Brisbane and Sydney I can spend about $9 and get a train to the airport – both lines built reasonably recently. In Melbourne, it’s a 50 buck cab ride from the CBD…
Yes, that is what struck me on my first trip to Melbourne was having to take a taxi from the airport and no decent rail link.
Mark, to be fair, we have a bloody great tollway that takes you straight from the airport to the CBD, and you can get the Skybus for the trip. Takes roughly 20 minutes.
There are lots of higher priority areas for public transport in Melbourne than that.
I don’t want to belabour the point, Robert, because as you say there are more interesting and important things to discuss (my comment was a bit of a throw-away), but I prefer trains to minibuses!
Robert, we want trains like any other civilized city. Get on to it.
Well it makes a nice change from ‘the public service is hopelessly inefficient and we’ll just cut the fuck out of everything or flog it off’.
It’s around $12 in Brisbane; Skybus in Melbourne is around $15.
A rail line to the airport might be civilised. But reversing recent cuts to services on existing modes is probably more important.
What’s wrong with Skybus?
As Robert says, you can get from the Swanston St terminus to Tulla in 20 minutes. The bus deposits you at the door.
At the other end, the entire rail and tram network is a few steps away.
Rail construction to Tulla involves a huge fix capital cost for little or no gain in convenience and a probable loss in flexibility.
Actually there’s a small but pertinent problem with building a rail link to the airport in Melbourne.
The contract our former Premier Jeff Kennett signed with Transurban, the mob who built the afore-mentioned tollway to the airport, specifically says that the Government can not build any other road or public transport to the airport that would be in competition with their toll road.
For the next thirty years or so, from memory.
So neither party is going to promise a rail link to the airport in the near future, for good reason.
Personally, I’d rather see far more services on existing lines (like every five minutes during peak hour and every 10 off-peak) and the promised extensions to bus routes. As has already been said, the Skybus service is really pretty good.
I want to know why we have to wait till March for the abolition of Zone 3. If we’re all agreed – why can’t it start Monday?
PS Surely with the electronic vending machines they’re flexible enough to be changed remotely, as happens each time the prices go UP… surely they can just be programmed to treat all zone 3 stations as zone 2 stations?