Just a few minutes ago we had a minor earthquake! Gidget was freaking out, while the neighbour’s dog was just excited everyone was having a gathering on the driveway, hahah. Usually the tremors we get are so minor I don’t even notice them, but this one was very noticeable.
Looks like it was a magnitude 5.7 quake, about 125km ENE of Melbourne, at a depth of 2km. Although Geoscience Australia has it at more like magnitude 6, at a depth of 10km.
Good blog post about how Melbourne’s highly radial railway network (which is itself the backbone of our public transport network, certainly the high-frequency part) is not well-optimised for cross-suburban trips. This is unlike Sydney, which has numerous connection points outside the inner city and even a couple of lines that don’t touch the CBD at all (the T5 runs north-south in the western suburbs, and the new “metro” line runs east-west across northern suburbs).
The post does say that we don’t need to wait until the Suburban Rail Loop is built to make improvements – we can reform bus networks to create more high-quality “feeder” routes, we can optimise timetables for efficient connections between different modes, and we can make less radical infrastructure improvements (in comparison to the SRL) like dedicated busways and tramways, to ensure those modes can run at higher speeds.
A couple of years ago, I think, I put out a tweet that went along the lines of, “So sick of hanging out the same washing day after day and it still NEVER DRIES. How are you supposed to line-dry clothes in the winter?”
This got retweeted by a mutual with tens of thousands of followers, and then I got inundated with snarky replies like “TIL they don’t have dryers in Australia …
The Victorian DoT is starting to review Melbourne’s bus network, which I hope will result in improvements – our current network is definitely not great. Anyway, it prompted me to write a page about buses and how to improve them for my new “personal wiki”. Check it if you like 🙂
For large swathes of outer-suburban Melbourne, buses are the only form of public transport available, and even in the middle suburbs (like where I live) buses are necessary to “plug the gaps” between railway lines, which fan out radially from the city and never intersect. So it’s unfortunate, then, that our bus network is so crappy.
Most Melburnians seem to see buses as a mode of …
Like many people, I think, I have an instinctive contempt for property developers.
It’s not that I object to new apartment buildings, per se. There do seem to be a lot of people in Melbourne who think that three million was the perfect population size for our city, and since as far as they’re concerned we were “full” at that point, we should continue to have a housing …
Tonight we set our clocks back to return to standard time, and as such here’s a discovery I made through Twitter: according to this tweet , it’s only in 1895 that Melbourne joined Sydney on GMT+10, which is indeed Sydney’s “true” time zone (GMT+10’s central meridian, 150°E, runs through the middle of Sydney). Before that, Melbourne time ran …
Jessica Smith is a left-wing feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also very interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.