Bendigo Day Trip

On the Sunday of the Queens Birthday long weekend I went for a drive with my mum to Bendigo. Been meaning to post this one for a while, there's nothing like other bloggers posting on a similar topic to spur me into action.

Somewhere under all that cloud is Mount Macedon

We drove there along the Calder Freeway (it's all Freeway now) as far as Elphinstone where we turned "inland" towards Sutton Grange, Mandurang and Strathfieldsaye. Along the way we stopped to do a Geocache by a creek near Sutton Grange, and then went on all the way to Strathfieldsaye just outside of Bendigo.

The next stop was Kennington Reservoir, where I found a second Geocache.

Kennington Reservoir

Next was lunch, had in the car by Lake Weeroona. Sandwhiches from home along with hot jam doughnuts bought from one of two caravans beside the lake.

One of the main reasons for the trip was for mum to visit Bendigo pottery to top up the dinner set. After getting some plates and bowls it was back on the road and into the back blocks of White Hills to look for a house where a relative used to live. Successfully found, we continued on and made our way to Eaglehawk before heading back to Bendigo proper via a round about sort of route.

Shamrock Hotel

Old Buiding, now a museum and tourist
information centre.

I should know what it was originally, but can't remember.
I suspect it was whwere the kept the gold Does anyone know?

I had two more Geocaches on my list for the day, so we went back to lake Weeroona to look for the first. It was really busy on this side of the lake and had to wait ages to get a car park. Then I had to be extra sneaky to retrieve the cache without being seen. While I was waiting for my chance I made friends with a swan.

Lake Weeroona

Black Swan

Tram crossing creek

The Bendigo Creek, now a drain

The final Geocache I found before heading home was near the Bendigo station.

The functional side of Bendigo rail station

We stuck to the Calder Highway all the way back to Melbourne.

Green for the company

The company I work for has recently gone "green", they created a series of "webinars" for staff on climate change and various other environmental issues. A further part of this drive has been to change all the screen savers on company computers to be a blank screen, and to encourage people to turn screens and computers off overnight. I admit that I used to leave my computer on overnight and just turn the screen off, at weekends I used to turn it off. Now it gets turned off every night. I think most people do turn their machines off every night, except if they need to run a process overnight, which in my area does happen quite frequently.

Soon all PCs are to be replaced with laptops, or so I gather from the questionnaire that was circulated recently. Sure they are more energy efficient, but I actually chose a desktop. The current desktops we have seem to struggle (well mine does) and I doubt a laptop will be much better. I suspect I will get one anyway due to the companies one size fits all IT policy. Either way it doesn't bother me.

The thing is, I see so many things wrong in my workplace in terms of energy wastage (and wastage in general) it's not funny. The building I work in heats up too much, in both Winter and Summer. There is something seriously wrong with the air conditioning and no matter how many times they fix it, it never gets any better. Being a modern (probably mid-late 1990s) glass and concrete building I suspect it is not properly insulated or ventilated either. On our floor we have large floor to ceiling windows facing north and west, which are definitely tinted, but I'm not sure if they are double glazed. Either way, it gets really hot and bright in the warmer part of the year. The only covering are some flimsy Venetian blinds to that have very poor insulating properties. What would make the biggest difference in my opinion is better insulating blinds and the ability to open windows for some natural ventilation.

As for water wastage, we have toilet cisterns that continually run even though a plumber has been in to change the washers and things. Some kind person printed out some signs telling us how to flush them so they don't run. Of course these instructions don't work, and I usually end up fiddling around until it stops. Most people just walk out without checking. On one occasion I resorted to turning off in one of the cubicles. Soon enough our sign writter had put a sign up saying there was no water and that a plumber was on the way. I think I went too far, but surely the tap is the first thing you would check if there is no water?

Really the whole building needs better maintenance, and even renovation as it is quite poorly designed.

Rail to Doncaster

In The Age today is an opinion piece written by Graeme Davison. He rightly asserts that the Doncaster rail line should have been built 40 years ago when the area began to be heavily developed, but is against the building of a line because of the issues involved with tunnelling and the fact it would travel along the Eastern Freeway away from where the potential passengers live:

Yet, for more than half its length, a Doncaster railway would run through the Yarra Bend National Park and across the parkland and golf courses of the Yarra River flats. Golfers and bushwalkers might welcome it, but it would generate next to no commuter traffic. At North Balwyn (Burke Road), passengers would alight about half a kilometre from the nearest houses, while on the north side of Bulleen station, students from Marcellin College are about the only prospective customers. The line would cross Doncaster Road about 1.5 kilometres from the main transport and shopping hub, Shoppingtown. You would either have to tunnel several kilometres under Shoppingtown to East Doncaster, extend the Doncaster tramway to Shoppingtown or rely on feeder buses to reach a station on Doncaster Road.

Davison claims that the railway would travel mostly through parkland and would not create patronage. He seems to conveniently forget that the freeway runs through there too, and does not gain much in the way of traffic from those areas either.

Davison also asserts that you would need to tunnel for kilometres under Doncaster Shoppingtown to East Doncaster. I don't know where he has been for the last 40 years, but a vast amount of tunnelling has always been on the agenda in the Doncaster area. This is not a new thing, and in fact it will help bring the line closer to where the people are, something he uses against the building of the line in the same paragraph.

Davison goes on to claim that:

Transport research shows the reluctance of commuters to put up with bad connections. Any break in transport mode — say, from bus to train — creates frustration, especially if the scheduled service doesn't come. If the Doncaster rail requires a network of feeder buses, the passengers might as well stay aboard the existing express bus services and ride down the freeway along a dedicated lane all the way to the city. Maybe that's why the Eddington report hasn't opted for a Doncaster railway but for a major upgrade of the existing DART (Doncaster Area Rapid Transit) bus service. You may be asking: but don't buses run on polluting and fast-depleting oil? Yes, but although trains run on clean and abundant electricity, that power is generated from the most polluting of all fossil fuels, brown coal. It's only when trains and trams are full that they come out ahead of cars. Railways and trams wear a halo of environmental respectability that is only half-deserved.

To that I say that if the rail frequency and feeder bus frequency are sufficiently high then issues of missed connections will not be a problem. If the rail frequencies on this line were near metro levels (and I would expect the Doncaster line to be part of a segregated network than an extension of the current system) of a train every 5 minutes in peak and every 10 minutes in off peak. Have the feeder buses run every 10 minutes on main roads intersecting the rail line throughout the day, which means the longest connection in the peak would be about 5 minutes and at most 10 minutes off peak. Overall this would equate to an average waiting time for the whole journey of 7.5 minutes peak and 10 minutes off peak. If the connections are good (and by current Melbourne standards these are very good), people will use them.

He does make a good point with the fact that we get our electricity from brown coal. Cleaner and more sustainable energy sources are something that we need to work on. However that does not diminish the fact that all forms of public transport whether powered by electricity generated by burning brown coal, or by burning diesel fuel in a combustion engine, are more efficient at moving large amounts of people than cars are.

This paragraph confuses me though:

The Melbourne 2030 plan was based on the shaky assumption that increasing residential densities around the main public transport system would improve the viability of public transport. But even when density increased, residents often continued to drive their cars. Now there is a swing in the other direction, towards the equally erroneous belief that if you provide the transport, the residential patterns will change and the passengers will come. The Doncaster railway dream is a perfect illustration of that belief.

If anything Davison appears to be having a punt each way in this paragraph. What little development that has occurred under the auspices of Melbourne 2030 has been stymied by contrary government policies and local interests. I would argue that because of this densities have not increased that much in the Melbourne 2030 transit cities. The reason the few new residents continued to drive is exactly as he states, the public transport improvements were not forthcoming, and while they are slowly happening are not happening fast enough. The government is to blame for not having enough will to back up it's own strategies. If anything you only need to look to Perth for examples of where this sort of strategy has been implemented successfully with the Northern Suburbs rail line. In comparison a rail line to Doncaster should be child's play.

In his final paragraph Davison is spot on by stating that public transport needs to be constructed at the time of development, and should have been the case at Doncaster. He is also right that the there needs to be a rail service along Wellington Rd to Monash University and Rowville where there is also a high demand for such services, but there is demand in Doncaster as well.

Earth Hour

Last night people flocked to cities around the world to see them in darkness. This is what they saw.

Librarial and other matters

Today I thought I'd go and have a nose around the City Library after work. After turning the corner from Degraves Street into Flinders Lane I was greeted by a sea of people and some flashing blue and red lights. Turns out the police were arresting a couple of drunk and disorderly types, there was a lot of arm twisting going on. I was surprised at the number of people just standing there watching. I didn't stop to watch though, I just kept going in to the library.

Once I was up the stairs and in the Library I turned right towards the catalogue computers only to find they had vanished. There was a paper sign stuck to the wall saying they had moved them to the pillars next to the stairs in the foyer. Sure enough they were there. What a bad idea though, talk about un-ergonomic. Although the screens swivel up and down to adjust for height, I would imagine these computers are pretty uncomfortable for anyone other than average height like myself to use. Not only that but the network in there is so slow, it took minutes to load up the page after hitting search, or clicking on a selection (couldn't help but notice that they had upgraded to Internet Explorer 7). I just gave up and went searching manually for what I wanted.

This led to my second qualm, which was the fact that there seemed to be more books sitting around on trolleys waiting to be put on the shelves than there were books on the shelves. This made finding what I wanted extra difficult, as if they were sorted in some sort of order, someone else like myself had come along looking for something and mixed them all up. I just gave up on the whole library thing at that point.

For the first time in my life I felt like I had to complain about something, so I went and found the suggestions box and sheets (at least I could find them) and spent a good 10 minutes writing out my complaints (in doing so I used the desk that used to house the catalogue PCs).

On my way out it seemed the police were still there, although there is a police station right opposite where the arrests were happening so I guess that is natural. I then took a tram up Collins Street to Spring Street where I was going to change to a train at Parliament, but decided instead to walk across the Treasury and Fitzroy gardens to Jolimont Station.

On the way I noticed how much cooler it was in the gardens. It was almost as if the coolness was radiating off the nice green lawns. This reminded me about something I was reading a few weeks ago about green roofs in cities and how they help to keep temperatures down. On a day like today at 39-40 degrees outside any relief would be welcome, not to mention the benefit of somewhat cleaner air and more public open space the rest of the year.