Melbourne on Jayeless.net

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 22:18:45 +1100

Link: It could be last drinks at famous John Curtin Hotel as owners put iconic pub up for sale

I do hope the trade unions can get their bid accepted, and save this historic pub from destruction and redevelopment into apartments 🙏

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 11:41:08 +1100

Link: Melbourne suburb names etymology

A couple of interesting maps showing the etymology of Melbourne suburb names (one map is “what language did the name come from”, the other is “what did the original name refer to (a person, a place, etc.)”. One thing that boggles my mind is just how far Melbourne’s metropolitan boundaries extend to the east – I already knew the Mornington Peninsula is included which is ridiculous because most of it is rural, but all those mountains and national parks to the east too?? Just absurd 😛

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 10:31:43 +1100

This past week I had some work that took me to the southern part of the Frankston line, a section of which has just been grade-separated (lowering the railway line below road level so cars don’t have to wait at level crossings). I took some pictures of the newly rebuilt Bonbeach Station (and a shot of the view towards the beach from there, just because 😊). Honestly I thought it was pretty nice – the station is a lot closer to normal ground level than the stations further north at Ormond/McKinnon/Bentleigh, and the sandstone-like walls soften its appearance from those other stations’ imposing industrial chic. Relevant to my interests, too, the rebuilt station is further south and thus closer to where I actually had to go to work!

On a sorta related note: the station also had a friendly NZ woman working there to talk to people about the new station, and she was also rather keen on telling me how amazing all the grey and drizzly weather was 😂

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 09:27:46 +1000

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.

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 11:36:14 +1000

Link: Building Melbourne's Useful Network Part 101: Suburban connection points - the secret to useful & versatile trains? by Peter Parker

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.

Laundry in Winter

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 15:51:47 +1000

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 🙄” and “Everyone in Europe manages this easily so I guess you’re just really dumb,” and yet no one really had a great answer to my question (not even the Europe person when pressed, shockingly).¹ I got some helpful tips, like “if it doesn’t dry in one day, take it in overnight and re-hang it the next morning, so frost doesn’t re-wet it overnight” and “windier dry weather is a more important target than sunny weather”… but these tips have not been the magic bullet I was looking for.

I feel like it never used to be so hard when I was growing up during the Millennium drought. For about ten years it almost never rained in the winter, so all of this was much less of a problem. But the drought broke as I reached adulthood, and most winters since then have seen Melbourne closer to its long-term average levels of rainfall, with rain on over half of the days. This winter has so far felt worse than average, with rain on at least two-thirds of days, and even the dry days mostly being thick with clouds and humidity.

At our place, our laundry system is breaking down. We’re hoarding so many dirty clothes in anticipation of the rare dry days that we’re not actually getting to the bottom of the laundry basket when those days arrive. When we do hang things out, they’re not drying, even when we hang it out and take it in 2–3 days in a row (until the dry spell ends). From the time we can actually get it up to the time we take it in before sunset, that’s often only 6 or 7 hours… in the summer clothes can dry that fast, but not in this cold, humid and often sunshineless weather. Drying clothes inside isn’t really working either because Vivian just stacks it all in a pile and leaves it in the coldest room in the flat, which makes for less than optimal drying conditions. I could take responsibility for re-hanging it all properly myself, but when I’m so utterly lethargic from seasonal depression that’s a really tough ask. Another problem is that our place is prone to damp – when we have cranked the heating to dry clothes indoors, the windows fog up and the humidity is palpable, making me worry that we’re going to encourage mould.

We have considered getting a dryer. The problem is that our laundry doesn’t have room for one. It’s not that common to have a dedicated laundry room in a flat in the first place, so we’re better off than some people, but the room is only large enough for one machine, not two. So then I’ve considered replacing our washing machine with a combined washer-dryer, but every model I’ve found is front-loading and has hinges on the left.² Well guess what… our laundry only has a slot for a machine on the right side of the room (so to load such a machine as I described, you’d need to reach over the door and chuck clothes in from that awkward angle… not to mention getting them out again), and there’s very little space in front of it for the door to actually open due to an in-built cupboard that’s there. Vivian’s asked if we could buy a dryer and put it outside… but there are no electrical outlets out there… and I can’t help but think an appliance will not last long left outside 24/7. They’re not designed for that, are they? If we owned the place we could consider remodelling the laundry, even making room for a dedicated dryer, but we do not. So in the long term I think our only viable option is to replace the dedicated washer with a washer-dryer combo regardless of the awkward positioning, but in the short term that feels wasteful when the old machine works perfectly well for what it does. After all, is it worth owning a dryer we’d only need to use for one-third of the year?³ (And yet every time we reach that one-third of the year, I’m like, ummm, yes, this would definitely be worth it.) Maybe when we one day have kids and our laundry demands increase exponentially, we’ll have to bite the bullet.

So short of that, what else could we try? We could try moving a clothes horse to our bedroom, where we run a heater overnight, I guess. I could iron more of my clothes (maybe the heat from the iron will get them to dry the last little bit of the way? although it wouldn’t be an option for everything – not fleece or wool, nor would it really work for towels or bedsheets…). These options just sound kind of labour-intensive to me, and at a time of the year when I struggle to muster the energy for much of anything.

I guess this post is more of a rant than a real call for help. I think I understand our options at this point and it’s just a matter of deciding what trade-offs we can live with. Just another reason why I cannot fucking stand the winter 😅

I tried looking up this supposed “European solution” myself but it seemed to be just… windiness? Like finding a breezeway with very very high winds and then it doesn’t matter if it’s cold and gloomy, the sheer amount of fast-moving air will buffet the moisture out of garments. So that’s nice and all, but I do not have a breezeway. ↩︎
It seems like in the US they have stack combo units, with a top-loading washer below and a front-loading dryer on top. That would work with the space we have, but such units do not exist in Australia 😢 ↩︎
May weather is so bad most years that I’m counting it as a winter month here, ok. ↩︎

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 12:25:01 +1000

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 🙂

Melbourne's Property Development Crisis

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 15:07:00 +1000

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 policy based on only having enough housing for three million people. I’m not one of those people. Melbourne is about to hit five million if we haven’t got there already, and all of us need decent places to live. If we don’t want to become a sprawling car-centric hellscape,¹ that means the inner and middle suburbs need to become a lot denser than they’ve been historically – and yes, that means apartment buildings.

What I dislike is how this construction of apartment buildings is happening. Everything is completely atomised, every individual apartment block built in complete isolation with no consideration of the surrounding area. If we really wanted to densify our city sensibly, we would consider entire local areas at a time. There would be some kind of plan for what level of density was appropriate for an area, and from that we would:

increase the capacity and frequency of public transport routes in the area to match
increase the capacity of nearby hospitals (and other medical facilities), and/or build new ones, and ensure there is enough staff (not only by recruiting new workers, but by improving conditions and pay for existing employees to improve retention)
increase the capacity of nearby public schools, and/or build new ones, and ensure enough staff on the same proviso as above
consider how much extra private motor vehicle traffic would be added to the streets if all new residents drive at the same rates as old ones. Assuming you do not want this (because it is not sustainable indefinitely), increase the capacity and frequency of public transport even further than in point 1, and also consider the introduction of new routes if the reason people are driving is because they want to go to places public transport can’t take you to efficiently
schedule upgrades to essential infrastructure, like sewerage, gas mains, electricity lines, telecommunications nodes, etc. to make sure they can handle the increased demand

None of the above ever happens, or at least not before hundreds of apartments have been built and thousands of new residents have been living there for many years! The government wants the sweet sweet stamp duty revenue from all the thousands upon thousands of apartments across the city being sold and resold (and speculated on – stamp duty grows ever-higher the higher property prices go), but they don’t want to invest money into health, education or infrastructure at anywhere near the speed our growing city actually needs.

Then the next reason I hate that the densification of our city is completely privatised and totally at the whim of individual property developers is that the only thing any of them care about is profit; they have no interest in providing housing that is actually suitable for a diverse range of people.

We’ve all heard the stories about the shoddy construction standards and outright negligence that goes into too many modern apartment buildings. Cabinet doors that fall off almost the second a tenant moves into the apartment. Non-existent insulation making you totally dependent on air conditioning to maintain a liveable temperature even on normal summer or winter days (let alone heatwaves or cold snaps). Pipes and the like which need replacing just a few years after construction. Sometimes, the problems are more serious again – flammable cladding, virtually guaranteeing that a fire that starts in one apartment will spread to all the others upstairs from it. Or a foundation so unsteady that cracks start running through the building and the entire thing has to be evacuated and abandoned. In these latter cases, it is of course the poor schmucks who bought apartments from these cowboys who have to pony up the cash to fix the problem, not the developers whose negligence actually caused the issue. They got their profit and they’re home free.

Then even if you ignore the fact that some of these apartments are falling apart within a few years, there is also the serious issue that there is no diversity of accommodation being built. Nearly all these new apartments are one or two bedrooms. A small number, perhaps one in 12, will have three bedrooms – and those will be so expensive that you could almost just buy a full house in the same suburb. There will certainly be no more than a tiny, tiny percentage which are built to be, say, accessible to people with reduced mobility (who may rely on a wheelchair or a walker to get around their own home, and may need things like handrails, a roll-in shower, and lowered countertops). It’s like in the minds of property developers, every single person in the city is one half of a dual-income couple with at most one kid. These are the only people they envisage living in these apartments.

I specify “living in”, because it’s pretty obvious the vast majority of these are not intended to be owner-occupied. The idea is that multimillionaire investors will buy up most of them to create vast property portfolios, and if they’re feeling magnanimous, rent them out to the working class.² Now I know there are many cities where the average person doesn’t expect to own property and renting for life is normalised (especially big North American cities like NYC, Toronto, San Francisco…) – but as a result these are cities where tenants have many more rights than tenants do in Australia. There’s no rent control here, there’s no ban on telling tenants to leave at the end of their lease term (indeed, if the owner sells up, you get asked to leave even if you’re in the middle of a fixed-term lease); until recently tenants weren’t even allowed to put hooks on a wall to hang photos. There is no such thing as having financial security in Australia without owning your own home – the aged pension here is only enough money to live on if you don’t have rent or a mortgage to pay. So, it’s a really serious problem here that first-home buyers can’t afford houses cos they’re all getting bought by property developers and we can’t afford apartments cos they’re all getting bought up by investors.

For people of my generation, there are pretty much three ways to get into the property market in this city (assuming you have permanent, full-time employment, which already excludes a lot of people):³ either you have an inheritance to cover a huge chunk of the price, or you buy a too-small apartment and try to cram a family in there, or you buy a house in the absolute sticks and resign yourself to a lifetime of excruciating long drives in maddening dense traffic to go anywhere. Now I’m not gonna lie, my partner and I are fortunate enough that we’re probably going to fall into the first of those categories, at least eventually (maybe not before we actually raise a family). But it shouldn’t take family wealth just to secure yourself a modest home.

Now, these problems are not exclusively down to property developers. Investors and especially the government deserve their fair share of blame as well. If we really wanted to build homes for people, the process wouldn’t be this privatised free-for-all in the first place, but there would be comprehensive area plans and apartment blocks would not be built for profit. (Or at least, margins would be a lot slimmer as developers would be required to build to a high standard, construct larger apartments even if it means fewer in a block, and not build blocks covering an entire lot, edge to edge, so as to preserve/cultivate tree cover and allow runoff to permeate into the water table below.) It’d be great if new apartment buildings could be as attractive as the old houses they replace, instead of all ugly as sin, too. It’s this frustration, and not NIMBYism, that gives me my contempt for property developers.

I would argue that vast swathes of Melbourne are tragically already like this, and that’s something we urgently need to fix too ↩︎
The way investors make money on our housing stock is 1) take out an interest-only loan to buy; 2) pay only the interest for five years (when the “interest-only” part expires); 3) sell five years after they bought it, making hella profit because property prices are just rising that fast. Often they do rent out these properties to cover their interest payments, but some investors don’t even bother to do that, feeling that that the profit from reselling is enough and that actually renting it out carries too much administrative overhead, like actually sending maintenance people in to fix all the shit that is broken in these shoddily-built apartments. ↩︎
A lot of older people, particularly, seem to think the only obstacle young people face buying a home is the deposit. While sure, it’s hard to save up $100,000, paying like $2,000+ a month isn’t chump change either, especially if you’re a one-income household or you have to pay that and childcare fees that are another $2,000 a month again or whatever. Not to mention that you probably won’t even get a loan unless you have a permanent job – and many young people, if they’re not outright casual, can only get fixed-term contracts these days. ↩︎

Melbourne Time

Sat, 03 Apr 2021 20:15:00 +1100

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 20 minutes behind Sydney’s, as we’re at 145°E.

I think I’m much more opinionated than the average person about what time sunrise should be.¹ When I’ve been to Sydney in the depths of winter, I’ve found their 7am–4:55pm daylight hours considerably nicer than our 7:35am–5:10pm at that time of year (I hate getting ready for work in the dark 😠). If we reintroduced Melbourne Time, we could get 7:15am–4:50pm which I think would be a big improvement even if we can’t actually shift the city further north for more daylight. On the other hand, our summer daylight hours don’t need to shift any earlier, so I guess the jump for DST would just have to increase to 1½ hours to compensate. (haha just kidding… unless? 🥺)²

As a bonus Twitter thread from the same guy, he also did one last year about New Zealand introducing a common, nation-wide timezone in 1868 (although not the UTC+12 that NZST is today). And apparently a New Zealander invented DST, so if you hate it, blame him! 😉

Pretty simple: no later than the time I have to get up on a weekday, and preferably no earlier than 6am, although the longer the day the less I care about sunrise being before 6am. Just don’t pull a Brisbane, which has daylight hours of 4:45am–6:15pm in mid-November… ↩︎
Please don’t @ me with any “wElL aCtUaLlY DST iS rEaLlY bAd FoR pEoPlE wItH sLeEp DiSoRdErS aNd YoU’rE a MoNsTeR wAnTiNg tO mAkE iT wOrSe” takes because this is not a formal policy document and I’m allowed to wistfully long for things that cannot happen OK ↩︎