Progressive Direction

December 12, 2019

• Club Troppo Oysters and institutions

  

  I have extracted below a section that took my fancy from an academic article about the economist Neild, whom I’d not heard of previously. It is an interesting story on its own terms and a nice illustration of how unhelpful the instinct to locate regimes or their functionality on a singular spectrum between ‘government’ and ‘market’. They are co-dependent entities.

  The English, the French and the Oyster (Neild 1995) is a succulent feast of a book, with rewards for readers of different kinds. Neild wrote the book as a result of his love of that mollusc and his interest in the evolution of its consumption. He wondered why oysters were more scarce and expensive in Britain than in France. He looked for an explanation but could not find one. So he researched the topic himself (Neild 2013b). While the book was not primarily an academic study, it dovetailed with his enduring interest in the ‘diversity of cultural evolution that shaped institutions’ (Neild 2017a, p. 6).

  The book can be read

  with reward by gourmets with no interest in economics, while economists and other social scientists can revel in its historical and institutional analysis of the oyster industry, as an illuminating complement to the more famous study of other common-pool resources by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom (1990).¹¹

  In the middle of the 19th century, oyster production and consumption were as extensive and popular in Britain as in France. Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers (1836), and Henry Mayhew in his classic London Labour and the London Poor (1851), noted that oysters were plentiful and consumed by the poor as well as by the rich. The new railways brought fresh oysters from the coasts to London and other cities. Some estimates suggest that per capita oyster consumption was higher in Greater London than in France (Neild 1995, p. 30).

  The railways had facilitated an increase in the demand and supply of oysters in both England and France. In both countries the result was severe over-fishing of the oyster, leading to a precipitous fall in o

  yster production in England between the 1850s and the 1880s. Estimates suggest that the number of oysters sold in Billingsgate – their principal market in London – fell by 90%. During this period of overall price deflation, the nominal price of some types of oyster increased about sevenfold (Neild 1995, p. 55). France faced a similar problem.

  Neild compared the responses of the French and UK governments to this mid-century crisis. He showed that differences in institutional heritage and ideological predilection led to very different recommendations and policies. The result was the near-extermination of the oyster industry in Britain but its survival and prosperity in France.

  Neild (1995, p. 52) defined a ‘common property right’ in terms of ‘no exclusion of anyone from the use of a property’. This is close to Ostrom’s (1990) definition of ‘common pool resources’, although he was unaware of her work. These are ensembles of assets, which are depleted by use, but where it is too costly to exclude other users. Common-pool resources differ from public goods (such as lighthouses), which are not depleted by use but are similarly non-excludable. Club goods (such as film shows in cinemas) are by definition excludable but not depleted by use (they are non-rivalrous).

  Notably, Neild thought about the solution to the commons problem in terms of the standard private versus public and market versus state distinctions, whereas Ostrom showed that other workable governance arrangements had been used. Ostrom showed in her case studies that arrangements to manage common-pool resources effectively had evolved over time, but without recourse to individ-ual property rights, market pricing or overall planning. Instead customs and rules had evolved to ensure the survival and continuing exploitation of the assets.¹²

  In both France and England, longstanding custom and legislation had enforced a closed season in the summer months, ensuring that the oyster population could recover. But unlike the case studies in Ostrom’s book, Neild addressed a problem of common-pool resources facing massive economic and environmental pressures, obliging governments to investigate and make recommendations. The UK and French governments solicited the advice of oyster fishers and scientific experts. But the institutional conditions and the policy responses were very different.

  A Royal Commission into Sea Fisheries was set up in 1866, which devoted attention to the problems with oysters, as well as to the supply of sea fish, particularly the herring. One of its three members was Thomas Henry Huxley – the famous friend and defender of Charles Darwin.¹³ Their report noted that a spawning oyster can produce hundreds of thousands of eggs, and wrongly inferred that the oyster shortage could not have resulted from over-fishing.¹⁴ Their report proposed that where possible oyster beds should be placed under private ownership, to encourage investment into and maintenance of the resource. But they also proposed the removal of all regulations and restrictions upon oyster fishing – including ending the closed season in the summer months (Neild 1995, p. 67). The free market should hold sway. This policy proved to be a disastrous failure. Neild (1995, pp. 71–2) commented on Huxley’s role:

  After his triumphs in the Darwinian battle, Huxley’s appetite for laying down the law and striking down those with different beliefs caused him increasingly to address political and philosophical subjects which were far beyond the realms of the physical sciences and hard evidence. . . . It is the misfortune of the British oyster that it fell foul of him at that stage of his career, as well as meeting the high tide of laissez-faire.

  Subsequent attempts to establish private property rights in oyster beds largely failed, because they proved to be too complex and costly as they were encumbered by the ancient entanglements and ambiguities of British property law.

  England had experienced a long history, from the Magna Carta of 1215 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, where the powers of the monarch were checked by strong countervailing powers. In particular, the barons had forced King John in the Magna Carta ‘to stop enclosing the shore and seabed for his own purposes’ (Neild 1995, p. 86). But this led to a complex maze of devolved property rights. These entanglements made the recommendations of the 1866 Royal Commission unenforceable. Problems in defining property rights over the shore and seabed persist in the UK.

  The French response to their 19th-century oyster crisis rested on very different institutional foundations, stemming from the period before the 1789 Revolution:

  In France the king stopped the private enclosure of the shore and seabed in order to make it a public domain where he – and the governments which succeeded the monarchy – were able to grant concessions and take other steps to conserve and develop the supply of oysters. . . . Thus the authoritarian actions of the French monarchy providentially furthered the interests of the producers and consumers of oysters better than the anti-authoritarian actions of English barons. (Neild 1995, p. 86)

  Neild thus revealed a hardly noticed paradox concerning the development and nature of property rights in different contexts. The prevailing narrative of modern institutional economists is that clear property rights became well-established, first in England, by placing the powers of the monarch in check, thus reducing the risks of arbitrary confiscation.¹⁵ By contrast, without citing this rival narrative, Neild showed that checks on the king’s power had led to an impossible tangle of rights over the shore and seabed in the UK.

  Regarding France on the other side of the Channel, a prevailing account is that its centralized monarchy restricted the development of property rights, trade and industry. There is probably some truth in this, but the argument does not apply neatly to fisheries and oyster beds. Neild showed that concentrated ownership of the shore and seabed, in the hands of first the monarch and then the republican state, created the opportunity to establish clear leasehold property rights that could be exploited by the oyster producers.

  There are further issues concerning the comparison of the English and French political and legal systems that need to be brought into the account. Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer (2002, pp. 1195) argued that in medieval England ‘judges and juries faced both physical and financial incentives to cater to the preferences of local feudal lords’. By contrast, feudal France developed a system of state-employed judges who were ‘better insulated’ from local pressures and interests: ‘France chose to rely on state-employed judges precisely because local feudal lords were too powerful.’ This does not necessarily imply that English lords were less powerful, but that France, unlike England, was capable of a centralizing state response. In France there was a massive tax-funded state bureaucracy, surmounted by a relatively more powerful king (Carruthers 1996, 23). While the 1789 Revolution dismantled much of the feudal state, Napoleon Bonaparte and others followed by building a stronger system of centralized political and legal powers in the early 19th century.

  Paradoxically, it was thus easier to establish clear and effective property rights over oyster resources in etatist´ France than liberal Britain. The British fostered the myth that laissez-fare was a longstanding natural condition, as proclaimed by Huxley – the influential naturalist. But in reality all property rights depend on historically specific, complex, political and legal institutions, which are not universal for all time. Property rights themselves involve several aspects or incidences (Hodgson 2015a; Honore´ 1961).

  Neild understood that property rights are systems of legal rules, not merely instances of control or possession, as in the manner of ‘the economics of property rights’ (Hodgson 2015b). Hence the response to an existing chaos of complex legislation and overlapping jurisdictions should not be to do nothing (as many proposed in the UK) but to ‘tidy up’ by legislative reform (Neild 1995, p. 112).

  In France in the 1860s the authoritarian Emperor Napoleon III accepted scientific advice on how to safeguard the oyster supply and granted concessionary seabed leases to oyster producers. Conservationist policies were further developed after the Franco-Prussian War. The two world wars in the 20th century severely interrupted French production, but it has recovered thereafter.

  Of course, the relative success of the policy of Napoleon III does not imply that state ownership of assets is superior in this particular case, or more generally. Neild made no such claim. Peculiar political conditions impelled the French Emperor to take a beneficial course of action. The most important overall message is that market solutions cannot work unless clear property rights concerning use, benefit and responsibility are established; historically, at least in this particular French case, the state facilitated their development.

  Neild also shows that the evolution of the British and French oyster industries were affected by laws and cultural practices dating back centuries. They are cases of strong, path-dependent evolution (Arthur 1989; David 1985, 1994).

  Neild (1995, ch. 12) related how the regulation of the British oyster industry remained in an ‘unsatisfactory condition’ until 1993 when new and better regulations were introduced as a result of membership of the Single Market of the European Union. It seems that supra-national forces are needed to shake the British oyster industry from its century of path-dependent relapse.

December 11, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Disruption calendars – Vic can do better

  For the big summer works blitz, the Department of Transport has an online calendar showing which lines are affected on which days.

  This is good, because it’s much more legible than their usual confusing lists of lines and days.

  

  It includes up to mid-February 2020. The January closures were announced on 21st November, so the disruptions were flagged 6 weeks in advance.

  This is an improvement – and allows some people a fighting chance to arrange leave to avoid the works period.

  

  How do other jurisdictions compare?

  Transperth has a calendar currently showing closures up to the end of January 2020.

  Transport For New South Wales publishes a 3 month calendar – it’s currently showing closures up to February 2020.

  Queensland Rail publishes a 12 month calendar – it’s currently showing closures up to July 2020.

  Further afield, UK’s Network Rail has a searchable calendar showing disruptions up to March 2020.

  Transport for London (including London Underground) has a calendar that shows disruptions for months in advance – it’s unclear if all planned works have been entered, but TfL Rail (aka Crossrail, which is partially open) shows disruptions listed as far ahead as April 2020.

  Washington Metro has a list of works up to February 2020.

  New York City’s subway lists disruptions up to March 2020.

  Back in Melbourne, the fact that passengers can see disruptions as far as mid-February is a big step forward.

  But that level of advance warning is unfortunately not routine, and it should be – for more than just the “special case” Gippsland line.

  Some major Melbourne rail closures are already planned well into 2020.

  For instance, the Upfield line, is expecting a three month partial closure for level crossing removals. I understand this will commence in August.

  Upfield Line to shut for three months in second half of next year to allow for skyrail construction. $542.4 million contract awarded to John Holland consortium @9NewsMelb pic.twitter.com/k4KD7c9rUc

  — Andrew Lund (@andrew_lund) October 26, 2019

  If they published this information well in advance, there could be a caveat: maybe works would move by a week or two, or the scope of the closure might change a bit closer the date. And smaller weekend-only closures might have to be moved or added with less advance notice.

  But often rail closures are locked in months in advance. So why not warn people so they can plan ahead?

• Club Troppo #BoySplaining: How not to argue
  

  I made up the term #Bossplaining. Or thought I did. Turns out it’s already a thing.

  The one thing I learned in my university education, the one thing that excited me, was the need for people to exercise real effort in understanding each other. The language we use is so full of shades of meaning and we’re such emotional creatures – particularly when we’re arguing. Johnathan Haight has popularised lots of the evidence of the truth of Hume’s claim that our reason is the slave to our passions.

  There’s something funny about the commentary in this thread about aggressive debate in economics faculties. It’s recently acquired a gender politics dimension and the first commenter – a male economist confesses to misreading the motives of the piece assuming the author was a man. Thinking he is dealing with one kind of meaning making – in which someone is right and the other wrong – he encounters another.

  Anyway, like my gradual disenchantment with almost all political debate, which I see as simply the thin artefact of the rituals of competition, where words mean less and less (and are chosen for that purpose) with everything in the body language (the body language of an argument – ha ha) I’m pretty disenchanted with aggressive argument itself. I’ve never seen it turn up much, though I guess it could when the argument is about things that are sufficiently formal that there really is a right and wrong answer. Even then though, argument should be direct, but not aggressive as it’s less efficient that way.

  Compete if you must – it’s not only natural but it’s good up to a point. It tests ideas. But even if one side wins, there’s usually quite a lot to be gained by looking at the perspective of others. This came to mind when reading this terrific piece by Kevin Kelly. He’s fantastic to read – such a powerful, curious intellect. That’s one reason why he’s not in the footnote chase of academia of course.  Anyway, he disagrees with Robert Gordon. I’ve not read Gordon, but he’s certainly a well regarded economist. An A leaguer.

  If I had to guess who’s going to be proven right, I think maybe Kelly will be, but who knows? Certainly Gordon looks to be right about all the panic about robots coming for our jobs – at least for now. It’s future gazing so a very difficult call. Both sides have a good case to make. What’s shocking is how juvenile Gordon’s response is. The lack of graciousness is unfortunate, but the lack of curiosity is unforgivable. Rather than explore the issues, elaborate on where he thinks the weaker parts of his thesis are, or take up some of the fertile threads Kelly weaves through his piece, Gordon is in high school debating mode. He’s right and Kelly’s wrong. Note how, in this style the antagonist defines the terms – making the debate about his contribution – and any deviation from those terms results from their opponent’s foolishness or knavery.

  What a tragedy that academia is so often policed by people of such desicated, reductive sensibility as Gordon. I’ve been reading recently about the foundation of the internet and it was populated by such clever and curious people with a passion for humanity – seriously, it’s amazing how many of them had a human vision for computers – how much they anticipated the ‘social turn’ that IT took at the turn of the millennium, though that’s now being set upon by various dystopian forces.

December 10, 2019

• Club Troppo A recent presentation on ‘Making an impact’

  Here’s a presentation I gave to a recent Government Economists’ Conference in Canberra. Like some other reflections of my book launching years (only some of which have been preserved for posterity), ¹it tries to describe how I go about thinking about economics.

  And the thing is, I don’t really know anyone who describes their own approach similarly. Most of the people who are unsatisfied with economics as it is, and that certainly describes me, want some new paradigm to take hold. I guess I could say the same, but only by saying that the paradigm change I want is some self-reflectiveness of the discipline and an ability to get the best out of the paradigms available to it. As I intimate with my use of the image of the plane with feathered wings, a discipline like economics which cannot really mark its knowledge much to market – where falsifiction is mostly only available to prove the obvious – one of the greatest enemies is impatience. The hankering for a new paradigm for the outsiders is like the hankering for the next bit of economic theory from the insiders.

  

  Most of the good economists can do using their discipline and anything else they can cobble together for the purpose will be taken up patiently looking at things, asking people on the scene and trying to find productive ways of describing the situation and, more importantly, what can improve it. Hence my little man with the magnifying glass and the chart suggesting that ‘doing economics’ in a professional capacity is and should be mostly the act of applying ideas. There’s plenty of different ways quite simple ideas can be applied, and the task is to find a principled and productive way to do so rather than just turn up, announce that you’ve got your “economists’ hat on” (what’s with it with these hats all of a sudden?) and then uttering some econo-robo-babble like “it’s all about supply and demand”.

  1. I know you’ll be looking for book launches at this stage, so here are two. ↩
• The Northern Myth Essential documents from Aboriginal Australia: 9 – The Original Wave Hill Mob Letter of 1967

  

  The Original Wave Hill Mob Letter of 1967

  To: His Excellency

  The Right Hon. Lord Casey

  Governor-General of Australia

  10 April, 1967

  We, the leaders of the Gurindji people, write to you about our earnest desire to regain tenure of our tribal lands in the Wave Hill – Limbunya area of the Northern Territory, of which we were dispossessed in time past, and for which we received no recompense.

  Our people have lived here from time immemorial and our culture, myths, dreaming and sacred places have evolved in this land. Many of our forefathers were killed in the early days while trying to retain it. Therefore we feel that morally the land is ours and should be returned to us. Our very name Aboriginal acknowledges our prior claim. We have never ceased to say amongst ourselves that Vesteys should go away and leave us to our land.

  On the attached map, we have marked out the boundaries of the sacred places of our dreaming, bordering the Victoria River from Wave Hill Police Station to Hooker Creek, Inverway, Limbunya, Seal Gorge, etc. We have begun to build our own new homestead on the banks of beautiful Wallis Creek in the Seal Yard area, where there is permanent water. This is the main place of our dreaming only a few miles from the Seal Gorge where we have kept the bones of our martyrs all these years since white men killed many of our people. On the walls of the sacred caves where these bones are kept are the paintings of the totems of our tribe.

  We have already occupied a small area at Seal Yard under Miners Rights held by three of our tribesmen. We will continue to build our new home there (marked on the map with a cross), then buy some working horses and cattle. These we will use to build up a cattle station within the borders of this ancient Gurindji land. And we are searching the area for valuable rocks which we hope to sell to help feed our people. We will ask the NT Welfare Department for help with motor for pump, seeds for garden, tables, chairs, and other things we need. Later on we will build a road and an airstrip and maybe a school. Meanwhile, most of our people will continue to live in the camp we have built at the Wave Hill Welfare Centre twelve miles away and the children continue to go to school there.

  We beg of you to hear our voices asking that the land marked, on the map be returned to the Gurindji people: it is about 600 square miles in area but this is only a very small fraction of the land leased by Vesteys in these parts. We are prepared to pay for our land the same annual rental that Vesteys now pay. If the question of compensation arises, we feel that we have already paid enough during fifty years or more, during which time, we and our fathers worked for no wages at all much of the time and for a mere pittance in recent years.

  If you can grant this wish for which we humbly ask, we would show the rest of Australia and the whole world that we are capable of working and planning our own destiny as free citizens. Much has been said about our refusal to accept responsibility in the past, but who would show initiative working for starvation wages, under impossible conditions, without education for strangers in the land? But we are ready to show initiative now. We have already begun. We know how to work cattle better than any white man and we know and love this land of ours.

  If our tribal lands are returned to us, we want them, not as another ‘Aboriginal Reserve’, but as a leasehold to be run cooperatively as a mining lease and cattle station by the Gurindji Tribe. All practical work will be done by us, except such work as book-keeping, for which we would employ white men of good faith, until such time as our own people are sufficiently educated to take over. We will also accept the condition that if we do not succeed within a reasonable time, our land should go back to the Government.

  (In August last year, we walked away from the Wave Hill Cattle Station. It was said that we did this because wages were very poor (only six dollars per week), living conditions fit only for dogs, and rations consisting mainly of salt beef and bread. True enough. But we walked away for other reasons as well. To protect our woman and our tribe, to try to stand on our own feet – We will never go back there).

  Some of our young men are working now at Camfield and Montejinnie Cattle stations for proper wage. However we still ask them to come back to our won Gurindji Homestead when everything is ready.

  These are our wishes, which have been written down for us by our undersigned white friends, as we have had no opportunity to learn to write English.

  Yours,

  Vincent Lingiari

  Pincher Manguari

  Gerry Ngalgardji

  Long-Johnny Kitgneari

  Transcribed, witnessed and transmitted by the undersigned:

  Frank J. Hardy

  J. W. Jeffrey

  Accessed from Australasian Legal Information Institute, Aboriginal Law Bulletin http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AboriginalLB/1986/41.html

  You can read more about and see more of the work of cartoonist John Frith at the Museum of Australian Democracy site here: https://frith.moadoph.gov.au/

  • Essential documents from Aboriginal Australia: 1 – the 1963 Yirrkala Bark Petitions
  • Essential documents from Aboriginal Australia: 2 – the 1998 Barunga Statement
  • Essential documents from Aboriginal Australia: 3 – the 1993 Eva Valley Statement
  • Essential documents from Aboriginal Australia: 4 – the 1998 Kalkaringi Statement
  • Essential documents from Aboriginal Australia: 5 – the 2008 Yirrkala Statement
  • Essential documents from Aboriginal Australia: 6 – the 1972 Larrakia Petition
  • Essential documents from Aboriginal Australia: 7 – the 2008 Yuendumu Petition
  • Essential documents from Aboriginal Australia: 8 – The 2018 Barunga Agreement

December 09, 2019

• Daniel Bowen More bustitution thoughts

  In the mainstream media, they have word limits. Even online, they have to keep it succinct. Blogs have no such limits, so I apologise not only for revisiting this topic again, but also for rambling on so long.

  Bustitution looms again over the summer, with large scale rail closures on the Mernda line underway now, and the Cranbourne/Pakenham, Gippsland and Frankston lines to be replaced by buses for almost all of January, and more around the network right through 2020.

  Hey this is great – @VicGovDoT has provided an actual calendar so you can easily see which major works affect which lines on which days over summer. https://t.co/1jVNIINHRp #bustitution #MetroTrains #YarraTrams #VLine pic.twitter.com/0OEdlUScUQ

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) December 8, 2019

  (There are so many closures coming up on the Frankston line that one senior transport bod jokingly suggested: “Have you considered moving?”)

  So here’s a braindump of a few points about planned bus replacements.

  Divide and conquer

  A big factor when designing bus replacement routes is the sheer number of people who catch trains – even on weekends and in the evenings.

  One of the ways they manage this is to split the buses up into separate routes, to speed up journeys, and so that not everybody crowds onto one route.

  For instance with the current Mernda line closure, the bus routes are:

  • Stopping all stations Thornbury to South Morang (“S”)
  • Express Thornbury to Keon Park, then all stations to Epping (Limited Express “L1”)
  • Express Thornbury to Epping, then all stations to Mernda (Limited Express “L2”)

  It’s the same when other lines close: there are often multiple bus routes replacing the trains. It can be confusing, but it’s much more efficient.

  But they do need to communicate this well. More on this later.

  

  Shorter = better?

  This ties into something else. I used to think the length of the bus replacements needed to be minimised, above all else.

  I’m not so sure now that it’s that black and white.

  During Frankston line closures a couple of weeks ago, we had buses:

  • All stations to Caulfield
  • Express City to Moorabbin – (Express “E”)
  • Express City to Caulfield, then all stops to Moorabbin (Limited Express “L”)

  This meant that only people travelling beyond Moorabbin needed to change services, which can mean an extra wait, especially if connecting from frequent bus to sometimes not-so-frequent train. The rest of the passengers got a one-seat trip on the bus.

  For inbound passengers, not having so many people change from trains to buses minimises the risk of long waits like we saw last Easter at Caulfield, with thousands of people shuffling in the queue for an hour or more just to get on a bus. Instead, the bus boarding is shared between multiple locations.

  “Buses replace trains”
  No, they really don’t. #TrainPain #bustitution #MetroTrains pic.twitter.com/k65FAL2PKt

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) April 7, 2019

  Of course, ferrying at least some passengers people from the closed line over to another line that’s running can also be an option, preferably with extra train services deployed to help cope. But this is difficult in some parts of Melbourne, where it’s a long way to the neighbouring rail line.

  Obviously it’s a balancing act, and each decision has consequences that authorities may or may not be able to quickly adapt to – but should at least inform the next round of planning.

  Unfortunately some lessons have been lost over time.

  

  Buses must have priority

  It should go without saying that no matter what the combination of routes, whether they run smoothly or not depends very much on the use of bus priority measures.

  During recent works on the Sunbury/Ballarat/Bendigo/Geelong lines, buses were taking ludicrous amounts of time between Sunshine and the City.

  Back when Regional Rail Link was being built, buses got priority along Ballarat Road, and fed into trains at Flemington Racecourse. It’s unclear why this time instead of repeating that winning formula, they ignored it and put people on slow buses all the way to the City.

  Sunbury/Geelong #bustitution: Queues to the buses at Flagstaff moving perhaps faster than the buses themselves, which have to go around the block to head west. pic.twitter.com/PPv1HYamFp

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) September 30, 2019

  The result this time? A lot of passengers gave up and either drove – making the traffic problems even worse – or switched to other rail lines – I’m told Werribee loads jumped by as much as 30%, adding to crowding and delays on that line.

  

  Information: Where are the stops?

  Despite the problems, in many ways they’re getting better at these operations, but there are still slip-ups.

  A couple of weeks ago I knew I’d be travelling home from the City on a Friday night, which coincided with a weekend of bus replacements on my line – from the City to Moorabbin (and also out to Westall).

  Okay – forewarned is forearmed. So where in the CBD would I need to catch my bus? The bus variants were:

  • All stations to Caulfield
  • Express City to Moorabbin – aka “Express”
  • Express City to Caulfield, then all stops to Moorabbin – aka “Limited Express” – this is what I wanted.

  The stop information was far too difficult to find. It was actually contradictory.

  The bus frequency poster PDF reckoned catch the bus from Flinders Street – with no detail as to precisely where. (Fed Square/Russell Street? Arts Centre? They’re hundreds of metres apart.)

  There was a separate detailed list of bus stops, which said I should catch it in Spring Street near Parliament. And there was mention of a third location, in between: in Flinders Street near Exhibition Street.

  I wanted to minimise my travel time. (Who doesn’t?) But what to believe?

  Asking Metro on Twitter, they replied that they’d depart from Parliament. Or possibly Flinders/Exhibition. Right… This was not helpful.

  Hi Daniel, if you're travelling outbound at ~10:30pm on Friday, the best bus location would be to either catch a limited express bus from Parliament (Spring Street) or Flinders/Exhibition Streets. Hopefully that helps.

  — Metro Trains (@metrotrains) November 20, 2019

  Eventually after some prodding, someone at Metro and/or PTV realised the mistake, and started correcting the information on the web site. The Limited Express buses would depart from the Arts Centre.

  But the advice was still confusing for some Cranbourne/Pakenham people, who ended up going to Parliament, as per the notices, only to be told they were in the wrong place.

  Lol, we didn’t traipse around last night trying to find the right bus, they tried to divert buses to Parliament but didn’t quite get it right… Probably would have been quicker to walk to Flinders st in the end!

  — Jo (@twelveeyes) November 22, 2019

  And I heard of another Frankston line person who also went to Parliament, was then somehow told to go to Richmond (by train), ended up on an all-stations bus from there to Caulfield, then onto another bus to Patterson. Total travel time: about 90 minutes for a trip that should take about 30.

  This type of stuff is ridiculous – and it’s not even an operational issue – it’s poor information provided to passengers.

  It’s hard enough trying to convince people that they should take the bus when the trains are out, without mucking them about like this.

  Being clearer

  Even if the information is absolutely correct, some of it is presented in the most incomprehensible manner.

  Some of the prominent information is the bus frequency guides, which are just a mess. This is one of the simpler ones.

  

  This is just too hard to read, yet is the most common type of detailed poster out on the system during closures.

  They’d do far better, I think, to remove the frequency information, which is in the online timetables – and is misleading anyway, as apart from a base frequency, despatchers send additional buses into service when queues emerge.

  Instead, focus the most important information: the different bus route stopping pattern variants, which really should be shown more prominently – rather than the diagram which implies every bus stops at every station.

  Spot the difference

  It turns out there are different staffing arrangements when it’s project upgrade works (such as level crossing removals or the Metro tunnel) versus routine maintenance works.

  For the former, they put temp staff at the bus stops to provide travel information and assistance. For the latter… they mostly don’t.

  Project works teams such as @levelcrossings do deploy additional staff to assist and provide information in regard to those works but for normal planned maintenance work, we normally don't deploy additional staff to intermediate stations or bus stops.

  — Metro Trains (@metrotrains) November 30, 2019

  Because apparently passengers need help when the line is closed for project works, but don’t if the line is closed for maintenance.

  Ticketing

  Finally: they still haven’t resolved the confusion around fares and ticketing on bus replacement services.

  On Metro at least, the bus portion of the trip is normally free: it would be far too slow if people touched on and off, and the Myki system can’t handle the special routes.

  But the Myki readers are usually left on, which continually leads to confusion. On one recent ride I heard the bus driver call out “No, don’t touch on!”

  This is fighting against years of teaching passengers to touch-on, touch-off.

  So why not do it properly?

  • Turn off the Myki readers on the rail replacement buses
  • Even better, if possible, switch them to a special mode that says “Free ride, don’t touch-on” or something similar – also handy for fare free days like Christmas Day
  • Fix the Fares & Ticketing Manual. It still claims you should touch on and off at the station – completely unrealistic and unreasonable given it may be hundreds of metres away, closed, or even in the middle of demolition.

  

  The need to do better

  I apologise again for the length of this article. It got away from me.

  But to conclude, there are a lot more of these shutdowns over the coming years.

  There are people who avoid using the buses, thanks to experiences of long waits, slow rides, confusing information. If those people drive to their destination instead, it just adds pressure to the overall transport network.

  Overall I think rail replacement bus operations are steadily improving, but they still need to do better.

December 06, 2019

• Club Troppo We’ve already had Our Very Own Brexit
  

  In good bookstores everywhere – at a very reasonable price

  Cross posted from the Lowy Institute Blog.

  Instead of munching popcorn at the political theatre, citizens’
  assemblies would give the community a chance to reflect.

  In what we now see in retrospect as something of a political “golden age” – say from the early 20th century through to the 1980s or so – political parties were the institution through which the political aspirations of different sections of the community were articulated and conveyed to the commanding heights of government. Millions of members joined those parties, which were embedded in the community alongside churches, unions, and business associations.

  Yet as Sam Roggeveen has described in Our Very Own Brexit, “hollowing out” has now inverted that process. Senior officers of the parties now comprise a political caste, the majority of whom secured their parliamentary position within their party’s career structure with scant achievements elsewhere.

  Each party manages their “brand”, and politics has become a Punch and Judy show. We barrack for our side if we have one – or our point of view in innumerable improvised or staged culture-war skirmishes. We cheer and boo, tweet and retweet.

  The governance that emerges from this is an uncanny mix of stasis and instability. Stasis because, at least when seeking their votes, each party hews to a small target strategy on policy while probing for ways to misrepresent and catastrophise their opponents’ policies and purposes. Instability because “we the people” so hate it all.

  We tell ourselves that the pollies are only in it for themselves. There’s truth in that. But also evasion. They’re victims too. The lead players in the show could be living much more prosperous, happy lives out of the madhouse. We fancy we deserve better than this as we sit in the stalls munching our popcorn. Indeed we do. Yet our clicks and our tweets – above all our votes – drive the whole system. Ultimately we decide who represents us and the terms on which they do.

  The most significant achievement of Australian voters’ emphatic decision at the 2013 election was the abolition of carbon pricing, which had taken a decade of political struggle to be absorbed into the apparent political security of bipartisan consensus.

  Whenever a political party offers a skerrick of leadership – whenever they depart, however cautiously, from their traditional “small target” or “comms” strategies of relentless manipulation and tendentious evasion, they’re easy meat for the scare campaigns and outrage machines of their party political and ideological opponents.

  Roggeveen’s definition of what constitutes “a Brexit” for his purposes is situated within his own, and the Lowy Institute’s focus on Australia’s external relations. I would characterise the UK’s Brexit moment and the US’s Trump moment more generally as the point at which the electorate perpetrated some action that the overwhelming bulk of the political class regarded in their heart of hearts as crazy.

  If that’s your definition, then just as Australia led the world in various aspects of economic policy – such as income-contingent loans, community strategies on AIDS, and the strengthening and targeting of welfare – our rendezvous with political crazy predates its moment elsewhere in the Anglosphere by three years.

  For the most significant achievement of Australian voters’ emphatic decision at the 2013 election was the abolition of carbon pricing, which had taken a decade of political struggle to be absorbed into the apparent political security of bipartisan consensus. It’s demise has plunged our energy sector into crisis and dysfunction. And it’s rarely noted by the commentariat (why am I not surprised?), but it’s also costing our budget more than $10 billion annually and rising. 

  Of course simply painting the picture Roggeveen does is useful. Yet if he has any ideas about how we might fight our way out of this frightening situation, he’s not telling. Perhaps like so many others, he wants more “leadership”. Perhaps we need a hero – someone with immense political talents who, having clambered up the greasy pole, still wants to achieve something and retains the authority over their party, the parliament, and the community to achieve it.

  But how likely is that in a political culture that almost never lets an act of leadership go unpunished?

  The one thing that gives me some hope is the existence of another democratic tradition which lies dormant in our political culture for centuries but remains healthy as a pillar of our legal system. Those empanelled on a jury represent us, not by flattering us to win our vote, but more simply by being chosen from among us.

  The makeup of a jury is more substantively representative than parliament, with far more of the young, the old, and the less well-healed. Selection by lot was a central mechanism through which the ancient Athenians secured the great political principle they called “isegoria” or equality of speech. It has been driven to extinction in the great political hollowing out.

  We’ve learned to distrust those competing for our votes, and those with different ideologies. But when we meet together in citizens’ juries, our trust in each other comes flooding back. For instance, when around 250 Texan citizens chosen at random deliberated in 1996 on various questions including whether they should pay between $2 and $5 more for electricity to increase renewables’ market share. With 52% agreeing before deliberation, 84% agreed afterwards, with such exercises making a material contribution to Texas – under Governor George W. Bush – leading many other states and installing 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy generation.

  The evidence suggests that similar methods would have demonstrated a contrast between the opinion of the people, and their considered opinion on Brexit. In late 2017, 50 Britons randomly selected to exemplify the referendum’s 52:48 Brexit vote swung to 40:60 against after deliberation, with not one of them swinging the other way. Something similar happened in a deliberative poll in 2010.

  And yes, what evidence we have suggests that this mechanism offers a useful means of tackling Roggeveen’s specific concerns. Just three months ago America in One Room brought together a “state-of-the-art scientific sample” of 523 Americans for a weekend’s deliberation in small groups on five critical policy areas. As the organisers reported:

  There were dramatic changes of opinion. The most polarizing proposals, whether from the left or the right, generally lost support, and a number of more centrist proposals moved to the foreground.

  And for those seeking to avoid our very own Brexit, there’s good reason to take heart. The deliberations elicited a more welcoming position on both legal and illegal immigration, mostly due to a softening from the right. Deliberation reduced support for cutting refugee intake from 37% to 22% with Republicans’ support dropping from 66% to 34%. Republican support for increasing skilled immigration rose from 50% to 71% (and overall support from 60% to 80%). Republicans also shifted from 31% supporting low-skilled immigration for industries that need it to 66%, with overall support for this policy rising from 53% to 77%.

  My conclusion from all this is that if we’re to avoid our next Brexit, according to my definition, we need to bring citizens’ assemblies into our existing constitution as a check and balance. But existing politicians who’ve worked hard won’t let go of any power they’ve acquired lightly. The beauty of this agenda is that huge strides can be made from outside the system.

  A privately funded but independently governed standing citizens’ assembly could surface the considered opinion of the people alongside all those polls that currently measure their unconsidered opinion. And the evidence suggests that swings taking place in such a body would affect voters and, in consequence, their elected representatives. I doubt the abolition of carbon pricing would have made it through the Senate once a citizens’ assembly had twigged to the unseriousness of what was to replace it.

  Given that and the fact that the Lowy Institute is one of Australia’s best-funded think tanks, I’d like to see it take the lead. It could do so with a citizens’ assembly such as America in One Room focused on immigration.

  Though we have a decade’s experience of advisory citizens’ juries which is very promising, we’ve barely begun to fill out the repertoire of political institutions according to this alternative way of representing the people. But it’s possible to reimagine virtually every political institution to which electoral representation has given rise according to the alternative logic of isegoria or equality of speech.

  The Lowy Institute could fund a standing citizens’ assembly on immigration. It could announce its intention to fund a citizens’ assembly whenever any Australian government was considering any combat deployment of Australian troops abroad. It could fund a joint citizen’s assembly of (say) 25 Australians and 25 East Timorese to deliberate together on the relations between our two countries. Despite the tiny size of Timor-Leste, such an exercise could have a powerful demonstration effect.

  Some enterprising philanthropists might replicate the experiment somewhere where it really could change the course of global history. They might convene a citizens’ assembly of Chinese and American citizens to deliberate in the first instance, on the impasse the two countries find themselves at on trade. But that could be a precedent for numerous similar exercises on subjects about which Roggeveen is anxious. And he’s far from alone.

  It’s not hard to identify problems we’d have to take into account in pursuing some of these courses. I’d rather have seen a citizens’ assembly on Timor-Leste a decade ago. And the Chinese Communist Party might be able to exercise a stronger influence on the Chinese representatives than America’s government could exercise on its own. But such obstacles are always encountered where we explore new territory. They almost never render us powerless. This one could be ameliorated, though not completely solved, by secret balloting.

  Personally I can’t see a happy future for any of us if we don’t set our minds and our hearts on evolving institutions that are a little more hospitable to what Abraham Lincoln so sublimely summoned up just by naming them: the better angels of our nature.

December 02, 2019

• Daniel Bowen King in your car

  Tony Abbott, in a way, was right:

  “The humblest person is king in his own car.”

  Tony Abbott, Battlelines

  I can see his point here. I don’t know about them being humble, but (especially as a pedestrian or a cyclist) you see plenty of people in their cars who think they are royalty.

  The problem is Abbott believes this should be accommodated and encouraged, by building new roads (no matter how economically flawed) and by not building public transport.

  Anyway, I’ve found a strong counter argument to Abbott’s point:

  “If you live in your suburban castle, and you only ever go out in your suburban land yacht, and the only humans you ever interact with are clerks, it’s the Target checker or your barista at Starbucks, you lose that sense of sociality – you start thinking of yourself as a driver, as a consumer.

  “So what’s good for drivers and consumers? That starts to be how you interact with civic life, through that lens: I’ve got to defend my parking, and my access to my local Starbucks.

  “I honestly think that suburban living on a subtle, sort of subterranean level, pulls you in the direction of sociopathy. It pulls you in the direction of antisocial thinking and attitudes.

  “And conversely, just being out around among people gives you more of a sense of social solidarity, and more of a sense of being in it, together, and having to accommodate other peoples perspectives.”

  David Roberts (Vox) – The War On Cars podcast, episode 24

  Is this extreme? Perhaps.

  Is it stereotyping people? Yes.

  But I think it’s making a really interesting point – and it only takes a few people behaving like this to make life difficult for everybody else.

  

  The podcast contains other moments of gold, including this:

  “We think of cities as so crowded, but that’s because almost all of the space in them we’ve given over to cars.”

  And this:

  “Public space is what makes a city. If you don’t have public space, you just have an urban area.”

  Give it a listen.

November 28, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from November 2009

  Here’s another of my posts of old photos from ten years ago – this time from November 2009.

  Let’s start with some art.

  

  …and now some art on the train. (I think a few of us with an interest in railways know the Bromage family.)

  

  Flinders Street Station’s Elizabeth Street entrance used to close at 10pm. This is how some people got around that.

  

  One of those mistimed captions on the news.

  

  Remembrance Day outside Flinders Street station.

  

  A new Passenger Information Display (PID) being installed at Richmond station

  

  …and one of the new displays actually working:

  

  Is your weekend bus crowded? It could be because most of the fleet is resting in depots.

  

  The old (rebuilt in 2016 when the level crossing was removed) Ormond Station, with its station code OMD on the top. (Pic from Nearmap, which at the time offered free access for personal use – now it’s only $$$ for corporates.)

  

  The level crossing at Ormond caused problems from time to time. On this day, a fault closed North Road, sending thousands of vehicles detouring via side streets and the nearby but narrow Dorothy Avenue underpass. This is the normally quiet Woodville Avenue.

  

  The level crossings also used to cause impacts for the Bentleigh Festival, so the closure of Centre Road to traffic was done in two separate halves.

  

  More seriously, emergency vehicles used to be delayed by trains at the crossings. Of course this still happens in other parts of Melbourne, and is one reason the level crossing removal program is so beneficial.

  

  A rally in Footscray against the then-proposed “Westlink” freeway, the Labor’s proposal at the time for a freeway connection from Sunshine to connect with Citylink at West Melbourne. I remember speaking at this, rambling about how the nearby new Edgewater Estate was served by a new bus route, but it only runs every 40 minutes – even in peak.

  

  Why catch a train to within half a block of the football, when you can park two blocks away instead? Little Lonsdale Street near William Street.

  

  I daily walk past this intersection, which is rife for Rule 128 violations. But in 2009 it wasn’t really on my radar – I appear to have snapped this one accidentally. Note the Owen Dixon East building at right, then under construction.

  

  In public transport land, Myki equipment was being rapidly installed around the network and tested.

  

  Originally it was expected that smart (but disposable) short term tickets would be offered alongside Myki. These got cancelled by the Baillieu government when they decided to keep Myki but reduce the scope of the system in 2011.

  

  November 2009 was notable for the end of the tram and train contracts. Tram operator TransdevTSL and train operator Connex/Veolia (now part of Transdev) finished up. Connex threw a big shindig for its employees and a few stakeholders. They were a French company, so that was the theme. Everyone got given a beret. (Marcus Wong has a blog post all about the last days of Connex)

  

  Start day for the new train and tram operators, MTM (Metro Trains Melbourne) and KDR (Keolis Downer Rail, for Yarra Trams). It didn’t save John Brumby (centre of picture) from electoral defeat a year later.

  

November 24, 2019

• Daniel Bowen SRL will be an independent line

  One of the things people have been wondering is whether the Suburban Rail Loop will be an integral part of the existing suburban Metro network, or a standalone line.

  

  Melbourne’s existing rail network has its origins in the 1854 line from Port Melbourne to Flinders Street (since converted to trams), but also particularly in the electrification of the 1910s and 1920s, to the standards of the time, including 1500 volt DC power.

  While the SRL will have many interchanges with the existing network, there’s no particular reason it has to use the same technology.

  The State Government announced on Sunday that SRL will indeed be different.

  Similar to the NSW decision to make their new Metro line independent of the double-deck suburban lines, the SRL will be completely separate from the suburban network.

  From the press release:

  It will be built as a separate rail line, meaning it can use state-of-the-art systems from around the world without having to retrofit technology into the existing network – saving time and money.

  Passengers will be able to easily transfer across both networks, with the same ticketing system servicing both and up to 12 new stations connecting the existing rail system with the new standalone line.

  SRL as a completely separate rail line brings a number of advantages.

  Smaller, shorter trains running to higher frequencies can be used – better meeting the non-tidal capacity requirements of a line that doesn’t serve the CBD, while providing real Turn Up And Go services that make interchange from other lines and modes quick and easy.

  The key would be to provide infrastructure that makes it possible to easily scale-up capacity as demand grows.

  Nobody wants a repeat of the tram 96 situation, where the conversion from high capacity heavy rail to medium capacity light rail, combined with population growth, has seen heavy crowding, with demand swamping the trams.

  A segregated fleet means platform screen doors can be used at every station, improving safety.

  (Platform screen doors are flagged for the metro tunnel as well, though theoretically could also be retro-fitted at most stations between Sunbury and Cranbourne/Pakenham – with the possible exception of platforms shared with V/Line. And full platform shelter might be required to make it work.)

  

  Smaller trains may mean a smaller loading gauge, helping to reduce tunnelling costs… or indeed the potential to use standard gauge tracks.

  Modern AC power can reduce costs as well – as I understand it, fewer substations are needed compared to the 1500 volt DC power used by suburban trains.

  If the line is completely grade separated and independent, it also means driverless trains are possible. Again, the new Sydney Metro line uses these, as do an increasing number of urban train services around the world, including parts of the Singapore MTR, Vancouver’s Skytrain, and London’s DLR.

  At this stage the Government seems reluctant to commit to full automation.

  Of course there are some disadvantages from using different technology.

  Fleets could not be exchanged with other existing Melbourne lines, limiting flexibility. The deployment of new vehicles, and the cascading of others around the network is common on some networks, including Melbourne’s trams.

  These types of factors become less important as the network gets bigger. Overall it seems to make sense the way they’re going. The pros outweigh the cons.

  I’m more concerned about them adding some intermediate stations (or at least future provision for them) to the longer stretches of the route, to help ensure plenty of people have access to the line.

  Given the apparent wish to seek private investment, it would make sense to have stations at some locations which are not already developed to a high density.

  There is also a strong argument for including Doncaster in the first section (currently flagged as Cheltenham to Box Hill) given Doncaster is one of Melbourne’s biggest centres with no rail connection.

  Provision for a future connection from Cheltenham to the Sandringham line would also make sense.

  And there are still questions about the Airport section of the line, connecting through to Sunshine. I suspect Sunday’s announcement means SRL trains will share the alignment with City to Airport trains, but use separate tracks – but given that’s SRL stage 2 or 3, that decision is a long way off.

  

  It’s good to see the Suburban Rail Loop progressing. It looks like we can expect to see construction begin by 2022 – just in time for the next state election.

  As it comes into service, it will revolutionise cross-suburban travel by providing fast frequent connections around the middle-distance suburbs – opening up opportunities in jobs and education.

  It does mean it becomes even more important to reform and upgrade bus routes and service frequencies to help more people easily reach the rail network.

  And building the SRL is not an excuse for not providing 7-day all-day frequent services on the suburban trains – as well as progressing other major rail infrastructure such as Metro 2.

  Our growing city needs it all to help more people get around without adding to the traffic.

November 23, 2019

• Club Troppo Why we should fear a world Empire

  Universalists dream of a world empire in which a world government works to solve global problems, enforcing the same law all over the world.

  There are many different ideologies that envision a world government, ranging from international socialism, to the brotherhood of Islam, to universal humanism. They squabble about what a world government would do or how it would justify its powers, but they share a dream of one world.

  There are many different scenarios for how a world government would arise that truly has the power to force all other entities to abide by a single law. Some envision a collapse in ecosystems to force to a moment of enlightenment and contrition, leading to one government. Others have visions of conquest, either by arms or by divine persuasion. Others envisage a world government emerging in the aftermaths of some huge catastrophe, like a nuclear war, whereupon the survivors combine into one government. Yet others think it will emerge gradually from increased connectivity between nations and increased roles for existing international institutions.

  I fear such a world government. I believe it would enslave the vast majority and lead to dreadful abuse, no matter how it arises. I have difficulties imagining it capable of remaining intact too, but that is another point.

  My fear is based on the forces that disappear with the end of competing nation states.

  A major force that disappears with a single governments is individuals voting with their feet, which currently forces countries to compete to attract talent and avoid losing talent. Countries do this because the individual elites in those countries benefit from having smart populations under their care. With a single world government, power is centralised and hence what matters to any local elite is their relation to the central governing system. What migrating populations do or think is then, at best, of indirect concern.

  Another force that disappears is the pressure on a local elite to have the support of their population, simply because that is their power base. At present the need for that support leads the elites of countries to want to grow and to look after their populations, at least to some extent. With a centralised world system, that pressure no longer exists.

  The loss of any interest in anything local is even worse at the central level, where the only pressure that remains is control of the single system and survival within it. We know from history exactly what that leads to: the centre becomes an Empire that absorbs all independent sources of power. Everything will be brought under central control. Businesses, villages, households, sports entities, culture, etc. Without the pressure to limit its power, the world will move to a Chine-style single Imperial system, but much worse because China always had some foreign pressures and its leadership could be taken over when it started to atrophy too much. When there is but one centralised government, we would get absolute control by an Imperial court.

  We also know from centralised Empires what happens if some group wins absolute power and is practically without competitors: everyone gets enslaved and does the bidding of the Emperor, who becomes a god. The whole population then gets pressed into service to God. Previously that included building the Pyramids and the Terracotta armies.

  Indeed, we know from human history that the move to absolutism is very rapid in a world empire: in the generation under which power is truly centralised, the deification of the leader(s) already emerges. The monstrous projects of the Chinese emperors began with the very first emperor, he of the Terracotta armies.

  I have an even deeper fear, which is that enslavement might be the best future humanity can hope for. This fear comes from the realisation that in a world political system where you have lots of competing blocks that each have the weaponry to wipe out most of humanity, sooner or later most of us will get wiped out, either by accident or malice.

  Would a single world empire under the rule of a human elite safeguard us from this though? I fear not. The history of empires has shown us that the fight for control simply shifts from open camps to hidden camps. Competition between the children of the emperor emerges. Different ministries compete. Army generals dream of revolt. Such tensions lead to assassinations and shadow societies at the top. When there is pressure on the whole system, due to climate disasters or a running out of food, the empire cracks and huge civil wars emerge. With devastating technology, the civil wars would be devastating, and perhaps exceedingly quick.

  So I fear a world empire lead by humans and expect nothing good from it. My fleeting hope is the end of human control over world politics. A world empire lead by gods might just be workable.

November 18, 2019

• Daniel Bowen An early morning flight

  3:30am alarm.

  3:40am shower.

  4:00am Left the house for a 4:30am rendezvous.

  By 4:45 we were in a minibus headed for our embarkation point.

  Time for a Sunday morning balloon flight – a Christmas present from last year from M.

  Hot air balloons are very much at the mercy of the weather.

  Our flight had been cancelled twice already due to the wintry blast of wind and rain that had been forecast.

  That’s fine by me. I’m a little nervous with heights. Did I want to be high in the air in a balloon in turbulent weather? No, I did not.

  For the first flight date, I’d optimistically booked a room in the hotel that serves as the meeting place.

  Once the flight was cancelled, it morphed into a night away from home – dinner in the CBD, a stroll to the hotel through gardens, a sleep-in, enjoying the views, breakfast out and a walk in the Fitzroy Gardens in the drizzle.

  

  Third time lucky, with the light wind of Sunday morning determining that we’d head to a park in Newport to take off, flying over the City from west to east – along with three other balloons.

  It was a group of nine people, and indeed setting up and packing down is a group operation.

  Two of us helped take the basket and the balloon off the trailer, and then once the two were attached, we held the end of the balloon as a big fan inflated it. This participation helped wash away any nervousness and replace it with enthusiasm.

  Pretty quickly the balloon took shape, and the wind started to blow the basket around, with our pilot directing people to get in to help weigh it down until we were ready to go.

  Some blasts from the flame and we were suddenly drifting upwards, quietly and smoothly.

  

  We headed over Port Melbourne, with amazing views of the bay, a cruise ship, and the Westgate and Bolte Bridges.

  Steve, our pilot, delivered a small box to one lady, visiting from Colombia, who opened it to find it was an engagement ring from her companion.

  She said yes. A round of applause, and we continued our sightseeing.

  Here’s some video:

  Being early Sunday morning, there were few cars around, so it was very peaceful – except when the flame was burning.

  (In contrast, the helicopter ride some years ago was incredibly noisy due to the rotors.)

  The flame, when used, was noisy and being just above our heads, was pretty warm too.

  Steve explained some of the detail of how it all works. Broadly, you follow the wind, but you do have control of climbing and descent, and a little control to turn the balloon.

  We drifted higher over the city centre, which was spectacular from above.

  

  Then over the Treasury and Flagstaff Gardens and the hotel where we’d met, reducing altitude over Collingwood.

  It was still early – few people were out and about, but one bloke sweeping leaves in the street did look up. We exchanged waves.

  After passing Collingwood Town Hall we continued over Yarra Bend Park. Groups of people were down below, dancing to loud music… by this point it was something like 6am, and a party was still going in the park. We drifted down low over them and they saw us and started waving and cheering.

  A little further on in the park and the pilot was radioing the ground crew to let them know we’d be landing soon.

  He prompted us to brace for landing… no doubt sometimes it can be a bit rough, but this was actually pretty smooth.

  It was a spot near the freeway – which compared to the quiet of the park, was surprisingly noisy even from light traffic.

  

  The ground crew arrived, and we helped pack up the balloon – it’s a bit like folding up a sleeping bag back into storage, but involves more people.

  Once the balloon and the basket were back in the trailer, we hopped into the bus to head back to the hotel for breakfast, regaled by tails of earlier flights. Steve recommended we Google for Glen Iris balloon landing.

  “That was me!” he said. “And it was this balloon!”

  “Glad you didn’t tell us before the flight” I replied.

  But our flight was flawless.

  I’m slightly nervous about heights, but the gentle take-off and landing were fine – and I can see why they cancel the flight if it’s too windy.

  Flights are generally around dawn, so winter would involve less of an early start – but it’d be colder and wetter (from dew) while setting up before dawn. It was an early start, but weather was perfect.

  It took a bit under an hour to fly/drift from Newport to Yarra Bend. It would probably take longer by car in peak hour.

  (Obligatory public transport advocacy: the Metro 2 rail tunnel would do a similar trip in perhaps 15-20 minutes.)

  But you can see why ballooning is a tourist activity, not a mainstream form of transport. The embarkation and disembarkation points are severely limited. You’ve got no guarantee of going where you need to go to.

  And any form of transport that requires you to be trailed by a ground crew is never going to be mainstream.

  Ballooning was first attempted in the 1780s – and it’s doubtful that it has ever been a terribly useful way to get around. But it’s still a lot of fun.

  Balloon hothead pic.twitter.com/zMOe59uWFC

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) November 17, 2019

  Postscript: Over breakfast, I overheard a NZ couple chatting with our pilot, about Melbourne’s public transport. Wherever in NZ they’re from, it’s better than there.

  “Yeah it’s pretty good”, replied our pilot. “But I don’t understand why the trains don’t run more frequently in the suburbs. Sometimes you have to wait half an hour.”

  Amen to that, Steve.

  • These guys are the operators we flew with. They offset their emissions, and I can thoroughly recommend them.

November 15, 2019

• The Northern Myth Constable David Jennings. NT cop and Ku Klux Klansman. Part 1.

  

  In 1977 the small Warlpiri township of Lajamanu was about as remote a place in this country as you could get. About 900 kilometres from the major Northern Territory centres of Darwin and Alice Springs, Lajamanu, then known to most but the locals as Hooker Creek, was at the end of very long and very rough dirt roads that would often be closed by floods and wash-aways for months on end.

  In many respects Lajamanu, like many bush towns in the NT then perhaps as now, was seen as a lawless backwater—at least in the non-Aboriginal sense. Few recognised—again then as now—that most if not all of the Aboriginal people living in Lajamanu lived their day-to-day lives according to their own laws and not the laws made in Darwin and Canberra.

  For NT Police officers many of these towns were seen as punishment posts. That is not to say that all Police saw these towns that way—there are some Police—far too few for mine—who will always be willing to spend the time to build local relationships and use enforcement of non-Aboriginal law as a means and not an end.

  The coppers that take that approach are usually described by locals as “good coppers”—hard-but-fair men and women who will turn a blind eye at the right time in order to create trust and to truly serve the community within which they live and work. Much like good Police would do anywhere really.

  But Constable David Jennings wasn’t that sort of cop. As he told the NT News in October 1978, before he landed in Lajamanu he’d been with the NT Police Force for four and a half years—including a stint on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria (another punishment post) and he’d previously worked as a Military Policeman for a year and with the South Australian Police for three and a half years.

  One day in late July 1977 Constable Jennings was asked by the local council to stop a truckload of wine flagons from entering the town. Jennings intercepted the truck carrying the grog and told the driver to stop in front of the Lajamanu Store, where he ordered that the 70 flagons of wine be offloaded out front. Jennings then grabbed his personal 12 gauge pump action shotgun—not a NT Police-issue firearm but one later described as a “Los Angeles-style” riot gun—and proceeded to blast the flagons into shards. Three locals, perhaps more, suffered injuries from the flying glass.

  That same store had been selling t-shirts—apparently often worn by Jennings—bearing the slogan “Ku Klux Klan, NT division.” Another shirt had an image of an NT Police “paddy-wagon” carrying Aboriginals and bore the words “Hooker Creek Taxi Service.”

  A month later Constable Jennings was at it again. As they are wont to do from time to time, some local juveniles got up to sufficient mischief to attract the attention of the police. Jennings rounded nine of them up and, after fixing horse-hobbles to their ankles in full view of the community, put them to work as an impromptu chain gang weeding the town’s gardens for the day,. All the while a local police tracker stood guard over them with a “decent sized waddy.”

  Of course this behaviour didn’t go unnoticed and in October 1977 Pam Ditton, a solicitor from the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service (CAALAS), following a visit to Lajamanu to attend the circuit court from her base in Alice Springs, wrote to the NT Police Commissioner Bill McLaren and to the Country Liberal Party’s Majority Leader in the NT Legislative Assembly (and after Self Government in July 1978, the NT’s first Chief Minister) Paul Everingham. In her letter Pam Ditton made several allegations of theft against one of the Lajamanu police officers and provided detailed allegations against Jennings about the riot gun and the chain gang.

  In November 1977 Jack Doolan, member of the NT Legislative Assembly for the seat of Victoria River, far to the south-west of Darwin, tabled a petition in the Assembly on behalf of his constituents at “Palumpa, Port Keats, Kildurk Station, Wave Hill, Dagaragu, Hooker Creek and Victoria River Downs” who were:

  … deeply concerned that some members of the Northern Territory Police Force habitually and constantly refer to Aboriginal Australians as coons or niggers which we resent. Your petitioners therefore humbly pray that the Assembly urge the Honourable Majority Leader and Cabinet Member for Police [Paul Everingham] to request the Commissioner for Police in the Northern Territory to instruct his officers to desist from using such derogatory terms so that they may give good example to the general public whom they serve and in future refer to us as Aboriginals, and your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.

  Not much seems to have happened about these matters during the long-hot summer months of 1977 but in early February 1978 the MLA for Victoria River, Jack Doolan—whose electorate included Lajamanu—caught the attention of the Canberra Times, which repeated the allegations contained in Pam Ditton’s letter under the headline “Nine Aboriginal teenagers in chain gang”.

  In Assembly sittings later that month Country Liberal Party MLA Roger Vale bowled up a dixer on a “recent incident at Hooker Creek” to Paul Everingham. Everingham referred to the minor theft complaints and then turned to the allegations concerning the shot-gunning of the 70 wine flagons and the chain-ganging of the nine teenagers, noting that these matters had been investigated by a team of two NT Police Inspectors, a Detective-Sergeant and a Detective-Constable.

  Everingham told the Assembly the Police investigation had found the theft allegations to be without substance and not warranting further action. But the shot-gun and chain-gang incidents were different matters altogether and Everingham advised the Assembly that in regard to both matters the opinion of the NT Solicitor-General was that while “there was no criminal charge which could profitably be laid” in both instances Constable Jennings was “guilty of a serious error of judgement.”

  The following day Jack Doolan elaborated on Everingham’s comments, reading into the Hansard much of the content of Pam Ditton’s October 1977 letter and that of her colleague’s follow-up letter to Everingham of February 1978. Doolan also read some statements from locals that he’d met with over the summer, who related their desire to “get rid” of Constable Jennings from Lajamanu because, among other things, “… that policeman chained those kids up, muluka, just like dogs.”

  Doolan went on to note that all those in Jennings’ chain gang were tribally initiated, i.e. in the Warlpiri world they were regarded as grown men, and that Constable Jennings’ conduct caused they and their families to “feel ashamed.” Doolan described Jennings’ behaviour as ” … the insane actions of a person who gives every indication of being a psychopath.”

  Everingham responded to Doolan’s comments, noting that the letters from Pam Ditton and her CAALAS colleague might not be admissible as evidence in any court proceedings and foreshadowing that, while Constable Jennings’ conduct might not attract criminal charges, it may be possible to lay departmental, i.e. NT Police, charges and that they were the subject of “active consideration.”

  The events at Lajamanu attracted national attention in The Weekend Australian of 4 & 5 March 1978, where David Trounce traversed the history of the many iniquities visited upon the Warlpiri over time, including the notorious Coniston massacre of 1928 that resulted in the wholesale abandonment by the Warlpiri of much of their traditional country following Police reprisal shootings across much of the Tanami Desert.

  David Trounce related much of the content of the CAALAS letters and the hansard material from both Everingham and Doolan. He noted that NT Police Commissioner Bill Mclaren was “still studying the enquiry report before deciding what action, if any, would be taken against Constable Jennings.”

  Next – in Part 2 I will examine the NT Police charges laid against Constable Jennings and the remarkable events that followed.

  ——————————————-

November 14, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Why are pedestrian crossings so narrow?

  Why is it that at most traffic lights, the crossings for pedestrians are so narrow?

  Even in Melbourne’s CBD, where heavy pedestrian numbers are expected, most crossings are far too narrow for the number of people.

  

  It appears that technically, anybody crossing outside the lines is in breach of Road Safety Rule regulation 234 (a) – which says you can’t cross a road less than 20 metres from a crossing.

  But in many cases, people have little choice but to cross outside the lines.

  Short “green man” phases at some intersections mean that you might miss the lights if you crossed between the lines.

  At King Street (corner Bourke Street), shown below at lunchtime, there’s only 12 seconds to start crossing, and only 30 seconds in total to cross – because roads authorities have prioritised north-south car traffic. (Hopefully King Street is one of the ones to be reviewed and modified.)

  The default crossing width seems to match the footpaths that feed into it.

  But this doesn’t make sense, as waits for traffic lights mean people cross in large concentrated groups – quite a different pattern from moving individually along a footpath.

  This is not just a CBD problem. Suburban crossings are often too narrow – either not providing required capacity, or not taking into account desire lines, such as the flows here at Bentleigh station to and from the westbound bus stop.

  

  To give authorities some credit, a few re-designed crossings provide a lot more space to pedestrians – at least in the CBD.

  In some cases these have been implemented alongside upgraded tram stops, for instance, where the ramps plus the platform plus widened crossings can nicely fill the half-block.

  

  Of course it doesn’t matter how wide the crossings are if motorists keep blocking them – an ongoing problem given there is no enforcement of the rules.

November 13, 2019

• Club Troppo Is it the duty of the state to police a positive national history story?

  Something very odd happens when people get told a story of how other people with some shared characteristic have behaved in the past: they take it personal and see themselves in those ‘ancestors’, even if they share no actual family relationship to those people and even though they were of course not involved anyway. When a group of people who see themselves as Polish now get told a story of how other people described as Polish behaved 300 years ago, that story becomes part of the self-image of the listeners, making them proud when they hear something that sounds good about those previous Poles. When hearing something bad or shameful, they feel bad about their own ‘Polishness’.

  People thus cannot help but ascribe historical continuity in their story of how they relate to the history of their country. Honesty dictates they shouldn’t, but they do and that has enormous consequences for the telling of the history of groups. It makes history politically contentious and a potential reason to go to war, to break up a country, or to work towards a positive shared future. The history story of groups should not be treated lightly.

  The inevitability that people see themselves in the story told about ‘the history of their country’ forces a country that wishes to remain united and strong to police the story of its own history. A unified country needs to punish those who put something too negative for the living into the story of that history. The alternative is a recipe for civil war and break-up into smaller bits that then are prepared to police their national story.

  Poland shows you how that policing is done. Spain and the UK show you what happens if you don’t.

  The Polish government, newly reelected in October 2019 with a majority in parliament, passed a law punishing anyone from mentioning Polish complicity in the Holocaust, despite ample evidence of enthousiastic complicity in WWII. After all, how could a thousand years of Catholicism in that area not lead to complicity? It is now illegal to bring up that evidence in Poland in a public forum.

  The government also sacked the director of the national history museum and put a new one in place who ironed out any negative stories about Poles over the ages. The fault of any misdeeds in the past, like, say, the mass murder of the population of Gdansk by the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages, is now described as due to someone non-Polish, which means one must avert ones eyes when one looks at just who made up the rank and file in that army of the Teutonic knights.

  Intellectuals are of course up in arms about this in Poland, but what the Polish government is doing can also be seen elsewhere in the world for the same underlying reason of needing a positive story for the population to buy into now.

  [Added due to persistent misunderstandings:] One should of course not confuse the need for a positive history with blind adherence to the history telling of today, or that one should abide by the history telling of a large dominant group in a society. On the contrary, the logic of needing a positive story for the population to go forward leads one to advocate additional elements and changes in emphasis to the existing history telling to accommodate new migrants and marginalised groups in society. Rather than accepting a particular story and not revisiting history, one is then continuously updating one’s view of history to ensure (almost) no-one is depicted as having an evil history. What we are now seeing in the world is many countries re-defining their history, some indeed accommodating groups not previously catered for, but sometimes not accommodating the whole population but merely a large part of them. The history re-writing is inevitable, leaving out large minorities is not.

  In India, a similar historic cleansing is underway to generate a continuous narrative from the Veddas to ‘modern’ Hinduism. In China, the government facilitated the creation of a story of 2,000 years of the Han Chinese nation, falling due to outsiders and rising again due to its innate greatness. We see similar processes in Turkey, Japan, South Korea, and much of Eastern Europe. In each case the new national history story is in a literal sense a made up story, concocted in committees and overseen by politicians, a fabrication that falls apart if you look too close.

  It is not necessary that the actual events and interpretations in the favoured national history story are completely made up, though that is rather normal. What is necessary is that certain things are accentuated and others not, ie the perspective is always selective. Hence the new Polish national story does not have to pretend that the murder of the population of Gdansk did not happen, but it does require downplaying the role of anyone described as Polish as perpetrators.

  We see stirrings of new history fabrications in the UK and Western Europe, usually in response to the failure to police or update old fabrications. The Catalan government since the 1990s churned out a story of Catalan history that is cleansed and that creates a national narrative for the Catalan people. That lead to civil unrest and the possible break-up of Spain, and reflects the failure of the Spanish state to control the national history story in Catalonia.

  Scotland has such stirrings too, for the same reasons and with the same consequences.

  In the UK they just put a prime-minister in charge who has personally penned down a more romantic nationalistic story of the time under Churchill, leading the charge out of the EU by drawing on narratives of Imperial greatness. The main question in the UK on this point is whether the Brexit movement is channelled towards a resurgence of British Nationalism or towards English nationalism. If it goes the way of ‘rose tinted’ English national history revisionism, it means the break-up of the UK. If it goes the way of ‘rose tinted’ British national history revisionism, I think the union will survive.

  I personally feel conflicted about the various fabrications. They offend me because I was taught to value truth and I don’t want to be constrained by a make-belief lalaland of national goodness. On the other hand I recognise that groups cannot function if they do not buy into a story that makes the members feel good about themselves. Without functioning large groups there is massive bloodshed, so if their stability requires history to be fabricated, then it must be fabricated. The alternative is the destruction of large group, and that can involve civil war, ethnic cleansing, and other mayhem. Breaking up the larger groups into smaller ones doesn’t help at all but just pushes the same issue one layer down, only stopping when there is policing of a fabricated story at that lower layer.

  The ultimate question is whether peace is more important than truth. Surely it is.

  Do I then not believe a country should face ‘the truth’ about its terrible history, learn its lessons and try and do better in the future, meanwhile reminding its citizens of the horrors they have been capable of?

  No I do not because that ‘truth’ is just another fabrication, particularly when it comes to things no longer in living memory. You see, none of those alive were actually involved in what happened before their birth and all countries emerged from lots of different entities with lots of people mingling within it. So any story about ‘our past’ that divides the living into victims and perpetrators is a quite nefarious fabrication itself. It is simply another attempt at enslaving the audience to a particular self-image, and we should judge on the likely outcome.

  So what matters about the fabrications is how they make you feel about your country and your place within that country now.

  This does not mean we have to pretend humanity is good. If you need to remind people that humanity can be brutal, tell a general story of human brutality, but do not accentuate this in the story of your own group.

  So I return to the point of my introductory paragraph: since people see themselves in the story told about ‘the history of their country’, countries must police the story of its own history and punish those who put something negative for the living into the story of that history. This is a basic duty of the state. The alternative means civil war and the break-up into smaller bits that are prepared to police their national story. So ultimately there is no alternative: we have to make up a positive national story that gives the vast majority of the population a positive view of their past.

• The Northern Myth The red hands of Yuendumu, Tuesday 12 November 2019

  

  This is a guest post by Frank Baarda, a long-term resident of Yuendumu, NT.

  Yesterday hundreds of Yuendumu residents marched on the Yuendumu police station. The police station was going to be opened to allow the station to be swept.

  Sweeping is a ritual whereby after a death the areas the dead person had frequented are swept using eucalyptus branches. I will not claim to fully understand its significance, all I can say is that it is a sombre emotional and cathartic event.

  The march seemed carefully choreographed. At the vanguard a group of placard carrying children who on arrival lined up and repeatedly chanted “Justice for Walker” and who much later briefly chanted “Peace”. Behind the children a very large group of black clad women with white ochre smeared foreheads followed carrying branches.

  Sporadic wailing would emanate from this group as we walked the considerable distance from the basketball court to the police station. Then followed the men and white-fellows and a miscellaneous assortment of visitors including journalists.

  As the slow process of first women then men then young people entering the station a few at a time to sweep was happening, the chanting children suddenly broke ranks and covered the police station walls with blood red paint hand prints.

  The march had been filmed by the ABC. Overshadowed by the NSW and Queensland fires our march appeared at the tail end of the news. Missing from the coverage were the chanting children. “Tensions are rising at the community of Yuendumu” the voice over proclaimed.

  Not long before we arrived in Mexico City on our way back to Australia from Canada, a massacre of students had occurred. That was in 1971 and I recall seeing a police riot squad seated in a long side-less bus driving past. The Mexican police were dressed in black and heavily armed. Never again was I to see such a sinister sight, until yesterday.

  “ …They do not know, that a subtle but effective system of terrorism, together with an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other, has emasculated the people and induced in them the habit of simulation …. This awful habit has added to the ignorance and self deception of the administrators”

  Mahatma Ghandi at his 1922 Sedition trial

  Yesterday we witnessed an organised display of force. At the public meeting at the basketball court I counted five police vehicles including one labelled ‘Major Crash Investigation Unit’.

  At the airstrip there was another police vehicle. Parked on the apron there were two Pilatus PC-12 aircraft, one belonging to the Royal Flying Doctor Service and another to the NT Police.

  I’d been told that earlier on, a contingent of police bristling with weapons had arrived on the police plane. A friendly policeman at the airstrip asked me what I was up to and told me that “The airport is closed off to the public for security reasons”.

  Opposite the police station at the other side of town in the shade of a lone tree there were four armed policemen dressed in military camouflage.

  At the public meeting it seemed to me that the only unarmed policeman was a senior ranking officer who has a long association with Yuendumu and has many friends here and is well respected in the community.

  Yesterday I witnessed the largest concentration of armed police I have ever seen since 1971 in Mexico. Why the overt display of weaponry? Was it out of unwarranted fear? Or was it an insensitive display resulting from ignorance or arrogance or both?

  So now once again and for the wrong reasons Yuendumu finds itself in the headlines. Bureaucrats politicians and the media are complicit in spreading misinformation which is once again portraying Yuendumu as this incredibly unsafe and dangerous place where ‘tensions are rising’.

  A question asked at the public meeting was “ Why haven’t the police told all government departments that it is safe to come here?” No answer was forthcoming.

  The NT Police motto is Building a safe community through prevention, integrity and unity.

  If what they’re doing in Yuendumu is their idea of living up to their motto. they’re no better than Centrelink, whose motto is Giving you Options.

  On an ABC website the following appeared a few days ago:

  At approximately 7:00pm last night a member of the Northern Territory Police was involved in an incident where a 19-year-old man in Yuendumu was shot Deputy Commissioner White said.

  An ‘incident’?

  It has now been declared a ‘death in custody’ Incidentally almost invariably in Australia when someone gets shot and killed if the person who pulled the trigger is known such a person is arrested and charged with murder and guilt or otherwise is determined by the courts.

  At 7:15pm on Tuesday 13 November 2019 the NT Police Force issued the following statement:

  Police officer charged – Yuendumu shooting.

  A 28-year old male Northern Territory Police officer has been charged with one count of murder.

  As this matter is before the court, no further information will be released.

  This information is provided in accordance with NT Police Transparency Guidelines.

November 11, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Train punctuality – WWJD?

  Last week the government announced timetable changes, including adjustments to the Cranbourne/Pakenham line. (I’ll just call it the Dandenong line for short. Almost everybody else does.)

  Of the roughly 265 services per weekday, 93 will be adjusted. A few will be quicker by a minute or two, but most of the 93 will be slower – most of them by 1-2 minutes, but a few by up to 5 minutes.

  During peak hour, I suspect most people won’t notice, because between the City and Dandenong it’s usually not worth looking at a timetable – there’s generally a train every 3-6 minutes.

  Beyond Dandenong it’s less frequent, of course, and off-peak 20 minute frequencies kick as early as 8am on weekdays at Pakenham.

  Striving for the impossible?

  But let’s cut to the chase. What’s the point of an impossible-to-achieve timetable?

  Over the past 12 months, this line has had the worst punctuality on the network (October 2018 to September 2019: Cranbourne 84.8%, Pakenham 85.9% within 5 minutes)

  If some running times can’t be achieved, it absolutely makes sense to make changes.

  But they also need to look at the causes of delays, and identify fixes.

  • Are there infrastructure issues? (Yes, there have been major disruptions due to new infrastructure, but is it also causing every day delays?)
  • Is the Cranbourne single track contributing to delays? (It’s hard to believe it’s not. Even the government’s own web site says duplication would remove the bottlenecks that cause delays and allow the number of train services to be doubled during peak times)
  • Is the flat junction at Dandenong causing issues?
  • What about the sharing of the City Loop tunnel with Frankston trains? Nobody could pretend that doesn’t add to track congestion.
  • Peak crowding? I’m sure that’s contributing. So how about boosting the service? Again, that’s possible if the Frankston trains come out of the Loop.
  • Not all of the changes are in peak hour. For instance the 1:40pm to Pakenham currently arrives and terminates at 2:58pm. Under the new timetable it takes 2 minutes longer. If services like this are taking too long now due to crowding, is it a sign the base off-peak service needs boosting too?
  • Will the new HCMTs help cut station dwell times? (And are other measures such as platform staff and announcements and the “burn lines” helping?)

  The preference should be to fix issues like these, and then adjust the times…

  We know they’re working on timetable changes.

  Realistically, right here and now, what do they do?

  And why has this been ignored for so long that some trains need to be given five minutes longer?

  

  What would happen in Japan?

  One reaction I saw from multiple people was along the lines of:

  Slowing down trains? Outrage! This would never happen in Japan!

  Um well… scrupulously punctual trains don’t just happen by magic. They have to work at it.

  So what do they do in Japan? A little research, and here are some answers, courtesy of this paper.

  It’s worth noting that they’re often looking at some seriously intense railway operations. The paper looks at the Tozai line, which carries 1.6 million passenger trips per day:

  In many railway lines in big cities, 25 – 30 trains are running per hour per direction on a double track line during morning rush hours. This means trains are running every two to three minutes in one direction. Still, trains are very congested and it is not unusual that more than 2,000 passengers are aboard a train which consists of ten cars and is 200m long.

  That’s far more and longer trains than on the Dandenong line, though that’s where things are likely to be headed in coming years.

  How do the Japanese railway companies handle it? The paper says they look at their infrastructure and try to make the most of it:

  Timetable planners are very cautious to avoid conflicts imposed by capacity constraints.

  And station dwell times are certainly an issue:

  Because trains are operated very densely, once a delay (primary delay) happens, the delay is propagated to other trains and a lot of trains are also delayed (secondary delay). Primary delays are quite often caused by passengers. If more passengers than expected get on/off a train, the dwell time becomes longer and the train is delayed.

  The paper goes on to say that if infrastructure can’t fix it, or it isn’t practical to upgrade it, then yes, absolutely they do adjust train timetables to improve punctuality:

  Various factors are relevant to the robustness of timetables. In particular, improvement or increase of facilities such as construction of new tracks is quite effective to increase robustness of timetables, but usually prohibitively expensive and sometimes impossible due to limitation of spaces. So, railway companies are more interested in improving robustness of timetables by slightly modifying them.

  And it flags some of the options for modifying the timetables:

  …potential adjustments are:

  Dwell time of Train Z at Station A should be increased by five seconds.

  Running time of Train W from Station B to Station C should be increased by 10 seconds.

  Departing order of Train S and Train T should be changed so that Train T departs first.

  Train U should stop at Station D.

  The whole paper is worth a read if you’re interested in such things.

  So then… do they slow down train timetables in Japan to maintain punctuality? Yes they certainly do.

  I’d love to visit Japan one day. But whenever and wherever I go on holiday, I’m wary of observing things just as a tourist, and I try not to make assumptions about how or bad and efficient things are, based on limited experience.

  

  So is our State government off the hook? Certainly not. The question is: are the root causes of delays being looked at? And we know Dandenong to Cranbourne is to be duplicated – by 2023 apparently, almost 30 years after suburban trains started on that line. Why has it taken so long?

  And how about the other single tracks around the Metro network: Upfield, Belgrave, Lilydale, Hurstbridge, Altona Loop? They all cause problems – delays, and short shunting to prevent flow-on delays.

  This isn’t Puffing Billy, a tourist attraction with a train only every couple of hours. Melbourne’s rail network underpins the entire economy.

  If they are serious about the public transport network, then sufficient infrastructure is a must, and the other barriers to punctuality all need to be looked at and resolved.

  • Lead picture: Kudanshita station, Tokyo (Wikimedia)

November 08, 2019

• Club Troppo Academia: from inefficient effectiveness to efficient ineffectiveness

  If, as I think, academia has gone from being inefficient but effective to being efficient but ineffective (a proposition I won’t defend here), the mechanism for making the switch was going from embodied cognition to abstract Cartesian cognition, or to be more precise from a rich to a shallow and superficial form of embodied cognition. Along the way a God’s eye view of the sector replaced a system in which the thinking and doing was deeply embedded in and emergent from the system.

  The most important thing an academic system must do is determine relative academic merit. Alas, it’s also the hardest thing to do. Here we are at the forefront of human knowledge where literally every next step, if it’s worthwhile, is two things. It’s at the forefront of its field – which may require a substantial amount of learning and specialisation even to understand. And it’s uncertain as to its its outcome – as a rule radically so.

  In this situation, the academic system we had in the 1950s was built around a centuries-old institution – the university. At least in its idealised form expressed by the conservative political theorist Michael Oakeshot, a university was “a corporate body of scholars … a home of learning, a place where a tradition of learning is preserved and extended”. Oakeshot’s description of the nature of scientific endeavour within universities helps clarify how potentially momentous our reform might have been:

  Scientific activity is not the pursuit of a premeditated end; nobody knows or can imagine where it will reach. There is no perfection, prefigured in our minds, which we can set up as a standard by which to judge current achievements. What holds science together and gives it impetus and direction is not a known purpose to be achieved, but the knowledge scientists have of how to conduct a scientific investigation. Their particular pursuits and purposes are not superimposed upon that knowledge, but emerge within it. 

  In any event, the way this system identified and promoted academic merit was within the broad outlines of the late 19th and early 20th-century notion of professionalism. One generally needed to qualify for admission to the guild of academics with one’s educational attainments (generally a bachelors degree until the 1960s) whereupon one proceeded towards higher status positions which were also more highly and more securely rewarded. More senior academics identified the best of their juniors for support and promotion. The best got the long-term career reward of internal satisfaction and the approbation of those they respected – the very wellsprings of what Adam Smith thought drove a good life in a good society.

  We can’t say how good this system was at selecting the best but it seems to have been tolerably effective at allowing the best researchers, or most of them, freedom to pursue their passions. However, there were myriad ways in which the system didn’t work as the ideal suggests it should. Just as lawyers typically come to serve their own interests ahead of the public interest in justice or their client’s need for justice at reasonable cost, academia was inefficient, often failing to put the public interest ahead of academics’ comfort in what they’d grown used to. In addition, crucial public goods on which science is built – such as peer review and the replication of previous studies – went unfunded.

  Then came reform. Though it was ostensibly pursued to promote the public interest, and though to this day university research is overwhelmingly funded by the public purse and philanthropy, reformers’ imagination didn’t run to addressing these problems. Reform seems to have exacerbated the latter problems relating to the lack of explicit support for the public goods of academia.

  Instead it ‘solved’ the apex problem of identifying academic merit by grabbing the nearest thing to hand – citation metrics. To put it another way, it didn’t start from where it was – with a difficult problem which was being tolerably solved by an existing institution but which could clearly be improved upon – with a thoughtful examination of the problems, a search for potential improvcements which were then slowly winnowed out and worked up into actual improvements.

  Instead, it made a beeline for a God’s eye view of the problem. What would God want from the university system? Why He’d want optimality. He’s a pretty optimal kind of guy himself. So he’d want this system to reward the best. The best universities and the best academics. Well, that should be pretty straightforward. Let’s look around. Journal citations look like they do the trick. And they’re even quantitative, so they can all be added up and Bob’s your uncle. What could possibly go wrong? Of course, lots of things could go wrong and go wrong they have, and go wronger they will as the process not only becomes embedded but triggers Goodhart’s Law.

  There’s a deep irony here. Economists exalt the way markets avoid this mistake of having some source, however authoritative, picking winners. Rather, the selection of winners is the emergent product of many different forms of valuation and action from many different perspectives. Yet reform of the higher ed sector is driven by economists’ and policymakers’ fondest imaginings that they’re moving towards a market-based system.

  In all this what’s happened is illustrated by the image above in which birds wings are fitted to a plane. Birds’ wings played an important role in early aviators’ figuring out how to get machines to fly. But, as a degree of thoughtfulness would lead one to expect, simply taking some features of a market and grafting it into another, quite different system might make it better or worse. But when things need to be finely adapted, one would surely expect it to make things worse. For each part of a plane and each part of a bird are a highly crafted part of a highly crafted whole. Transfering the insights that birds’ wings might give one into flying machine will need a lot of work of the kind that led to the evolution of birds’ wings and the development of planes. One is seeking to use an insight from a mechanism in one domain in another domain which operates according to quite different principles. One might as well transplant a dog’s leg onto a Thylacene’s body and imagine it would work effectively.

  Yet that’s what we’ve done in one area after another. And called it economic reform.

   

November 05, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Protip: the Myki gate doesn’t have to close behind the previous person before you can touch your card

  Update – see below

  At busy times, queues can form at station fare gates, especially when large numbers of people arrive from multiple trains at once.

  Investment in more gates and faster (Vix) readers has helped – 950 new readers are being installed in 141 stations.

  But it’s noticeable than some people wait for the person in front of them to go through and for the gate to close before touching their card. This slows things down.

  You don’t need to wait. When the light acknowledging the previous person’s card goes off (or for older readers, when it says “Touch here”) you can touch your card – even if the gate itself hasn’t closed yet behind the previous person.

  In the video above, hopefully you can see that the guy in front of me waits until the previous person has cleared the gate and the gate has fully closed, then he touches.

  But I touch my card and follow before the gate has closed.

  This helps keep the queue moving rather than a stop-start shuffle.

  Given ongoing problems at some busy stations, I’m surprised authorities haven’t tried to educate passengers on this – particularly now all the busiest stations have the faster readers.

  Keeping people moving through the gate line seems like a logical step to help improve flows through stations.

  Update – it turns out there’s a complication! I’m told that at some locations, going through this fast may not be possible – the gate may get confused and close on you. This seems to be an issue with some of the red coloured gates in particular – not the yellow ones shown above. So if the gate is red, you’re right to be wary.

November 04, 2019

• Club Troppo Pedantry is not its own reward – and it’s certainly not ours!

  Pedantry is alluring. Especially if one gets some aesthetic satisfaction from the way words are used. Take “begs the question” for instance. I love this term because it is such a simple, chummy way of naming something that’s maddening in is subtlety. To beg the question in its traditional meaning is to mistake the form of answering a question for its substance. One ‘answers’ the question by simply asking it again in another guise.

  This can be the product of deliberate deception. But in my experience, and in some ways more maddeningly questions are begged more often by people deceiving themselves. They conclude their ‘explanation’ with great satisfaction, blissfully unaware that their explanation is no explanation at all. Here’s an example of begging the question – which involves answering a question by asserting its premise in different words.  From Wikipedia.

  To allow every man an unbounded freedom of speech must always be, on the whole, advantageous to the State, for it is highly conducive to the interests of the community that each individual should enjoy a liberty perfectly unlimited of expressing his sentiments.

  Today, ‘begs the question’ is much more often used to mean ‘prompts the question’. “The minister says he wasn’t at the lunch, which begs the question ‘Where was he?'” This was a mistake a few decades ago. It pisses me off that it’s not still a mistake. But there you go. Language moves on. A small aesthetic diminishment of the language and that’s it. I don’t use ‘begs the question’ in this way that I dislike but I don’t pull people up on it either. Language is a socially given thing.

  I recall a friend of my father’s objecting to the world ‘hopefully’ as in ‘hopefully nothing bad will happen to us’. If you think about it, other than its familiarity, this usage is a bit odd. Because it’s an adverb with an absent verb [I’m no great shakes at grammar so I won’t be surprised if someone corrects anything in this last sentence]. The more logical way to put it is “we are hopeful that nothing bad will happen to us”. But here’s the thing – well two things really:

  1. These horses have bolted so we need to get on with our lives
  2. Their cost can be almost entirely restricted to the aesthetic

  But there’s a long tradition of schoolmarmish finger-wagging about precisely this kind of thing as occurred in this Age column by Stephen Downes. The author takes exception to people using the word ‘multiple’ to mean ‘many’. Like ‘hopefully’, I can see the logic in his point, but so what? I use the word in the way he deplores. With him having pointed it out, I might take to the aesthetic of being more pernickety about it. But so what? Others certainly won’t so it’s a lost battle already and, much more to the point a battle that’s hardly worth anything.

  After the finger-wagging in Downes’ column George Orwell is inevitably trotted out warning that sloppy language is a step towards the gulag. The thing about George Orwell is that he was writing about something very serious which is the control of language by power, about certain idioms that render the things that need to be said unsayable. As he said – or words to this effect – the creation of a situation where speaking the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

  I can give you an example. I was collaborating on a two-page explanatory memo for an enterprising bureaucrat somewhere in the world who was keen on explaining my idea of an Evaluator General. I wrote that it was to “nurture and protect a culture of truth-telling”. But she wouldn’t have it. “We can’t say that”, she said. You’ve probably already guessed why not. Because it implied that there wasn’t a culture of truth-telling. And truth-telling was already hot and strong in the agency she worked for. Why it was in the corporate values (OK: I made that last bit up, but it may well have been in the corporate values.) The point was, she didn’t feel comfortable writing that in the briefing. That illustrates in simple and concrete terms, Orwell’s point – and the power of Orwell’s point. We’re dealing with a serious and difficult subject which, if we are to give it its due, will make demands on us.

  In any event, if people are going to wag their finger to talk about good writing, as Stephen Downes does, they could surely give us some good writing. They should surely make the case with some compelling worked examples leaving us thinking – ‘yes this matters and now I know why’. Is this vivid?

  Using multiple is just one way in which the media is diluting its impact. If journalists’ writing was more succinct, more articulate and more consistent grammatically, it might also be more powerful. When – not, “At a time when”, you’ll notice – governments, commerce and organisations of all sorts are stifling the truth, writing with bite is the only antidote.

  That paragraph is actually hard to take in. The beginning of the last sentence needs to be read several times – at least I had to read it several times. But that’s not my main objection – which is that it makes a claim about “writing with bite”, proposes it as an antidote but the writing is sloppy and vague. Not much bite! In this piece, I try to explain with a precise example what I object to about a corporate value that specifies “honesty in all we do and say” and try to show how that statement itself becomes the apex deception. As I put it:

  There’s something creepy about calls from on high for “honesty in all that we do and say” while the routine deceptions of everyday life, both petty and otherwise, proceed apace.

  Well, apologies for my tastelessness in quoting myself as a good example – I’m short on time. Commenters can no doubt offer much better examples – there are plenty in Orwell. Don Watson is hilarious and fun – my attempt at ridicule is here – but also a bit disappointing.  Satirising something has some value in itself as social action. It can also be implicitly forensic. Watson’s stuff is brilliantly, hilariously written of course, but it left me a bit disappointed for not homing in on its quarry with sufficiently forensic analysis.

  But spare me the finger-wagging without a cause. Downes’ concrete examples of what he anathematises all end up in the same place. After ‘multiples’ we get the use of surplus words and expressions like ‘now’.¹ Then we get a nice general wave of the arms:

  Weak writing means feeble thinking. Yes, we know what the writer meant in the sentences above. But in writing badly, he or she is signalling a lack of interest in precision, in lightening the readers’ load, in conveying meaning. She’s telling readers that she doesn’t care enough to pick the most powerful verbs, call things by their proper names and write her words in the correct order, the most common characteristics of weak prose. Poor writing also demonstrates to the powerful – to politicians, big business, lobbyists and the malevolent – that we don’t care enough about our thoughts and ideas to aim them accurately. They are easily deflected.

  Thoughtful writing is strong and eloquent. I doubt that it has ever been needed more.

  Quite.

  It’s two stars from me (and three and a half from Margaret).

  1. “We write skill sets and drought conditions. Why, when skills and drought do the job? The words ‘all’, ‘any’ and ‘location’ are almost never needed, yet we read them time and again. ↩

November 01, 2019

• Club Troppo The British Film Festival
  Festival Website | Films | Schedule

  Top Picks

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  Military Wives (Opening Night)

  The life of a military wife can be thankless. Separated from loved ones, their suffering and sacrifice go unnoticed while they live with the dread of a fateful knock on the door. But Kate finds freedom in song and persuades a ragtag group of women on the base to form the Military Wives Choir. Finding their voice together, the misfit choir put two fingers up to stuffy military tradition, anti-war protestors and their own personal differences. As friendships flourish, even the sceptical rebel and rocker Lisa is transformed by the choir’s friendship, humour and courage.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ In The Seats

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  Hope Gap

  Grace and Edward have been married thirty-three years. When their son Jamie comes home to visit them in the fading seaside town where he grew up, Edward makes the shocking announcement that he intends to leave Grace. As the lives of the family unit begin to unravel through stages of shock, disbelief and anger, Jamie desperately tries to save the situation, while Grace is forced to face the possibility of spending the rest of her life alone.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ The Upcoming

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  Sorry We Missed You

  Ricky is a former construction worker in Newcastle, who lost both his building work and his chance of a mortgage after the economic crash of 2008. Easily impassioned, with a liking for the drink, he is nevertheless proudly hardworking and loves his two kids and wife Abby, an overworked contract nurse, and in-home carer. When Ricky takes a golden opportunity to buy a van, start his own business, and become a freelance deliveryman, things don’t quite work out as planned, and his already dire situation takes a turn for the worse. As the impossible demands of the job edge him further into debt and push his family’s relationship to the brink of collapse, we can only watch as his and Abby’s hopes turn from to confusion and despair.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Cine Vue

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  O Lucky Man!

  Mick Travis is a determined young man. Starting off as a coffee salesman, Mick is soon promoted within his company. But then a series of bizarre obstacles occur, all threatening Mick’s trajectory toward success. As Mick becomes smitten with the gorgeous Patricia, he winds up working for her father, the sinister executive Sir James Burgess, where things progressively get stranger.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  Citizen K

  In 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the richest men in Russia, began a ten-year sentence for tax evasion. Many believed his downfall was challenging the newly elected president Vladimir Putin. During his decade in a Siberian prison, Khodorkovsky became a world-famous dissident. Today, exiled in London, he continues to battle Putin’s 19-year hold on power. With this exquisite cinematic portrait of Khodorkovsky, prolific documentarian Alex Gibney utilises more than 20 hours of interviews with the man himself, as well as conversations with Khodorkovsky’s friends and enemies.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  Official Secrets

  It’s 2003, and British and American politicians are pressing the case for the invasion of Iraq. British intelligence specialist Katharine Gun is a secret service employee who receives a memo from the NSA with a shocking directive: The United States is enlisting Britain’s help in collecting compromising information on UN Security Council members to blackmail them into voting in favour of invading Iraq. Aware of the potential explosive repercussions of this illegal directive, Gun is unable to stand by and watch the world be rushed into war, becoming a reluctant heroine who risks it all in trying to prevent a war and save the lives of thousands.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Reel Views

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

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  Romantic Road

  Rupert and Jan are an English couple in their late 60s living in the south of England. They still receive their milk from a milkman every day, their rural cottage is alive with chickens, sheep and cats, and their family car is a hand-me-down 1936 Rolls Royce. After being invited to a human rights conference in India, they decide to turn the trip into an epic adventure. Shipping their beloved Rolls Royce across to the sub-continent, they embark upon an ambitious 5000-mile, six-month journey from Mumbai to Dhakar battling local officials, dodging tribal conflicts and dining with maharajahs.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  The Madness Of King George

  Based on Alan Bennett’s acclaimed play, The Madness of King George takes a dark-humoured look at the mental decline of King George III of England. As the monarch alternates between bouts of confusion and near-violent outbursts of temper, his doctors attempt the ineffectual cures of the time. Meanwhile, the Prince of Wales plots to take the throne from the King, whom many blame for the loss of the colonies. However, the prime minister and his wife Queen Charlotte are determined to prevent such a betrayal.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Reel Views

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  Don’t Look Now

  Laura and John are a grieving couple whose young daughter has died in a tragic freak accident. When John accepts a commission to restore an ancient church, the couple travel to Venice, where they encounter two elderly sisters, one of whom claims to be clairvoyant and informs them that their daughter is trying to contact them and warn them of danger. Initially, John dismisses their claims, but soon after starts to experience mysterious sightings and frightening encounters himself.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ BBC

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Cine Vue

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Reel Views

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  The Queen

  The Queen follows the relationship between Prime Minister Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth in the wake of the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Newly appointed Blair finds himself at odds with the Queen over her reluctance to publicly mourn the princess, and increasing pressure from the heartbroken British public, who view her silence as cold and heartless.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ BBC

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Reel Views

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  The Professor And The Madman

  Professor James Murray took on the daunting challenge of creating the most comprehensive dictionary ever developed, but predicted that it would take him and his team over a century to compile all known definitions. However, by “crowdsourcing” the work and enlisting definitions from people all over the world, the dictionary could be accomplished in mere decades. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee led by Professor Murray, discovered that an American Civil War veteran Dr. W.C. Minor had submitted more than ten thousand words. But when the committee insisted on honouring him, a shocking truth came to light that no one could have ever predicted.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  Kind Hearts And Coronets

  When Louis Mazzini’s mother eloped with an Italian opera singer, she was disowned by her aristocratic family for marrying beneath her station. Consequently, Louis was also cut off from the lineage, shunned and made to pay for his mother’s choice. After the family refuses to let her be buried in the family mausoleum, it is the last straw for Louis. He decides to avenge his mother’s death by attempting to murder the eight relatives who stand between himself and the family fortune. But when Louis finds himself torn between his long-time love and the widow of one of his victims, his plans go awry.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ BBC

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  The Good Liar (Closing Night)

  Career con artist Roy Courtnay can hardly believe his luck when he meets the wealthy widow Betty McLeish on an internet dating site. Initially to Roy, Betty is nothing more than a lottery prize, but as she opens her home and life to him, Roy is surprised to find himself caring about her. Matters become even more complicated when Betty’s grandson shows scepticism toward his grandmother’s latest companion. Eventually, what should be a cut-and-dry swindle for Roy turns into the most treacherous tightrope walk of his life.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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October 30, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from October 2009

  Here’s another in my series of old photos out of the vault from ten years ago.

  We went to Bendigo for a couple of days, so here are a couple of snaps from that trip.

  

  

  The only time I saw Powderfinger live was this “surprise” gig in Federation Square. (A surprise except a lot of people seemed to know they were coming.)

  

  I must have been checking out the then-new bus turnaround at the western end of Lonsdale Street. Much of the area has since been redeveloped, including The Age building at left.

  

  Remember these? Back when you could buy a tram ticket on a tram.

  

  Yes, trams used to get crowded before the Free Tram Zone was instituted. But most of the trams are bigger now, and more frequent, and more crowded. (They also take about the same amount of time to get across the CBD, sometimes a little longer, according to timetables.)

  

  Collins Place. Basically unchanged from this angle.

  

October 29, 2019

• Daniel Bowen The ups and downs of escalators

  It’s not your imagination. Some City Loop escalators are running slower in peak hour.

  Normally: Fast in peak, slow off-peak

  Normal practice (for decades now) is to run the Loop station escalators at a reasonable clip during peak hour, and set to slow down outside peak. This is pretty annoying for many of those catching trains at off-peak times.

  Why slow them down outside peak? It’s not clear.

  • Perhaps to save power – but isn’t the travel time of off-peak passengers important too?
  • Perhaps some off-peak passengers are uncomfortable with the higher speed. But then, they have the option of lifts.
  • Perhaps it’s one of those operational policies put into place in 1981 when the Loop first opened that’s never been reviewed.

  

  Trialling slow speeds in peak

  Anyway, just in the last couple of weeks Metro has been running the down escalators in peak at the slower speed at some stations.

  They say it’s a trial to improve safety.

  We’ve followed up with Flagstaff and a new escalator speed trial has begun at Flagstaff (and Parliament), designed to improve safety.
  
  The trial will involve slowing the speed of downward escalators during peak periods to reduce the risk of slips, trips or falls.

  — Metro Trains (@metrotrains) October 15, 2019

  My initial reaction to slower speeds: I wonder if it could backfire:

  • The slower speed may encourage more people to walk on the escalator, increasing risk of a fall
  • It’s a known problem that some people overbalance or suffer from vertigo while standing on escalators. Slower escalators means they’re on them for longer. Would this mean more risk?

  A study of 600 escalator incidents over 9 years showed people were more likely to fall off escalators going up than down – but slowing upwards escalators in peak would cause capacity issues – see below.

  To my surprise, I’m hearing that the initial results of the trial have been favourable.

  But I guess we’ll see how it pans out.

  Escalator capacity: walking vs standing

  By the way, some people claim that everybody standing (nobody walking) on escalators is faster. I think that’s slightly misinterpreting the results from the well-known London Underground trial back in 2015.

  What it does provide is more capacity – because standing people are more space-efficient than walking people.

  But it’s only faster if having both standing and walking is resulting in queues at the entrance to the escalator – this could particularly be an issue if the majority of people want to stand.

  

  Southern Cross is pretty bad for escalator crowding, especially during their frequent outages.

  Of the underground stations, Parliament station might be the worst for escalator crowding, particularly during morning peak. (See above)

  In most cases I’d rather walk, but there might be some justification at that location to encourage everybody to stand.

  It’s probably easier to convince people to stand if the escalators are not running slowly. And the faster speed will clear any queues more quickly of course.

  At the northern end of Parliament, it might also be an option to ask the small number of people entering in morning peak to use the lift down to the platform rather than the mostly empty third escalator – opening up more capacity for those exiting. (This may not be an option at other stations with higher proportions of interchange and counter-peak flows.)

  

  The design, capacity and provision of escalators is no doubt being studied carefully for the new metro tunnel stations. You’d hope they will handle expected growth in coming decades, especially at Parkville which may become a future Metro 2 interchange.

  But building more escalator and lift capacity into existing underground stations would be incredibly expensive – so in the City Loop, this is another case where it makes sense to look at operational practices to make the most of the current infrastructure.

October 28, 2019

• Daniel Bowen The end of Toxic Custard

  Before blogging and the web, there was email and Usenet and FTP sites.

  Just over 29 years ago I started writing online, sending out literal undergraduate humour to mates at Monash University and beyond mostly via email, under the truly ridiculous name “Toxic Custard“.

  It got into the student newspaper, then in 1996 it went onto the web and became the early version of this blog. Along the way the content has continued to morph, to more autobiographical material, and more recently a concentration on transport.

  The email list still exists… and to my surprise it’s still got about 600 people on it.

  But I’m shutting it down – because it requires manual intervention to crank it up and send it out, which I rarely get around to doing, and because it relies on YahooGroups, which recently announced most of its features are being shut down. Emails to lists will be the only thing left, but it’s probably pretty safe to say these won’t last much longer. It’s obviously not a business Yahoo wants to be in anymore.

  Edit: In classic Yahoo style, the final email to the list took almost 24 hours to be delivered.

  The blog will keep going. Those wanting to receive posts by email have a couple of options:

  Subscribe to all posts – I’ll be sending out invitations to this to those on the old list.

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  There are also options to get new posts via RSS feeders (just add this URL), and I promote most of them via Twitter and Facebook. Edit: Of course you can just read it on the web.

  I also occasionally blog on technology and various geeky tidbits at geekrant.org

  Thanks to all who stayed on the email list over the years.

October 23, 2019

• Daniel Bowen How much would trains every ten minutes cost?

  One of the gaping holes in Melbourne’s public transport system is the lack of an all-day every day frequent service on the backbone: the Metro suburban train network.

  Melbourne is one of the few cities in the world, outside North America, which doesn’t have frequent all day trains.

  Other Australian cities are moving towards this. Perth has now trains every 15 minutes to most stations until around 8pm. Sydney does even better – they’re every 15 minutes until around midnight, and the new Sydney Metro line runs every 4 minutes in peak, and every 10 minutes the rest of the time.

  The PBO costing

  A few months ago the State Parliamentary Budget Office published their cost estimate for the Greens policy of trains and trams every 10 minutes, every day, all day until 9pm: $214 million per year – with $173 million of that being for trains.

  Some people thought this was cheap. I actually wonder if it might be even cheaper. One source suggested to me that the train upgrades would be closer to $100 million per year.

  How did they calculate it? The PBO’s source document doesn’t have much detail. I did ask, and they said they only included scalable costs, which in theory takes into account the cost savings inherent in using existing assets more efficiently.

  The Greens policy scope is larger than some other proposals, as it includes 10 minute frequencies all the way to Pakenham and Werribee.

  It’s unclear if the PBO took into account potential efficiencies from driver shifts – a driver who might currently run 1-2 peak services in a shift may also be able to drive some additional off-peak services for no extra cost.

  

  The importance of the network effect

  The cost would be partly offset by increased fare revenue.

  The PBO’s estimate of increased revenue was based on work by Infrastructure Australia, but it’s not clear if this takes into account the network effect. That is, if you run a single route more frequently, that’s good, you get some more passengers. But run a lot of routes more frequently and you make exponentially more journeys more time-competitive, and get a lot more passengers.

  It’s like when they made it so text messages weren’t confined to one phone network, but you could SMS anybody. Usage grew exponentially.

  (Yes, I am old enough to remember these things.)

  Apart from connections between different bus, tram and train routes being easier with high frequencies, it also makes life easier during works and disruptions, when sections of rail lines are replaced by buses, as connections (especially bus to train) involve less waiting around.

  Objections to frequent trains

  Interestingly, when faced with the idea that most of Melbourne’s trains could run every 10 minutes all day, a few people object to the concept.

  Here are some of the points that I’ve seen raised.

  “Huge infrastructure upgrades are needed first!”

  No they’re not. Although there are sections of single track that are a barrier, most lines can run trains every ten minutes with no issues, because they already run more frequently than this in peak hour.

  

  “There aren’t enough trains!”

  Yes there are. While there might be some adjustments needed to maintenance, again, there would still be plenty of trains unused outside peak hours, so this shouldn’t be a big problem.

  “It’s too expensive”

  Big transport networks are expensive. According to the Budget Papers, the fees paid to MTM for running and maintaining the entire Metro network amount to about $1.1 billion per year.

  So we might be talking about a funding increase of around 10% per year to make the network vastly more useful for people. And that doesn’t count increased fare revenue.

  (Total rail network costs, including Metro, V/Line, V/Line coaches and the strange Capital Assets Charge, which is an internal government accounting trick, are about $3.9 billion. Against that higher cost, this is a tiny increase of about 3%.)

  “Nobody travels in the middle of the day”

  Melbourne is now a big city. Plenty of people travel outside peak hours.

  Vicroads data shows road demand as strong right throughout the day, and weekend demand is nearly as strong as weekdays.

  All-day frequent service can also help spread the peak load, by making it more attractive to travel outside peak.

  “Off-peak trains aren’t crowded“

  In some cases they are. For instance, western suburbs lines get very crowded during weekday off-peak and weekends – see below.

  This plan would solve that, but the main benefit is sparking more demand by cutting waiting times (including connections from other services) to make public transport a more attractive option. This is because transport is supply-led.

  “Express trains would be better“

  Some argue that instead of trains every 10 minutes, there should be alternating stoppers and expresses every 20 minutes.

  This is messy, eats track capacity, is harder for new users to understand, and means only a fraction of stations get the cut in waiting times. And each station skipped only saves about a minute of journey time.

  Studies indicate that perceptions of waiting time can be up to 2.5 times that of travel time. Cutting waiting time is the priority to get more passengers on board.

  “It’s opex“

  Yes, it’s operating expenditure, recurring funds, which can be seen as bad for government budgets, unlike once-off capital expenditure. But this is the reality with a public service. You don’t build a hospital and then not staff it properly.

  Better services would maximise use of the (substantial) rail infrastructure and fleet, and the cost would be partially recouped by increased fare revenue.

  Spreading peak demand, just as was the case with the Earlybird fare, can also seen as a way of saving on upgrades to peak capacity (on public transport and on the roads), which are very expensive.

  More broadly, it would assist economic growth by providing more opportunity for people to reach employment and education.

  “Every 10 minutes? It should be every 5!”

  Perhaps eventually, but let’s walk before we run.

  With feeder bus services generally poor, who would use the trains if they ran every five minutes? The risk is they’d be under utilised.

  Better to build up the patronage, then see which lines need a further boost.

  “What about buses?”

  Buses are important too, and many bus routes suffer the same problems as off-peak trains – more so, given some routes run only hourly. So yes, buses need upgrades.

  But if you had to do just one mode, I’d start with trains:

  • the fleet is ready to go
  • they serve both short and long distance trips
  • carrying capacity is much higher, including passengers per additional staff member deployed
  • upgrading a network of just 15 lines provides far greater frequent service coverage across Melbourne
  • trains are largely immune from road congestion, so the investment in new services is maximised

  “It would lock up the road network”

  Unlikely. Outside peak times, local arterial roads (the ones they typically have level crossings) are not under the same stress as at peak hour, and the proposal is for fewer trains running than at peak hour.

  The introduction of 10 minute all-day trains on the Frankston, Dandenong and Ringwood lines has not caused chaos on the roads.

  And the extra trains would attract trips out of cars onto public transport, giving more people a way to avoid road congestion.

  That said, the continued removal of level crossings means there is the opportunity to boost train service levels with less affect on the road network.

  

  Frequent trains mean huge benefits

  Melbourne continues to grow, and all day traffic levels continue to grow.

  Running the trains more frequently all day brings huge benefits for many, including better connections across the network, without breaking the bank.

  You know the joy of walking onto a station platform and finding there’s only a few minutes until your train? This experience makes using the system far more attractive. That’s the power of high frequency service.

  The State government is going great guns on infrastructure, but it’s time they moved on upgrades to services as well, especially a no-brainer like this.

October 20, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Big changes proposed for the City Loop

  A Metro (MTM) proposal has emerged for big changes to the operation of the City Loop for trains running through the Caulfield and Burnley tunnels.

  The page below is from a document discussing CBD station capacity implications from the introduction of the High Capacity Metro Trains. I’m told the document is genuine.

  It reveals that the Caulfield Loop will be required to run anti-clockwise all day – the opposite of the current weekday PM direction. Apparently this is due to signalling changes for the HCMTs, which will run in the Loop when they come into service in 2020, until the metro tunnel opens in 2025. It sounds like those upgrades have only been implemented in one direction.

  The document goes on to say that to prevent overcrowding on the remaining trains running from Parliament to Richmond (Burnley Loop trains), they propose to have those services not stop at Richmond.

  

  So, what does this mean exactly?

  In AM peak, the Loop would run as at present, except Frankstons would all run direct to Flinders St (“full Cross City operation”) – this is good; it allows more Dandenong and Frankston line services.

  The bigger changes are in PM peak:

  • Caulfield Loop trains to/from Cranbourne and Pakenham would run anti-clockwise (Frankstons would all run direct to/from Flinders Street)
  • Burnley direct trains (generally they are the stopping services to Alamein, Blackburn and Ringwood) from Flinders St would continue to stop at Richmond
  • Burnley Loop trains (currently mostly express trains to Belgrave/Lilydale, and Glen Waverley services) would not stop at Richmond – they’d stop at Burnley instead for interchange

  Here’s a diagram – modified from the PTUA’s guide to navigating the City Loop.

  

  What it means for passengers

  Not stopping Burnley Loop trains at Richmond is to avoid what could otherwise be dire overcrowding on those trains. But it would mean Caulfield people have to catch a train anti-clockwise around the Loop.

  If going to the Frankston line, you would presumably change trains at Richmond or Caulfield. Sandringham line passengers would also need to go round anti-clockwise and change at Richmond.

  For passengers from Parliament or Melbourne Central to any of the lines through South Yarra this inevitably means a longer trip outbound, about 10 minutes. Probably about the same at Flagstaff and Southern Cross, and quicker from Flinders Street.

  It’s 3 minutes from Parliament to Richmond direct; the other way around it’s 13 minutes assuming no extended wait at Flinders Street. Which might be a big assumption – Metro’s challenge will be to eliminate or at least minimise this wait.

  Metro will also need to prevent any transposals – where a train unexpectedly changes destination after people have boarded. This is especially important now that they’re in the habit of hiding the train’s destination on station displays to discourage late boarding.

  

  The change to anti-clockwise all day is similar to when the Clifton Hill Loop changed in 2008 to run consistently clockwise on weekdays. It meant a longer AM trip for passengers going to Parliament, but cut the travel time for those going to Flinders Street – in that case, it was fairer, as they had previously gone the long way around in both directions.

  Clifton Hill people don’t have the option of changing trains, but some of them hop off at Jolimont and walk to Spring Street in the morning.

  Way more people than you might think hop off the trains at Jolimont in morning peak hour.
  I’m guessing this grew strongly after the Clifton Hill Loop switched to clockwise all day in 2008. #MetroTrains pic.twitter.com/fBlLHWra9I

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) October 8, 2019

  Ultimately, people may need to re-assess their travel patterns as a result of this proposal. Their nearest CBD station may not be their fastest option. (My nearest is Flagstaff, but Flinders Street is only slightly further away, and will become my fastest option under these changes.)

  I’m sure we’ll adapt… just as Clifton Hill and Werribee people did in 2008, and Sandringham people did in 1996. Those lines continue to boom. But don’t be surprised if people are grumpy about it.

  The change would be much easier to deal with if the Northern Loop was changed to run clockwise all day on weekdays, as it does on weekends. This would provide passengers from Parliament a quick way of getting to Flinders Street to pick up their trains. (It would add to loads, but not as badly as Burnley Loop trains, which have their full CBD load to carry from Parliament.)

  

  For people starting their trip at Richmond, or changing off other lines at Richmond and wanting to use the Burnley group, they will be able to use the trains running direct from Flinders Street (about 8 trains per hour in peak hour), and change to expresses or Glen Waverley trains at Burnley instead.

  More consistency? Yes, but at a cost

  There are compelling reasons for running the Loop tunnels consistently all day, including better network legibility (especially for occasional users; PTUA gets hundreds of hits every month on the City Loop guide), cutting long midday gaps between trains, and fairer outcomes for those who go the long way around in both the AM and PM peaks.

  This change will also enables Loop passengers to get to Southern Cross and Flinders St in the PM, not currently possible without changing trains. This is very helpful for V/Line passengers in particular.

  But it’s at the expense of the consistency of stopping every train at Richmond, which is likely to cause confusion, especially initially, and will cause a blow-out in some travel times.

  Could they leave Burnley Loop trains as they are? Yes, but I suspect the modelling is right: the crowding at Parliament and Richmond would be pretty bad, with people heading to Richmond crowding out Burnley passengers.

  

  A few other questions spring to mind:

  • Would the anti-clockwise direction be changed back when the metro tunnel opens and the Frankston Line returns to the Loop in 2025? (Probably not. People will have adjusted by then, I suspect if it happens, they’d leave it alone, and keep the benefits.)
  • What boost in services will be seen on the various affected lines to make use of the extra capacity, and lessen the impact of the changes?
  • For Caulfield Loop trains, will Metro successfully eliminate delays through Flinders Street and avoid transposals?
  • How will Caulfield cope with the increase in interchange of Loop passengers to the Frankston line?
  • Will Southern Cross cope with the passenger increase, especially when there are delays and escalator failures, some of which run for weeks at a time?
  • Even though consistent Loop direction is in principle a good idea, given the problems with it, why didn’t the City Loop upgrades include bi-directional running for the HCMTs? True those trains will move to the metro tunnel in 2025, but won’t they eventually be redeployed to more lines as the Comeng trains get decommissioned?
  • Was it really not possible to change the Northern Loop to cut travel time blow-outs?

  Overall there are benefits to this proposal, particularly around better separation of services, which helps reliability and capacity – which is of course a key priority. And it helps connections to V/Line and non-Loop western suburbs lines at Southern Cross.

  But this comes at the cost of travel time increases for some passengers, and inconsistent stopping patterns at Richmond.

  Obviously making lots of changes at one time is hard, but this would be a lot easier on people if the Northern Loop was changed to run clockwise at the same time.

  Especially without that, this proposal looks like one of those awkward compromises that adds some capacity and benefits, but unfortunately brings drawbacks for quite a few passengers.

  • Herald Sun: Major shake-up of train services may see major station bypassed

October 14, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Does your super match your values?

  The wave of climate protests (the Climate Strike a few weeks ago, and to a lesser extent the Extinction Rebellion last week) are a good reminder that although our current political masters (especially at the Federal level in Australia) are keen to do nothing, pretty soon a large mass of people who want action will be joining the electoral roll and voting.

  Oh, the politicians may claim they’re acting. But the numbers speak for themselves: Australia’s emissions are rising, not falling, and some politicians’ love for coal (including building new coal power stations, even when it makes no economic sense) and the constant criticism of clean power and electric cars makes it obvious which way they lean.

  Anyway, if you’re working, there’s something you can do.

  Pretty much every working Australian adult has superannuation, your mandated retirement fund, and for most people it’s probably their largest, or second largest asset (perhaps second only to their house, if they own one).

  For many people it’s Set And Forget. But you can choose to direct your super fund to put your money into ethical investments.

  These can avoid your money going into things that you may be philosophically opposed to: for instance arms manufacturing, gambling companies, and fossil fuels. The precise definition of ethical varies by fund, but I suspect they’re all a step in the right direction.

  What’s the financial cost of this? Probably nothing. In fact shifting to ethical might well be financially beneficial, as many of these investment options actually have very healthy returns.

  For instance, for some years my own super has been half in an Australian Shares portfolio and half in an Ethical fund. The compound return on the Shares in the past 10 years is 8.8%; Ethical is 10.6%.

  (Note: this blog does not constitute financial advice, past performance is not an indicator of future performance, etc, etc.)

  The easy option

  In many cases your current super fund will already have an ethical option, which makes it easy.

  Just log onto your super fund’s portal, and find the setting for investment preferences. In mine it’s called “Future investments”, eg where any future deposits go to.

  If you’re lucky, this will take all of a couple of minutes to do.

  

  Go harder

  Different funds decide for themselves what is “ethical”. The above explainer is from Australian Ethical Super, but the bigger funds may not be as fastidious.

  If you’re super keen, you can look around at the ethical super fund that best meets your values.

  This Choice article is a good starting point.

  If you decide to roll your super over into a new fund, this involves a little more work, but isn’t overly onerous these days.

  I must emphasise that I’m not a financial adviser, and there is inherent risk in any investment.

  But your super is (hopefully) a huge amount of money that is working for you. So why not have it match your values?

  ---

  • Note: I’ve got no link with Australian Ethical Super, but I am a customer of their Managed Funds. Managed Funds, if you’re wondering, are similar to Super, except the money is not tied up until you retire.

October 06, 2019

• Club Troppo Greek film festival
  Festival Website | Films | Schedule

  Top Picks

  ---

  1968 (Opening Night)

  April 4th, 1968: Greece is under right-wing military rule. In Athens, 80,000 people have gathered at the stadium, while millions are glued to their radios — like the tram driver who witnesses a miracle, the widow visiting the cemetery, the girl dreaming of her wedding day and the political prisoner cheering from his jail cell. Meanwhile, at a betting shop, old and new wounds resurface.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Maria By Callas

  The first film to tell the life story of the legendary Greek-American opera singer completely in her own words. Told through performances, TV interviews, home movies, family photographs, private letters and memoirs, the film reveals the essence of an extraordinary woman who rose from humble beginnings to become a glamorous international superstar and one of the greatest artists of all time. Callas believed that two different women lived in her: Maria, the woman who longed for a normal life, and Callas, the public figure and icon, from which an adoring public expected a transcendent experience every time she stepped onstage.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ UK Film Review

  ---

  Perfect Strangers (*No Subtitles)

  In this adaptation of an Italian box-office hit, during a dinner party, seven friends place their mobile phones on the table and agree to make all texts and calls public, in an attempt to prove that they have nothing to hide. Over the course of the evening secrets are revealed and lies are exposed.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Perimenontas Ti Nona (*No Subtitles)

  In this light-hearted comedy, fun-loving, 40-something, best friends Hercules and Alexandros arrive in Naxos so Hercules can visit his gravely ill godmother one last time. On the island they meet Fotini, aka Phaidra, a Greek girl visiting from Germany, who quickly realises something about Alexandros’ identity. Along with Fotini’s German boyfriend Alex, she, Alexandros and Hercules form a tight bond before Alexandros finally learns the truth.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  The favourite

  Early 18th century. England is at war with the French. Nevertheless, duck racing and pineapple eating are thriving. A frail Queen Anne occupies the throne and her close friend Lady Sarah governs the country in her stead while tending to Anne’s ill health and mercurial temper. When a new servant Abigail arrives, her charm endears her to Sarah. Sarah takes Abigail under her wing and Abigail sees a chance at a return to her aristocratic roots. As the politics of war become quite time consuming for Sarah, Abigail steps into the breach to fill in as the Queen’s companion. Their burgeoning friendship gives her a chance to fulfil her ambitions and she will not let woman, man, politics or rabbit stand in her way.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Cine Vue

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

  ---

  Pause

  A blackly comedic drama about an overworked and repressed Cypriot housewife who – once she hits menopause – dreams of violent rebellion against her sexist husband.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  GASFF-Greek Australian Short Film Festival

  A retrospective special selection of Greek-Australian shorts and award winners from the last nine years in two fabulous events. From documentaries about amazing grandmothers, to sharply satirical animations. From comedies in the kafenio to experimental spoken word pieces, dance films, music videos and award-winning dramas – the festival has endeavoured to bring an eclectic mix to audiences.

  01. 296 Smith Street

  02. Addicted

  03. Antidote

  04. Bad Language

  05. By This River

  06. Dave’s Dead

  07. Metamorphosis

  08. Mrs. Metro

  09. The Scream

  10. Two Devils

  11. You Know What? I Love You

  ---

  Her Job

  A film about a woman’s empowerment through employment, during the Greek financial crisis. Panayota is a 37-year-old mum who leads a quiet, modest life with her unemployed, domineering gambler husband Kostas, their rebellious daughter and their sensitive son. To ease the burden on her family, Panayota gets a job for the first time in her life, as a cleaning lady at a large DIY store. She becomes a model employee, gains financial independence and friendships but also faces a ruthless system of exploitation and competition. Meanwhile, her family life improves and she gains the respect and appreciation she never had. But how will a series of lay-offs at work affect her?

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Festival Reviews

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Epiphany

  Set in a Greek community of sponge-divers in Florida, the film tells the story of Luka, a troubled teen who is grieving the loss of her aunt and is desperate to connect with her negligent father. While also struggling in her relationship with her pill-addicted uncle Peter, Luka befriends an older man and slowly uncovers her family’s mysterious past.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  GASFF At The Greek Center

  A retrospective special selection of Greek-Australian shorts and award winners from the last nine years in two fabulous events. From documentaries about amazing grandmothers, to sharply satirical animations. From comedies in the kafenio to experimental spoken word pieces, dance films, music videos and award-winning dramas – the festival has endeavoured to bring an eclectic mix to audiences.

  01. Adult

  02. Anna

  03. Athena

  04. Dinner For Few

  05. Goldfish

  06. Hit

  07. Maiden

  08. Memories Of A Doll

  09. Olympic Nick-A Donutumentary

  10. Straw Dolls

  11. Tangles And Knots

  12. The Maker

  ---

  The Taverna (Closing Night)

  In this black comedy, Kostas, the owner of a Melbourne Greek restaurant, has employed Jamila, a single mother going through a bitter custody battle, as a belly dancer to entertain customers. When her ex-husband Arman and his new girlfriend Rebecca show up for dinner, she refuses to dance, prompting quirky waitress Sally to take her place. During Sally’s performance all hell breaks loose. Rebecca is abducted and Kostas learns that his son left the scene of an accident, fearing he’d killed the other driver and would fail a drug test. By the time the police arrive, there’s forgiveness in the air. But will this evening have a happy ending?

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

October 05, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Myki ten years on, and photos from the test centre

  This is part two of my ten year old photos from September 2009.

  At the time, Myki had been launched in regional cities, and was about to start in Melbourne.

  Ahead of the wider rollout, I got to look around the Myki test centre, which was fascinating.

  Around the place were lots of test cards and computers and other hardware

  

  Myki gates: at the time these hadn’t been deployed anywhere on the system – initially Myki readers were fitted onto the old Metcard gates.

  History has shown that the Myki gates (in particular the readers) were too slow, and many of the readers have since been replaced by units made by Vix, which was the company that engineered Metcard, finally providing sufficiently fast response times.

  

  

  Gate Controller – these are seen at railway stations, allowing staff to configure and control the gates. I don’t think the deployed units have the large emergency button – this seems to be generally placed discretely nearby.

  

  Myki Check devices were deployed to a lot of busier railway stations and tram stops to sit alongside Myki vending machines, though they are now being replaced by Quick TopUp machines (which can also check the card status).

  Note the display shows daily and weekly capping – the latter was never rolled out (though I’d argue that it would be a worthwhile change – it is easier to understand than 7-day Passes, and better value for passengers)

  

  Tram vending machine – only one or two of these were deployed onto trams, for test purposes. They would have allowed people to buy or top-up a Myki card, though with coins only. They were cancelled in 2011 as a result of the Baillieu government’s review into Myki. It was reported later in 2011 that 500 of the machines had been bought in 2008, never to be used.

  

  Myki readers. Like the gates, these have also never performed satisfactorily, which led to the scrapping of the requirement to touch-off trams. These are also being gradually replaced with Vix units – they first appeared on E-class trams, but are also increasingly appearing on buses.

  

  Those with long memories might recognise this part of the test centre – it was where in January 2009, one of the readers fell apart in front of then-Public Transport Minister Lynne Kosky, as the TV cameras were rolling. (Kosky didn’t start the Myki project. That was her predecessor, Peter Batchelor.)

  Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, Myki is now in daily use and has gradually improved, including with faster online topup, the Vix readers, Quick Top-up machines, Mobile Myki and the removal of unwanted receipts.

  Some of this newer technology is probably thanks to the open architecture design of Myki, but it doesn’t excuse that the original rollout was so troubleprone, the result of the State government insisting on building it from scratch.

  Despite the problems with Myki, the purchase of an established system for Sydney wasn’t radically cheaper. I suspect the costs are mostly related to the size of the rollout – in particular the amount of hardware to be installed on vehicles and stations.

  The scrapping of tram vending machines and short term tickets in 2011 has made life difficult for some users, including those who don’t regularly use public transport, putting them off using the system.

  Perhaps more public transport networks will move to cashless in coming years, but it was a backwards move at the time. It would be easier to deal with if London-style contactless credit/debit card payment options was offered alongside the other options.

  For all the faults, we’re stuck with Myki now, and at least it mostly works for most users. But let’s hope the improvements keep coming.

October 03, 2019

• Club Troppo Is Trump a blessing in disguise for world peace?

  Let’s first agree that if Trump is a blessing in disguise for world peace, he makes an exceptionally good disguise.

  Trump’s bark is probably the worst of any US president in living memory. He has threatened the total destruction of North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and probably a few other countries. He has made belligerent and antagonistic statements towards nearly all the closest US allies in Europe and the rest of the world, with the possible exception of Israel. He has started trade wars with China, Canada, the EU, and lots of other countries. For private gain, it seems he drew back American support for the Ukraine government in the hope that this would get them to do his political bidding at home. He has similarly trashed the Iran nuclear deal that was the main hope of diffusing tensions in that region, and don’t even get me started on his management of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or his stance towards climate change.

  In terms of openly flouting the normal rules of international politics and diplomacy, Trump is the worst major leader I have encountered in my life-time, and I am old enough to remember Reagan and what the CIA was up to under his watch!

  And yet, and yet. His bite is remarkably soft. Though his rhetoric and flouting is that of a bull in a China shop, there is a reasonable argument to be made that he has made the shop a lot safer because of his personal behaviour. Everything in the shop has been tightened up out of fear of disruption by the bull. Blessings can come in odd disguises!

  Look for instance at his cosy relationships with several dictators of countries the US used to be close to war with. Putin of Russia, Kim of NK and even Xi of China. He gets on remarkably well with these characters, perhaps because they channel a bit of business towards his hotels, or he just enjoys the company of politically strong men. Whatever the reason for this though, this is basically very good news and has reduced tensions a lot. No-one in their right minds would have wanted the alternative of continued or even increasing hostility by a US president towards these characters.

  Also look at the lack of new wars started by the US in his time in office. Perhaps because of his need for praise and self-confirmation, he seems to have destroyed the ability of the US State Department and the Pentagon to operate efficiently. As soon as a National Security Adviser gets too comfortable and starts getting things done, Trump fires that person so that someone else has to start again. This has reduced the ability to plan forward, including for new wars.

  What is not to like about this? Anyone who, like me, believes the US in previous decades has been too gung-ho in starting new wars should see this internal disruption of the US security establishment as a huge blessing. On his watch, the US have not gone into any new combat zone that I know of, unlike for instance Saint Obama whose bite was worse than his bark.

  Look closer at these supposed trade wars that Trump started. For one, his Republican predecessors also initiated trade wars with the EU and China, so there is nothing new here. And also look at how limited the trade wars have truly been. The US is still running a huge trade deficit with China and many announced sanctions get quietly ‘postponed’. Furthermore, the strategic rivalry between China and the US has been coming for a long time and is supported by all parts of the US political establishment.

  So look at what has not happened with US-China relations on Trump’s watch. There have been no major incidents in the South China see. There has been no standoff over Taiwan or Japan. There has been little US effort to scupper Chinese investments in Africa or central Asia. Really, one has to say that when it comes to the US-China conflict it is somewhat quiet on the Western front. Lots of noise, little action. The enmity that was inevitably building anyway is so far being channeled in very healthy directions, though seemingly as the unintended consequence.

  Relatedly, perhaps the biggest benefit of Trump on the international stage is that he has forced groups of countries together by being so unpredictable and so money-oriented. Under his watch, the Europeans have started combining with the Chinese on finance and the internet, in both cases alerted to their previous weakness by Trump’s weaponisation of these areas. The potential for US (ab)use of their dominance in finance and the internet was already there, but that threat is now being quietly eroded with little fuss because Trump has been using those big sticks for small gains. Trump has used the finance muscle in the case of Iran and the Internet muscle when it comes to 5G and spyware, in both cases alerting others to the presence of the big stick. This is leading to countermoves, such as the French digitax. Bad for the US, probably good for world peace. Thank you Trump.

  Trump’s willingness to play hard ball with his allies has, arguably, also lead China and India to be more peaceful to each other. Basically, the Indians don’t seem to trust that the US will stand by them if they really make trouble with China. Thank you Trump.

  There are also big silver linings in the increased animosity towards new migrants in the US. What are all these smart ambitious people going to do now they can no longer go to the US? Its obvious: they go to Europe, Latin America, and are thus productive elsewhere. The loss of the US is the gain of others. Once more …. thank you Trump.

  We can repeat this for the other instances of Trump misbehaviour, such as on climate change or even on Iran: his bluster and economic violence in those areas have forced cooperation between the rest and are teaching the rest of the world to be more pro-active and serious.

  Of course I have skipped over a zillion nuances, but I cannot escape the overall conclusion that Trump has single-handed improved world peace by making friends in unusual places; by upsetting his allies and thus forcing them to make new friends; and by so expertly sabotaging the ability of the American security establishment to make war on others. He may still do a lot of damage in his remaining time in office, but really, you have to say, on the whole: Trump has so far been a blessing in exceptionally good disguise.

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from September 2009

  Oops, I managed to miss posting ten year old photos in September.

  Better late than never, here they are – at least here is part one – I’ve got a special part two coming up soon.

  Centre Place, always lovely. I notice the sign about when it’s closed to vehicles – it’d be a brave person who tried to drive along it at any time, I reckon.

  

  Myer’s flagship Melbourne store was getting a huge makeover. Here’s the view from the front, which appears to have exposed some brickwork.

  

  …and the view from the back. I don’t actually remember where I took this; it must have been from one of the upper levels of the old Lonsdale Street store.

  

  At Chadstone, some bright spark decided that the thing bus passengers needed was a waiting room, dubbed the Transit Lounge. I think they tried to imply it was “airport-style”, but if so it’d be the scummiest airport you’ve ever seen – just a few seats and a chip machine, though at least it would provide air-conditioned relief on hot days. Since then the bus interchange has been completely rebuilt. (What bus passengers at Chadstone still need is, of course, more buses.)

  

  A snap taken opposite the City Square, now taken over by metro tunnel construction. Hilariously, some people haven’t twigged that the giant concrete monstrosity on the site now is a temporary acoustic shed, rather than the entrance to the new station.

  

  Keeping Melbourne Moving advertised on a tram. At the time, they were using route number 112 for St Kilda to West Preston. Since then the routes have been split into the 11 and 12, which is what they were before.

  

  The old Monash Bus Loop. Since replaced by a shiny new interchange.

  

  Okay, that’s part one of my old photos from September 2009.

  Stand by for a very special part two.

October 01, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Hey Google, tell me where to go

  My car has a spot in the central console area thingy that looks like it has been designed to store your mobile phone so you can kind of see the screen while driving, for navigational purposes. At least, the manual doesn’t seem to document its purpose, and I can’t figure out what else it could be for.

  A few months ago I had to drive to Balwyn to pick up a batch of stuff to bring home. My navigational skills for this part of the world are a bit hazy. Anywhere north-east of Kew, and I’m a bit lost.

  So I tried out the Google Maps navigation in my phone. I’ve used it plenty of times for planning trips on public transport or on foot. And occasionally when driving I’d use it to check road conditions, but I hadn’t used it in fully-blown GPS mode before.

  I have to say, I’m impressed. Pump up the volume and it reads you all the directions as you travel along, including details like pointing out when you might have to be in the left lane to turn right.

  (Supposedly, dedicated GPS units are better than using phones, but given how little I drive, I’d struggle to justify it.)

  

  It would be interesting to understand the algorithm, but from my observations:

  • Time appears to trump any other consideration. Save one minute by using a toll road? It’ll suggest it, unless you set the options to exclude toll roads. But there’s no option to be selective about it – maybe I’m willing to pay $3.18 for the Bolte Bridge, but not $8.27 for the Burnley Tunnel and M1.
  • It seems pretty good at avoiding big traffic snarls.
  • In the case of the trip from Bentleigh to Balwyn, it took me on a route which I totally wouldn’t have chosen myself, along numerous minor roads and side streets.

  I find this last point interesting. If I’d planned it, I’d have taken a longer route along main roads – because they’re easier to navigate if you’re unfamiliar with an area and aren’t being given directions.

  If the algorithm prioritises time over everything else, presumably it’s sending a lot of motorists down streets that previously didn’t get much traffic.

  Other GPS systems are probably doing much the same thing – this article goes into some of the technical detail.

  Some communities are fighting back, particularly in the USA where perhaps more people are using them. Apparently the town of Leonia, New Jersey has closed numerous streets to all vehicles except local traffic. And there other strategies some are employing:

  Since Waze uses crowd sourcing to update its information, some people – frustrated at the influx of outside traffic – have taken to fabricating reports of traffic accidents in their communities to try to deter the app from sending motorists their way.

  

  Oddly, the article doesn’t mention the measure that I would consider the most obvious: traffic calming to reduce overall driving speeds. Off the top of my head these might include:

  • Reduce speed limits
  • Closing off through-streets to create cul de sacs for traffic (see above; preferably still allowing pedestrians and cyclists through)
  • Speedhumps and chicanes (see below) to slow down cars
  • Turn or through-traffic restrictions at intersections (a recent high-profile example is Toronto’s King Street)

  And I’m sure there are other measures that can be used. In my own local area, Glen Eira has implemented a number of these measures on side streets – great to see.

  

  After all, if the algorithms are giving people the fastest route no matter what, then making residential side streets slower and less convenient might be the only way to ensure that quiet streets stay quiet.

  And even better, it also makes life better for cyclists and pedestrians using those streets.

September 27, 2019

• Club Troppo Some thoughts from on high

  Sometimes we should just be grateful in this country for the steady hand on the tiller at the very highest levels. People might mock but it’s easy to mock.

  Philip Lowe wants us to take a bow!

  I don’t think we should forget that more Australians have jobs today than ever before in Australian history. That’s a remarkable achievement. [Even more remarkably, this remarkable achievement is remarkably achieved in most countries about 80 per cent of the time where it nevertheless tends to go less remarked on].

  Australian Public Service Commissioner Peter Woolcott wants us to know that it’s not just business-as-usual with the Thodey Review. Well it is kind of business-as-usual, but in a very good way, indeed a way that looks like it has not been precedented (if you know what I mean) over the last 15 years.

  Some of the more sceptical among you will point to the numerous reviews of the public service over the last 15 years and question whether this will be any different.

  It is different this time — and different for a number of reasons. Firstly, you have strong direction from the government with the PM’s sharp focus on implementation and the Australian people [All previous Prime Ministers over the last 15 years had a fuzzy focus on implementation and were closer to the Chilean than the Australian people at least judging from their secret handshake]; second you have an APS leadership that is committed to reform and understands absolutely the importance of good governance and staying relevant [It was not committed to reform over the previous 15 years and of those public servants who were, they only understand the importance of good government relatively. As for staying relevant – well they were relevant – but that was then. One has to stay relevant and pretty obviously it’s hard for public servants of 15 years ago to be relevant to today – for instance how many of them knew about Adele?]; thirdly, the speed of technological and societal change is creating its own momentum [just 15 years ago we were still phasing out horses. Indeed, horses were put before carts in those days, but not any more.]; and finally, layered on top, are public expectations [15 years ago public expectations tended to be layered very much more towards the middle of whatever it is that they’re layered on top of now, but it is true that those expectations have been managed upwards, so it’s no surprise where they are now].

  In this week’s weekend competition you’re encouraged to suggest other examples from around the world and from the annals of history. Prizes include a weekend as co-president of the Free World with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago with a night out in his famed electro-plated panel van “Golden Stormy”.

September 25, 2019

• Club Troppo Strategic voting and avoiding a no-deal Brexit

  Things are shaping up for extraordinary developments in the UK, and I’m not talking about Brexit. Well, I am, but not directly. I’m talking about strategic or tactical voting. In Australia we are mightily protected from such dilemmas by preferential or instant runoff voting whereby, if your first preference doesn’t win the election, your vote passes to your next preference and so on until it is counted. In the UK as readers will know, they use a remarkably common and crazy system of first past the post.

  And now if there’s a general election it’s entirely possible for the anti-no-dealers (the Lib Dems and the Labour Party) to so steal votes from each other that those relaxed and comfortable about a no-deal Brexit could win far fewer votes yet win government handsomely.

  What’s needed to stop that is some strategic voting response. Essentially voters for the Lib Dems or the Labour Party need to vote for whichever of these two candidates is most likely to win – so they don’t waste their vote. Ideally the two parties would sign some agreement to work out which of them would stand and would only stand one candidate between them. But they can’t agree on that.

  And they can’t agree on any informal version of the same thing – for instance with the party of one side or the other agreeing to ‘run dead’ in specific electorates. But it seems to me there is another way. A coalition of those opposing a no-deal-Brexit could fund some authoritative process whereby the electorates were polled up to – say – a week before the election with an endorsement coming for one or the other of the Lib Dem and Labour candidates so that anyone who didn’t want to waste their vote was well informed about which of the anti-no-deal Brexit candidates to cast their vote for.

  If this was well funded, one could imagine it swinging a substantial number of votes – especially as it gained the public support of those Labour and Lib Dem politicians who independently endorsed it. (It might be harder for sitting Labour members to do so with party discipline at all, but that shouldn’t stop Labour elders from doing so.)

  

  Like the UK, Canada has three major parties creating all kinds of need and scope for tactical voting.

  George Soros where are you?

• Club Troppo Wanted: an executive email service with stamps.

  Are you dismayed at getting 100 emails a day you need to wade through, disturbing your concentration? Does your administration bother you constantly with things you just ‘have to be aware of’? Are you tired of the ‘executive reports’, ‘award notices’, ‘compulsory breathing training’, ‘lost car keys’, ‘upcoming events’, and a million other reminders of how everyone else wastes their time? Do you worry that these constant distractions in the long run diminishes your ability, and that of your workers, to concentrate?

  If you do, you might want to consider an email service with stamps. What I envisage is that people have to pay, say, 1 dollar for every kilobyte of message they send you, and 5 dollars for every link to some outside website. The only messages you would then get are those that people really want you to see, presumably one a week or so. The stamp is essentially the price of your time.

  I envisage a system in which the user can set the height of the price that needs to be paid to reach that user. People who hardly value their time have a low price, people who value it greatly have a high price. There can be minimum prices and discounts for particular groups. This of course goes both ways, so one would see the price list for messaging others before the message to them arrives, and one would need to agree to paying that price before the recipient gets the message.

  I think the proceeds of the stamps should in principle go into the personal accounts of the people messaged to (minus the handling fee of course). After all, the stamp buys the time of the receiver who is asked to look at the message. The stamp is then the payment for the attention given. Alternatively, one can send the surplus proceeds towards a good cause, like planting trees.

  I would like to see the same service for messages and reminders on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, pings on the mobile, and all the other ways in which social media now distract us. My hope is that some internet organisation develops a whole package of services that embed a system of stamps for all the ways people’s concentration is upset.

  I suspect such an internet service would make a very attractive package to many businesses who need their employees to concentrate on their projects and who thus have to protect their workers from all the immediate distractions. The only way to halt the flood of chatter that gets sent round is to charge people for it. This would be particularly useful to reduce the avalanche of stuff that administrations send round to all the workers in the organisation. If administrations and management have to pay for the messages they send round, they would become much more discerning about whether the employees really need to know something or not.

  The reaction to such prices would probably be that people start using the phone a lot more and that workers go round to the co-workers in the organisation they want to talk to, rather than ‘flick them a message’. This is perfectly fine and exactly what you want: more conversations and more face-to-face interaction, less spam.

  I can see very few downsides to this. The problem of internet scams and outside spam would be solved virtually overnight as those activities would cease to be worthwhile, freeing up a lot of time from the IT services to do more useful things than clean out the viruses that came in via spam.

  I do envisage a flood of complaints by the many who love being distracted themselves, and the many more who love distracting others. Yet, since we know that productivity suffers in the longer run from the reductions in the ability of people to concentrate, I see a real business incentive to take the protection of the concentration of workers seriously. I’d certainly sign up for it. It just needs a smart businessperson with real programming skills at his or her disposal to set this up, starting with something like ‘Executive Email Services’.

September 22, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Map: How the 2015 zone changes affected train patronage

  It’s well known that the Free Tram Zone worsened CBD tram crowding, but the package of fare reforms implemented in 2015 (planned by the Napthine government, matched by Labor) also capped zone 1+2 fares at zone 1 prices.

  This removed a long-time bugbear in the fare system: the huge jump from going over the zone boundary. New statistics show the effects.

  Herald Sun today: Fare change driving commuter surge towards to outer suburban stations

  Here’s the data showing 2014-19 patronage changes plotted onto a map:

  • Red = patronage reduced by more than 1.5%
  • Yellow = patronage steady: slight drop, or increase up to 8%.
  • Light green = increases up to 22%.
  • Dark green = larger increases

  Overall network growth was 7%, but clearly some stations have done better than others.

  Network-wide, three of the top four were in residential growth areas:

  • 1. Officer – an amazing 537% increase in 5 years, coming off a low base
  • 2. Diggers Rest – up 234%
  • 4. Williams Landing – up 117%
  • Shown in dark green, there was also strong growth on the outer ends of the Sunbury, Craigieburn and Pakenham lines

  

  On the boundary

  You can also see many of the drops (red) were at the edge of Zone 1, with some big increases (green and dark green) just over the boundary in Zone 2.

  Jacana was the third highest rise overall with 183% growth. Ruthven came in fifth at 99% growth. Along with Gowrie (91%), Patterson (68%), Jordanville (54%), Aircraft (49%) – these are all stations which are the first on their line outside Zone 1.

  On some lines, the next couple of stations along also saw growth, eg Williams Landing (fourth highest, 117%) – this got the double whammy of zone changes and growth area.

  It’s clear that what’s happened is the effective removal of the zone boundary for trips into zone 1 mean that some people switched to these stations when the trip to the City became cheaper.

  You might jump in your car to drive to zone 1 to avoid a huge surcharge, but if that surcharge is removed, you’d aim for a station closer to home.

  Those just inside Zone 1 that lost patronage included many park and ride favourites: Laverton -20%, Mont Albert, Holmesglen and Reservoir (all -19%), and Brighton Beach -10.6%.

  Reductions seem to have been more than matched by overall growth. Using Brighton Beach as an example: Annual boardings fell by about 53,000 over five years, but growth at the Zone 2 stations further down that line more than made up for it: Hampton up 131,000; Sandringham 191,000.

  Of the zone 2 stations, Hoppers Crossing and Werribee had notable drops, probably due to Regional Rail Link opening in mid-2015, with stations closer to home for those living in Wyndham Vale and Tarneit.

  What’s capping train use now?

  For a growing city like Melbourne, it’s important to continue to foster growth in train network usage. Patronage and services are not currently keeping up with population growth, and this needs to be turned around.

  Peak hour is difficult until the Metro tunnel opens, but this should unlock a lot more peak capacity when it’s commissioned in 2025.

  In the meantime, a lot more can be done to spread peak loads by cutting off-peak waiting times. This would also relieve the crowding that is now a regular sight on the lines still running 20 minute off-peak services.

  The reliance on car parking also needs to be overcome. The biggest car parks are never enough to satisfy demand. Alongside better walking and cycling options, better connecting buses are desperately needed, especially in the outer suburbs where service levels are poor.

  While we wait for the tunnel, more services – on the trains and on the buses – are the key to helping more people catch trains. And the more people catching trains, the better.

  • Previous map: Services vs patronage

September 19, 2019

• Club Troppo The Italian Vilm Vestabule

   

  Festival Website | Films | Schedule

  Top Picks

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  The Champion (Opening Night)

  Christian Ferro is a young superstar striker for Roma. Growing up in a rough area is a far cry from the millionaire lifestyle he is now living, which has attracted party-animal friends from home as well as the return of his long-lost father. When Christian’s determination to prove to his friends that he remains rebellious lands him in trouble again, his coach Valerio Fioretti gives him an ultimatum: get back in line and pass the high-school exam, or get out. But Christian’s world of fame and Ferraris clashes with Valerio’s humble circumstances.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  Dafne

  Dafne is a witty 35-year-old woman with Down syndrome. Despite being fiercely independent, she still lives with her ageing parents. When the sudden death of her mother shatters the family balance, Dafne’s father Luigi falls into a depressive state, and it is left up to Dafne to construct a new life path. When she proposes that she and Luigi undertake an adventure across the country, this sparks a series of events that give Dafne a new and exhilarating self-confidence and provide the ointment needed for her and Luigi’s wounds to heal.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  The Great Spirit

  In a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Taranto, high upon the rooftops framed by the Ilva steel factory, we meet Tonino a.k.a. “Barboncino”. Tonino has just committed a robbery and, in a moment of foolishness, fled from his accomplices, taking the entire loot for himself. He escapes upward, clambering from roof to roof, until he can go no further and must take refuge in an old water tank. Here he finds Renato, a strange and eccentric man who believes he is an American Indian from the Sioux tribe. Trapped with no other choice, Tonino is forced to team up with Renato. A strange and crazy friendship is formed, and Tonino learns to see things from a very different perspective.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  Twin Flower

  Along the roads that stretch through the harsh and beautiful Sardinian landscape, we meet two troubled teens: Anna is on the run from the immigrant trafficker her father used to work for and Basim is an illegal immigrant orphan from the Ivory Coast. Together, they find protection as they journey toward safety: Basim, hoping to reach the North of Europe, and Anna, running from the man who is trying to keep his secret from becoming public. Adventuring across the visually rich countryside they form a powerful bond as they dodge in and out of public view, hiding from danger.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  The Consequences Of Love

  Titta di Girolamo is a lonely and secretive Italian businessman living in a Swiss hotel. As punishment for his huge loss in the stock market, he is marooned in Switzerland. His sentence includes that every week, for the rest of his life, he is required to deliver a suitcase of laundered mafia money to a Swiss bank. Now, approaching nine years in this condition, Titta is losing his grip on the real world, and any semblance of life in it.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ BBC

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  One Hundred Steps

  Story of an outspoken Peppino Impastato who lives in an ancient Sicilian town, hemmed in by sea and rocks and ruled by Mafia. His father is ambitious to see his son eventually become a “boss”, but Peppino is suspicious of the path he is being forced to take. His rebellion rocks his tainted father and the town’s stifling tradition of silence, setting Peppino down a difficult path.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  Michelangelo-Endless

  Michelangelo-Endless is the first ever art film made about the Renaissance creative genius Michelangelo Buonarroti. The film portrays the immortal personality of one of the greatest artists the world has ever seen. Here the worlds of cinema and art meet to paint a portrait of a man who was secretive as well as troubled. Through the immense beauty of his most famous works: the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Pietà and statue of David, among others, Michelangelo emerges as a master of sharp contrasts and strong passions. The film exposes an artist who proved great courage when displaying his beliefs and ideologies.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  My Own Good

  Elia has no intention of leaving his ghost town of Providence which was struck by an earthquake years earlier. While he spends his days in the company of the memories of his wife and his idyllic past life, the rest of the population has moved downstream into the new community housing. Every so often, someone comes to visit him: the local teacher, his friend Gesualdo, and the mayor. But it is a different and wholly unexpected presence which begins to turn Elia’s solitary life upside-down.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  1900

  The epic tale of a class struggle in twentieth century Italy, as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends-Alfredo Berlinghieri from a landowning family and Olmo Dalcò-on opposing sides

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

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  The Conformist

  A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ BBC

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

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  Pavarotti (Closing Night)

  Luciano Pavarotti is one of the most famous tenors in history. His charm, charisma, and impressive ability to hit the high-C earned him a level of renown on par with the biggest pop stars. His death at the age of 70 left an undeniable void in terms of worldwide exposure of classical music which has not since been filled. Through never-before-seen footage, concert performances and intimate interviews, this evocative documentary laments an astonishing singer as well as the robust music industry of his time.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

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September 16, 2019

• Daniel Bowen It only took eight years

  It’s a miracle!

  Back in 2011, the train information on this Smartbus sign at Bentleigh station was switched off.

  In 2016 during the level crossing removal project, the bus stop and sign were removed, then put back.

  For a while the sign wasn’t working, but then the bus times were switched on. But not the train times.

  On Monday, for the first time in over 8 years, the train times re-appeared. Eureka!

  

  Thinking ahead, and more broadly: the real-time bus information that was once unique to Smartbus is now more widespread. It’s made its way onto smartphone apps.

  The opportunity here is for authorities to get some solid passenger wins for relatively little investment.

  • Roll-out street displays to more stops, showing departure countdowns for all routes. Sure, most people have a smart phone that can access this information, but it’s still better to “push” it to people.
  • Put Smartbus-style Passenger Information Displays (PIDs) announcing the next stop into all new buses – London, a place that is serious about their buses, has done this. For that matter, all of Melbourne’s trams are getting it.
  • Enhance them to be able to show other messages such as the current route, and disruption information (see London example below)

  Displays inside new buses should be a no-brainer, given the other required infrastructure is already in place – when a Smartbus ends up on a “normal” route, it appears the displays work correctly.

  Unfortunately the current program of 100 new buses for Transdev has missed this. They are adding new generation Myki readers, USB ports for charging, and better external destination displays, which is good. But no internal displays.

  (Marcus Wong points out in his blog today that they’ve also missed an opportunity to shift to more hybrid or electric buses.)

  Displays at stations are also handy, as bus drivers can see imminent train arrivals, and may be able to wait for connecting passengers.

  

  Of course, more direct routes and better bus frequency and operating hours are the best thing to get more people using buses.

  But making them user-friendly for new and regular users is also important, and should be an easy win.

• Club Troppo Observations on Poland and the Baltics

  The family cycled from Berlin to Tallinn this year, giving me an opportunity to see how Poland and the Baltics have fared after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990s. Some observations:

  –          Poland is doing well. Agriculture there is as organised and productive as in Germany, with the newest combine harvesters collecting flour for millions of bread rolls.

  –          You see large new houses in the minor villages in Poland, and lots of new infrastructure in the towns. People drive in reasonable cars, horse-drawn carts have disappeared, and the youth looks tall and healthy.

  –          Interestingly, the Polish are quite bad at English and usually don’t understand you in bars, hotels, and restaurants. Their German and their Russian is a lot better on average, even amongst the younger generation. This in turn seems to be part of the success of Poland: because their English is poor, they can only do somewhat menial jobs abroad, meaning that they get treated as second-class citizens in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, etc. That in turn encourages them to go back and work on the future of Poland, with great success. So lacking good English language skills, which will have cost them in the early decades after the Soviet Union, is now helping them emerge as a more vibrant and self-conscious society. The opposite can be seen in the Baltics….   

  –          Poland is clearly investing in its historical heritage. The fort of the Teutonic Order in Marienburg is beautiful, with many other relics being restored. They are proud of various scientists who lived there throughout the ages, such as Copernicus.

  –          You do see some interesting new Cathedrals in Poland and the roads have lots of small places of worship, but there is still no great religious enthousiasm on display. You do not see constant religious processions, groups of nuns and monks, or open displays of large crosses. Television has lots of scantily dressed young people and few preachers.

  –          Alcohol is cheap, accommodation is cheap, and the parks and squares are full of young people. So on the outside it’s pretty tourist-friendly.

  –          Road users are remarkably well-behaved. To cyclists, in London an orange traffick light means ‘hurry up’ and a red light is a suggestion. Not so in Poland.

  –          Interestingly, the Polish have started owning some of the Prussian and Baltic heritage that the North-East of Poland boasts. They are still not quite comfortable with German cemeteries and inscriptions, but things like the Hanze league (which were blatantly German-only) are now embraced. There is also a rediscovery of the Baltic origins of many of the Prussians, which seems to make it easier for them to accept that part of the Polish population. The Polish-Lithuanian alliance is similarly now celebrated.

  –          So Poland is essentially constructing a new historical narrative that allows it to live harmoniously with the population groups in its border.

  –          Lithuania by contrast is considerably poorer than Poland. The houses are more often wooden, the fields are less productive and less modern, the roads are poorer, the population density lower, and only a few coastal cities are doing ok. Even the cities are losing people though, with the population in Lithuania going down, just as in Latvia.

  –          In all the three Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), the young people speak good English. As a result, you don’t see many of them because many live and work abroad. This is a very mixed blessing: because they do well overseas, they often do not return, which takes the pressure off the politicians to truly reform, making it difficult for new businesses to thrive, keeping the talented youngsters away.

  –          The language history of the Baltics shows the importance of not speaking the language of the elites: in each of the three countries, the large coastal cities were dominated by foreign invaders for many centuries. Danes, Germans, Teutonic knights, Hanze merchants, the Swedes, and the Russians ruled the roost in Riga, Tallinn, and the few ice-free harbours on the coast. These cities dominated the economies of these regions but, crucially, their populations were small and these cities did not bother educating anyone on the countryside. As a result, the peasants kept speaking their old languages, never adopting the language of the small elite in the cities. When nationalism swept through the region and delivered new countries at the start of the 20^th century, the identity was essentially language-based as the language had remained fairly untouched.

  –          There are many ironies to observe in how the populations of the Baltics see themselves. The story of ‘we were oppressed for 700 years until we got our freedom’ could be heard everywhere. Yet, it sounds rather hollow if you press them on who their ancestors were, because they will quickly have to admit that their families are a mixture of German, Polish, Russian, Jewish, and Baltic. So both supposed oppressors and oppressed are liberally represented in the pool calling itself the perennially oppressed. Where have we heard that before?

  –          I learned a lot about the Hanze and the Teutonic Knights. The Baltic Hanze cities were more ethnically oriented that I knew, only accepting German merchants into their circles. The Teutonic knights were like an ISIS that made it…..  German knights returning from the crusades who were given permission by the pope to go kill and rob the Baltic populations as long as they converted them to Christianity … which they duly did … for instance destroying Danzig in order to take over the amber trade which paid for the bills …..

  –          The tug of war between Riga and Tallinn as to where Christmas trees originated is hilarious. The Ests in Tallinn say it was them because rich bored German merchants organised in the Brotherhood of the Black Heads were first recorded around 1450 to set fire to fir trees in the middle of the city. After a few years of doing this, the practice was forced of the city because of course it caused huge fires in the whole city. Yet, the Lets in Riga say it was them because rich bored German merchants there were first recorded around 1500 to dress up said fir trees before setting fire to them ….. of all the things to be proud of ….

  On the whole, things are going pretty well with the remaining populations in that region. No huge tensions or great poverty that I could see. If you force me to nominate something not going well, then it is that the Baltics are rather empty because don’t have enough kids and they encourage the few they have to move away.

• Daniel Bowen Remembering James Coppell Lee

  I was in Brighton Cemetery on Saturday (long story) and noticed this statue from a distance, so thought I’d have a look.

  Someone famous? Not really.

  

  A young man, tragically drowned off Mornington. The statue was made by his workmates.

  Thanks to Trove, I found quite a detailed report of the accident.

  FISHING BOAT OVERTURNS.
  YOUNG MAN DROWNED.
  Forced by a blinding rainstorm to abandon a proposed fishing expedition off Mornington early on Saturday morning, a party of youths attempted to turn their boat shorewards when the light craft was over whelmed by a big sea, and one of its occupants was drowned. Two other members of the party were rescued in an exhausted condition after a stern struggle in the surf.

  The Argus, 29th December 1919

  Trove also shows that in the following years, his parents placed notices in his memory.

  And it all happened 100 years ago this December. With the weather turning, this might be a good reminder of the importance of taking care in the water this summer.

September 15, 2019

• Club Troppo Is it the social scientists job (or anyone else’s) to make models of reality? (Hint: no).

  There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think – which is fundamentally a moral problem – must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process.

  Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

  As journalism is the first draft of history, some of my emails are the first draft of blog posts. As here where I was responding to someone with whom I’d already agreed that in economics there’s lots of emphasis on using models to understand reality but not much care given to the question of fitting them to the world.

  To paraphrase in a way that’s unfair to him – but which is only intended to provide a point of departure here – he then suggested that social science was about model building and fitting the world to those models and, to shift the world towards better outcomes for social science (we were talking about economics), one needed different kinds of participants in this.

  A model that comes to mind when thinking about all this is the model of how movements (e.g., Me too, civic rights, etc) happen. First we need a “0”, a person who would be willing to go against the social norm even if there were 0 people helping them. I would label Rosa Parks as a 0 in the scenario of civic right movement. But then you need a “1” to have observed the 0, and a 2 to have observed at least two people from type 0 and 1, and a 3 to have observed at least 3 people from 0, 1 or 2, and so on. Because they need to be observed to trigger additional behavior, in practice we need a bunch of 0s, a bunch of 1s, a bunch of 2s, and so on, otherwise the movement does not create its own momentum. In terms of making progress in the economic problems, I believe we need all kinds of people like that: the 0s, or the ones that have an original vision, the 1s, or those that make enough progress on those visions, and so on. As I said above, I do believe that in academic jobs in economics most people are in the 10,000s, so we need to incentivize more people to go down their numbers and create alternative paths for progress. For instance, I believe Glen Weyl has been doing important and timely work in economics. He is currently more like a 500 (where a 10 in this scenario might be Henry George).

  My response – edited as I fancy going through it again was thus:

  I don’t agree with much of that I’m afraid :)

  I think it builds a metaphysics around one’s ordinary practice and convinces oneself that one’s own practice is paradigmatic – that reality is built in such a way that the practice not only makes sense, but contains within it the kernel of how all sense is actually made in the relation between us and the world. Here’s a nice passage on the point written in the 1920s you may have come across – I’ve edited and in doing so bowdlerised it a bit, but the original longer quote is here if you want to check it.

  Now the history of mind reveals pretty clearly that the thinker who decries metaphysics will actually hold metaphysical notions. .… If he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful. .… but inasmuch as the positivist mind has failed to school itself in careful metaphysical thinking, its ventures at such points will be apt to appear pitiful, inadequate, or even fantastic.

  E.A. Burtt
  The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.

  I can think of two things I recoil from when I read what you’ve written.

  1. Economic theory is very strong on resource allocation and has no strong theory of resource quality or what drives it up and down (other than reductive quantitative theories which might say that there’s a some co-relation between quality and market value). And your depiction of what we need to figure out the world has a given number of types of thinker and a division of labour. Discussing matters of thought in terms of resource allocation always reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where John Cleese explains acting in resource allocation terms – getting the right words, the right number, then getting them in the right order, inserting the pauses, getting the facial expressions right and so on. This also comes up in economics when people debate the role of formal analysis and it’s amazing – to me anyway – how often economists say that there should be a mix (which obviously there should be) and leave it at that.

  As I agued in my debate with Krugman, I’m not arguing in any important sense for more or less of one or the other.¹ It’s the quality of the thinking – of whatever kind that’s of the essence. And of course the way ideas from different perspectives using different techniques or skills are put together – echoing the original point on which we agreed that the fitting of models to the world is a critical matter which tends to be given short shrift.

  2. The whole business of fitting models to the world has a very ‘positivist’ flavour. Reality is ‘out there’. We’re ‘in here’ (either in our own individual subjectivity, or in some discipline or department trying to understand the world as it is) and our job becomes building a ‘model’ or a ‘map’ of reality. That almost invariably begins with the now pat explanations that models aren’t reality, nor are maps of the territory – sigh. It seems to me that we need to be very careful in sketching a picture in our head of what’s ‘really’ going on.

  To use a cool expression Wittgenstein used to describe philosophy, it represents the fly trying to get out of the fly bottle. It’s easy to turn one’s own intuition of the way the world is into a metaphysical map – as indeed was done when we thought that the sun revolved around the earth. That was ‘based’ if I can use that expression on the fact that it looked like the sun went round the earth. This was what I call metaphysics by default. As Wittgenstein put it, “and what would it look like if the earth went around the sun?”.

  We need to be careful about ‘just so’ stories that reduce our making sense of the world to some simple reductive model. If we don’t pay close attention to what we’re doing, we end up simply reifying our own intuition. One thing we do know is that we don’t ‘build models of reality’ to navigate our daily lives. Yet how could that be if one needs to build models to understand reality? A tennis player seeking to run to strike a ball follows numerous heuristics to get the ball where they want. The knowledge they have – in their bodies and brains – is embodied.

  They acquired their knowledge of the world from being in it and interacting purposively in it. In that regard their main cognitive job is not to build some God’s eye model of the world as it is, but to find ways of turning the physical and other features of the world into affordances for their purposes. It seems to me that engineering is the discipline that gets closest to this mindset (though I should make clear I have no extensive familiarity with the discipline(s) of engineering). Engineering, as I understand it, is a body of knowledge to assist in the articulation and pursuit of human purposes. If you want to build a bridge or a battleship or a chemical with certain qualities or a software program, you follow procedures that it is engineering’s task to explore, investigate and prove up to some point after which it’s up to your own critical nous to ‘apply’ in the field.

  It’s only preoccupied with some God’s eye view of reality to the extent that that might become necessary or advantageous in the quest for the affordances it seeks. Thus there will be all manner of knowledge about the tensile strength of different materials, how they bear up under stress of different kinds, how they change through time and so on. It may be expedient to seek this knowledge via building God’s eye models of certain aspects of reality. It may be possible to acquire adequate knowledge from common knowledge or trial and error or some other method. The point is that one encounters the knowledge with purposes in mind.

  In fact I can’t really see how one would encounter a God’s eye view of reality except as part of the lack of intellectual vigilance intimated by Burtt above which leads me to a corollary claim that seems attractive having come this far. I’d be highly suspicious of any abstract statement about what the physical or social world was like in any circumstances where the person making the assertion couldn’t explain how that conclusion arose from purposive activity – ‘where they were coming from’ as it were. If that couldn’t be done, I’d suspect their statement would be vague, possibly meaningless or poorly defined, or, to the extent that the claim that was being made is clear, wrong.

  As an example I’d provide the Arrow Debreu ‘model’ of general equilibrium, though only a fool takes that to be a model of reality. Arrow and Debreu certainly didn’t accuse their model of being a model of reality. Perhaps a DSGE model is a better example. At least there, one may be able to explain the purposes with which it was built, which will then frame one’s investigations as to whether it’s of any use or not. As an aside however it will be difficult to explain why arbitrary (aesthetic) constraints were placed upon the assumptions that constituted the model.

  1. OK, I’ve allowed myself an intellectual shortcut here – which you can fill out for me as an exercise if you like. As things are so extreme it is literally true that the upshot of what I’m arguing would involve more discursive analysis and by implication relatively less formal analysis, but to focus on quantities of two different kinds of discourse is to pretty comprehensively miss my point. You can have any amount of discursive analysis and completely miss my point – as most ‘methodology’ or ‘philosophy of economics’ courses actually do. ↩

September 13, 2019

• Daniel Bowen State Library station

  This blew my tiny mind.

  

  Speaking of Metro tunnel station names, the project publicity is increasingly talking about (new) North Melbourne station.

  It’s a shame the old one wasn’t renamed to West Melbourne (as per the plan) last year when all the maps were reprinted for the opening of the Mernda extension.

  Hopefully they get it done soon, well before the tunnel opens.

  • September 2017: What should the metro tunnel stations be called?
  • November 2017: The names are announced

September 09, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Home improvement

  Yes, sometimes my blog isn’t about transport. If you’d prefer to see only transport posts, you can use this link.

  Here’s a post where I ramble on about recent upgrades around my house.

  Wall insulation

  I had wall insulation installed earlier in the year.

  The winter gas bill came in recently. It’s down 37.7% from the previous year.

  We were away for a bit of time, but nowhere near that much. I’d call that a win.

  

  My current thinking is I’d like to slowly transition off gas and onto electricity, moving towards solar PV.

  • Re-do the kitchen (it needs it!) including a move from gas cooking to electric (induction?)
  • Replace the hot water with electric heat pump, removing the existing hot water solar panel to be replaced by PV panels
  • Replace the ancient gas central heating with reverse cycle heating/cooling – the only question being whether individual units or a central unit is better. (Can individual units be controlled in unison via a timer program?)

  We got a new TV

  Back in 2011 we got our first widescreen digital television: a 32 inch (80 cm) Samsung.

  Rather annoyingly it still works fine, but I was thinking of buying something bigger than 32 inches, perhaps around 43 inches. (Are television sizes one of the last holdouts of imperial measurements?)

  Then my sons spotted the 49 inch Sony X70F on Amazon, which seemed irresistibly cheap at $649 – slightly cheaper than the cost of the 32 inch TV in 2011.

  Choice’s handy guide to model numbers indicates that the X70F is last year’s model, but it’s got all the features we want, including 4K. We bought it. It’s since gone up to $849.

  We also bought a TV stand so it could fit on the old (narrow) cabinet. What I didn’t realise was the stand on top of the old cabinet positions the TV far higher than suits the room. The stand is height adjustable, but only up from where we have it.

  Sigh. Oh well, the old cabinet was also due for replacement (an ancient unit from Ikea that’s at least 25 years old – remember their Nunawading store and when they sold products that were real solid wood?), so I ended up buying a new cabinet as well. It’s lower but wider so has more space. Yes, Ikea again.

  It took an evening to re-cable everything into the new cabinet, but it’s tidier.

  

  Is a 49 inch (124 cm) TV too big for my small livingroom? Perhaps. Some advice seems to be aim for a TV with a size of about half the distance you sit away from it. On that basis it’s okay, but that’s really aimed at not seeing pixelation at the highest resolution. … Oh well, I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

  This article from 2016 reckons most people are now buying much bigger screens, and in the USA, the average size is now above 50 inches.

  The bathroom

  I moved into my house 14 years ago. My best guess is it had a makeover in the mid-1990s when the property was subdivided and most of the backyard was sold off and developed.

  So the bathroom was some 25+ years old and looking pretty tired. I finally got it revamped over winter.

  I was able to arrange the perfect timing: Peter the bathroom guy was able to do the project in early July, when my sons were away, and during the Caulfield to City bustitution – giving me an excuse to stay home and avoid it, at least in peak hours.

  Peter’s way of working is to provide a shopping list for most of the required bits and bobs, so I got to decide on and go shopping for tiles, grout, tapware, showerhead, toilet, vanity unit, towel rails.

  I discovered that there are any number of places that will sell you all this stuff – but almost all of them are only open during weekday business hours, and Saturday mornings – which was not very convenient at all.

  Only Bunnings has the smarts (and resources) to be open all weekend, and until 9pm on weekday evenings. In return for their long hours, and relaxed returns policy, they did very well out of me on this project.

  Thankfully my house has a second toilet. No full second bathroom though. I got used to washing each morning in the laundry sink, with occasional showers courtesy of nearby family so I could wash my hair. It’s manageable, but it was good to have the actual bathroom finished.

  In the end the work took a week and a half. Could it be quicker? If two people worked on a small bathroom, they’d just bump into each other.

  Any lessons learnt? I do wonder if next time I might not use a mixer tap for the vanity unit basin. The reason is the default (middle) position is likely to be used by people when they don’t want hot water. This actually runs the hot and cold together, which means the hot water heater starts up. It might be more energy-efficient to have separate hot and cold taps, even if they mix into one outlet.

  During the work we discovered why some of the pipes had been rattling – and fixed/replaced them. We also found the water takes a long route around the house before getting to the bathroom, which is why the hot water takes a while to start. Unfortunately it sounds like that would be quite complicated to actually fix.

  Not to worry – the overall result is great.

  Now I just have to get around to repainting affected sections of wall… put it on the list with the drill spots from the insulation.

  Maybe when I get the kitchen re-done, I’ll get some painters in to do it all.

  Now, what’s next?

September 01, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Passengers for the Airport, change trains at Sunshine

  Trouble afoot for the Melbourne Airport rail link?

  Age: The new proposal would see airport trains use existing rail lines between Southern Cross and Sunshine, and add a new line between Sunshine and the airport, sources close to the project have said.

  Herald Sun: …while most prefer an express route with only one stop, the state government’s plan to include the airport rail project in its $50 billion Suburban Rail Loop means travellers may have to change trains at Sunshine to get to the CBD.

  This casts light on some of the thinking inside the State Government: that the airport trains might share tracks into the City, or that they might not reach the City at all!

  I think we perhaps could live with the former, but the latter would be problematic.

  There also seems to be talk of a bog-standard service frequency of every 20 minutes, which is half that of the Skybus and the busiest off-peak suburban lines.

  

  The goal of an airport rail link

  Step back for a sec: It’s important to think about service outcomes, not infrastructure‌ and we should also not assume that everything needs to be resolved in one hit at enormous cost – with most people talking about a premium fare of some kind, super-expensive infrastructure is likely to drive up fare prices.

  Let’s take it as read that the route is via Sunshine, with a stop there for interchange purposes.

  My view is the goals are we need a travel time of 20-25 mins or so from the City to the Airport, and a service frequency of 10 mins. That’s what’s going to ensure the train is competitive with car travel, or taxi, and that it’s at least as fast as the existing Skybus, including ensuring interchange (whether in the CBD or at Sunshine) is quick and easy.

  Bear in mind those two aims.

  Sharing tracks

  There are two sets of tracks from the City to Sunshine: the Sunbury line (which by 2025 will connect into the Metro tunnel) and the Regional Rail Link tracks, carrying V/Line services to Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo.

  The Sunbury line only carries 3 trains per hour at present at off-peak times, but hopefully will be 6 before too long. And those off-peak trains stop at every station, so Airport trains wouldn’t be fast enough if they shared those tracks.

  By my count, the RRL tracks carry 6-7 trains per hour off-peak at present. So with some tweaking (and assuming electrification), you should be able to get another 6 airport trains per hour onto that line without too much trouble, and all running pretty fast from the City to Sunshine – typically they take 12 minutes at present.

  It’s peak that is the problem. Between 5pm and 6pm there are currently 16 outbound trains on the RRL lines, so it’s getting close to full, particularly with the current situation of numerous flat junctions (yeah, fix those for a start).

  Melton and Wyndham Vale trains are likely to run as electric services on the suburban tracks in the future, which might help, though you’d expect some of those paths to be needed by additional longer distance trains, to further relieve crowding.

  But peak is only a few hours a day, and the competition (the Tulla Fwy) is also congested then, so as an interim measure, while they figure out/fund/build more track capacity, you could probably live with slightly longer running times or slightly lower frequencies to the Airport.

  If the freeway clogs up every day in peak, does it matter much if the train travel time goes a bit over 25 minutes at the same time? It would still be quicker, and as long as the travel time is predictable and consistent, it would still be time-competitive.

  This would not be a unique situation. London’s Heathrow Express and Gatwick Express trains both run 4 trains per hour, and share tracks with other services. Gatwick Express in particular has running times that vary a bit according to other traffic on the line.

  And this is of course no different to many other public transport routes, including street-based trams and buses.

  Sure, eventually you’d need more capacity. That could mean extra tracks between Sunshine and the City. But it could also be the Metro 2 tunnel – latest thinking includes it providing a route for (electrified) Geelong trains direct into the City, taking them off the Sunshine route, freeing up yet more RRL paths. This would have a number of other benefits too.

  But if we’re going to demand dedicated tracks all the way from day one (really, a multi-billion dollar tunnel for a measly six trains per hour?) it’ll just mean it takes longer to build, and will help push up the fares.

  

  Changing trains

  Forcing people to change at Sunshine however, I think would be far more problematic.

  It’s not unreasonable to expect an airport train would provide a one seat journey from the CBD, attracting a significant business market.

  Also worth remembering that passengers from the suburbs (or in fact anywhere in the CBD that isn’t walking distance to the terminus, presumably Southern Cross) would have already changed service at least once.

  The Metro 1 tunnel will provide better access to Sunshine for people along the Sunbury to Cranbourne/Pakenham line, including from Parkville and ANZAC (Domain) stations. Sunshine is also readily accessible from the Ballarat, Geelong and Bendigo lines (assuming the latter is altered to actually to stop at Sunshine – for some reason it doesn’t at the moment).

  But from other lines, it’s problematic. Doubly so for Alamein and Stony Point passengers, who may have already changed trains to reach the City… and not forgetting people who had to catch a bus or tram to the station at the start of their trip. Plus a lot of people would have luggage to wrangle.

  There are some cities where you need to change trains between the CBD and the Airport. Singapore is one of them, with a cross-platform interchange and reasonably frequent service at most times of day.

  But it’s slow. A random check of Google Maps reckoned around 49 minutes from Changi Airport MRT station to City Hall MRT, not helped by stopping all stations – but the change of trains alone was 7 minutes. Driving can be as fast as 20 minutes. That might be okay in Singapore where car ownership is restricted, but would it fly in Melbourne? I doubt it.

  

  And one more thing: It’s a hard enough sell at the best of times convincing Melburnians to change trains. I reckon an airport rail link that doesn’t serve the CBD would be political suicide.

  Competitive travel times

  Ultimately, the airport rail link needs to be price and time-competitive with taxis and driving from a variety of locations around Melbourne, including the CBD which is the hub of the existing public transport network. It must also be convenient for people, especially those with luggage.

  It’s understandable with lots of infrastructure projects underway that the government is looking to see if it can cut costs – but they will need to take care that the airport link meets these goals.

  Let’s hope they carefully consider the options.

  More reading: Ben Lever (PTUA Ballarat) highlights the other upgrades needed, whether or not a new tunnel is built

August 29, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from August 2009

  It’s nearly the end of the month, so here’s another in my series of photos from ten years ago.

  Yarraville one afternoon. This hasn’t changed much at all.

  

  In Swanston Street, a quirky display of old public benches.

  

  Every few years, the tram/train level crossing at Glen Huntly needs renewal.

  

  

  

  Of course during the renewal, buses replace trains. Back then, they ran the buses along the side streets – picking up passengers closer to the stations, but a long slow journey.

  

  Here’s a Moorabbin Transit bus running rail replacement service. This company was owned by Grendas at the time; Grendas was eventually bought by Ventura.

  

  Once the crossing works were finished, trains resumed, crawling across at 20 km/h, as they still do today. The crossing is on the removal list, added during the 2018 election campaign, but no firm timeline yet.

  

  As clear as mud? Trying to document the busy Swanston Street/St Kilda Road tram corridor in one sign. Note the style which also affected the train map of the time, which obscures which way the branches go when they join the trunk route.

  

  Here’s the view on St Kilda Road near the Shrine. As of 2019, a lot of this area is busy with metro tunnel works.

  

  This is the Domain Interchange, before it got completely rebuilt in 2013 at a cost of $10 million. It was subsequently demolished for the metro tunnel. Your taxpayer dollars at work.

  

  

  Down in my neighbourhood of Bentleigh, the serious crash of a stolen car destroyed some of the shopfronts and killed the driver. Lucky it was early in the morning – nobody else was hurt.

  

  Elsewhere in Bentleigh, spotted this portable building being moved. Not sure where it was going, or why they chose to navigate down that narrow street.

  

  Federation Square, looking towards the river.

  

  …and the view from Flinders Street. The Visitor Centre has now been demolished, and metro tunnel works have taken its place; this will be one of the entrances to Town Hall station.

  

• Left Focus
  

  
  above: While Menzies was far from without fault, on many issues today's Liberal Party would be unrecognizable for him. 

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Dr Tristan Ewins

  
  

  
  

  
  
  Much is said about the clash between the liberal and Conservative wings of the Liberal Party of Australia. Usually leading figures will speak of a ‘broad church’ which includes a diverse membership. But the truth is that the Liberals continue to drift ever deeper into the hard Right. Liberals will stand up for religious liberties (which there may be some kind of argument for) ; but John Stuart Mill would turn in his grave if he was aware of Liberal policies on trade unions, charities, and attempts to shut down grassroots mass organisations such as GetUp!
  

  
  The Encyclopedia Britannica identifies various rights as central to Classical Liberalism. Freedom of association, assembly and speech amongst them. Also: “freedom from fear of reprisal”, and of arbitrary arrest and punishment. It also identifies free industrial organisation of workers as a necessary counter-balance in the marketplace.
  
  Interestingly, iconic British liberal John Stuart Mill was even in some ways sympathetic with the socialist social experiments of Robert Owen in the 19th Century. (see: ‘On Socialism’, J.S.Mill, Prometheus Books, New York, 1976)
  
  And while free markets are crucial to classical liberalism, various liberals are divided on the balance between public and private. All liberals would oppose a ‘command economy’, and would demand a central space for ‘personal determination of needs structures via markets’. For some liberals, however, Hayek and Rand are seen as occupying ‘the extreme end of the spectrum’ ; but those theorists’ ideas are exactly those promoted by the Institute of Public Affairs - which has a powerful role influencing Liberal Party policy. Before the 1970s, Hayek and Rand were ‘on the fringes’ in most Liberal and Conservative parties. Fanatical commitment to the progressive and open-ended dismantling the welfare state, social wage, social insurance and public sector would have once have been ‘out of place’ in ‘the Party of Menzies’. Now those ideas are in ‘the mainstream’. And for Conservatives, adherence to economic neo-liberalism has eclipsed ‘compassionate conservative’ tendencies.
  
  By contrast with the original liberals, today’s Liberal Party of Australia is committed to the total dismantling of the power of organised labour. Its ‘Ensuring integrity’ Bill has several aims. Firstly, the bill (if passed) will take non-protected industrial action as being ‘criminal in nature’ ; and union leaders could thus be charged and imprisoned ; and unions themselves deregistered and ‘dismantled’. It will enable government to “sack” union officials convicted of criminal offenses: which includes ‘industrial’ offenses such as unprotected industrial action, and entering workplaces to organise or inspect working conditions without notice. Also: even ‘protected’ rights to industrial action will be able to be withdrawn if an ‘interested party’ argues it affects their interests. The legislation will establish in many ways arbitrary punitive powers for government against workers and union officials. While freedom to withdraw labour is a liberal right ; so too is freedom of association.
  
  The Liberal Party is also now endeavouring to have mass-based progressive lobby group ‘GetUp!’ considered a branch of the ALP and the Greens ; and hence to restrict its rights to campaign in the lead up to elections, and on election day. With a membership base of over a million Australians ‘GetUp!’ is obviously much broader than the ALP or Greens, and has organisational independence. But these days the Liberal Party is simply interested in shutting down all opposition in a display of crude power politics. This is the opposite of liberalism ; even if defined narrowly as ‘classical liberalism’. True, the Liberals abrogated liberalism when they attempted to ban the Communist Party under Menzies as well.  ('Doc' Evatt's defense of the liberal rights of Communists was an important victory for Labor at the time)   But the Communists never had over a million members: mums, dads, students, retirees. People who want a political voice: but many of whom are not ready to join a Party.
  
  Another example of Liberals abrogating liberal principles regards their treatment of charities and other organisations who must fear their tax-deductibility status being withdrawn if they criticise the government. ‘Political’ speech is seen as compromising the work of charities by the Liberal-National Coalition ; but in fact this is just another rejection of real free speech: sacrificed on the altar of brute power politics. Despite a decision by the High Court upholding the right of civic organisations like charities to engage in political advocacy, the Liberals and Nationals are still looking for ways to shut-down resistance. Arguments have been made to ‘withdraw support’ for organisations ‘out of step’ with majority opinion. (whatever that is)
  
  The other side of this involves calls on the Left to tax churches ; which may include lay organisations at the grassroots level. While the Liberal Party has largely abandoned liberalism in practice, the Left could do worse than to integrate liberal and socialist principles.
  
  Finally we must consider the treatment of refugees and the unemployed by callous governments of the Australian Right-Wing. Open-ended incarceration with the effect of breaking the spirit and the will to live of those affected has no place in any account of liberal human rights.
  
  Meanwhile, ‘Work for the Dole’ comprises a form of labour conscription, and we must consider the real power relationships underlying these arrangements – as opposed to the fantasies of Hayek and Rand who only see ‘individuals freely entering into voluntary economic relationships’. Sophisticated liberals deal with ‘the world as it is’ and not merely as it is supposed to be in the theories of the economic hard right. In reality, both major parties are supportive of a policy of a “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment”. (ie: unemployment of approximately 5% with the point of containing inflation and wage pressures) The point of this is exactly to restrict workers’ bargaining power at a time when the unemployed are vilified, wages are stagnant, and there is restricted consumer demand in the broader economy. (in turn impacting on growth)
  
  In times past liberals would be capable of recognising the real-world imbalances of power in economic relationships: and hence support rights for trade unions, and a decent welfare safety net without punitive, unfair and unrealistic mutual obligation provisions.
  
  While some Conservative figures like Barnaby Joyce are finally recognising the threadbare and punitive nature of ‘Newstart’ unemployment insurance in Australia, Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is determined to keep existing policies as a wedge against Labor. While 'Robodebt' policies drive innocent people to desperation and suicide, the hope of decent bipartisanship has been cruelly crushed. An ugly sentiment against the welfare-dependent and job seekers has been whipped up in the monopoly mass media in Australia for decades. But the Liberals have all-too-readily seized upon the consequent public sentiment ; and have exploited it.
  
  While progressives should always prefer a Labor Government to a Liberal Government in Australia, it is to be hoped that genuine liberals like John Hewson - who have not been ideologically captured by the Institute of Public Affairs – improve their fortunes in internal debates. While this author is opposed to Blairite ‘Third Ways’ it would nonetheless be a relief to have bipartisanship on issues of basic human liberty and decency. While the Liberals increasingly embrace Hayek and Rand on the economy, on social liberty they are effectively against libertarianism. (eg: on the rights of organised labour)
  
  In Australia the nominal party of liberalism is anything but liberal. Even in the narrow sense of classical liberalism they fail to uphold core principles. Labor could reconceive of itself as a liberal Party ; and occupy that space abandoned by the Liberal Party. But for social democrats and democratic socialists that is not the answer if it means abrogating our own historic principles, and the rights and interests we defend. But a more libertarian position on liberal rights on the Australian Left would apply significant pressure to the parties of the Australian Right. To a some degree this is already happening. It is a trend that needs to be developed further.

August 25, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Some thoughts on the Myki data leak

  This, the other week, was interesting:

  In a concerning revelation, researchers have found that myki, in conjunction with social media, can be used to uncover a wealth of information about card users.

  ABC: ‘Shocking’ myki privacy breach for millions of users in data release

  Here’s the report and media release from the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner:

  Information Commissioner investigates breach of myki users’ privacy

  Here’s the original study:

  Two data points enough to spot you in open transport records

  What happened was that PTV released a whole bunch of Myki touch on/off data for a “datathon” event, where people see what handy things they can do with the data.

  It was “de-identified” – that is, Myki card numbers were removed and replaced with another identifier, which could link trips from a single card together, but not back to a card holder.

  Or so they thought.

  Part of the problem was they left in a flag indicating the card type. This is not just Full Fare (Adult) or Concession – it goes down to the precise type of Concession or free pass. For instance type 39 is a War Veterans Travel Pass; type 46 is a Federal Police Travel Pass.

  With more than 70 types of card, some of the more obscure types are pretty rare, so if the person you’re trying to track down is using one of them, they’re probably not that hard to find, particularly if you know which stations they regularly use.

  That’s presumably how the researchers found Anthony Carbines, State MP for Ivanhoe, I’m guessing travelling on a State Parliamentarian Travel Pass – by looking at the data, and matching it up with his social media posts, which included at least one from Rosanna Station.

  I’m probably in there too. And so are you. (I’ve only seen a sample of the data; a mere 30 million card touch records out of the total 1.8 billion originally released.)

  

  Ultimately, it’s good that data sets like this are released. There actually should be a lot more of it – at present, the data released by PTV is very limited. Anything related to patronage or bus service performance is really difficult to find.

  Perhaps the problem with not adequately cleaning the data is that they’re out of practice. Almost everything currently available either has nothing to do with passengers directly, or is at such a high level that it could never be used to find individuals.

  More data should be out there. Ultimately, the public transport network is funded by taxpayers, and it should be a lot more accountable and transparent than it is.

  One thing’s for sure: if they have a go at releasing this level of detailed data again – and I hope they do – they’ll need to be more careful to remove information that could be used to re-identify individuals.

August 19, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Is the importance of car parks inflated?

  One of the tropes of urban planning is that traders think car parking (and car access generally) for their customers is far more important than it might actually be.

  Here are some live examples in Melbourne right now.

  Save Inkerman!

  In Caulfield, traders reckon their businesses will suffer if separated bike lanes, part of the Principal Bike Network, replace car parking. Some residents, who seem to believe they have the unalienable right to park on a public road in front of their house, are also not happy.

  Read more about the Inkerman Road proposal here

  

  Save Elizabeth Street!

  Even in the CBD, belief in the importance of car parking is a thing. Some traders in Elizabeth Street are up in arms at proposals to give more place to pedestrians:

  Andrey Eierweis (from Ekselman watchmakers and jewellers): “We’re losing business because there’s no access to the shops and people can’t find a parking spot close enough.”

  And he makes this amazing claim: “The city’s dying. No one’s coming here.”

  No sir. The city’s not dying. It’s busier than ever. That’s precisely why the council is proposing these types of changes, to make space for more people.

  Perhaps what you mean is no one’s coming into your shop. Which is a different problem.

  It should be noted that Ekselman possibly is a business that genuinely does benefit from parking nearby, because, the article says: in the past they had sold and repaired a lot of large clocks but that had dried up because of a lack of parking.

  The parking in front of their shop disappeared when the tram superstop was installed some years ago.

  I suspect that if their business relies on people being able to bring in large clocks by car, they should move their premises to a different street. Most CBD streets have easier parking than Elizabeth Street.

  Read more about the Elizabeth Street plan here

  Meanwhile in Sydney Road

  Meanwhile in Sydney Road, some traders object to the council proposing a trial of fewer car spots, in favour of separated bike lanes.

  Jessica Tolsma (Jessicakes – great name!): “The proof in Melbourne is that when you remove parking from strip shops like Acland St and Bridge Rd, it doesn’t work and decimates businesses.”

  Read more about the Sydney Road trial here

  So how bad is Acland Street?

  Is Acland Street doing as badly as the Sydney Road traders claim?

  Recently removed the parking was removed and the footpaths were widened, and a new two-platform accessible tram terminus was constructed. So how bad is it?

  I stopped past on Sunday morning for a quick look. At 10:30am, the street wasn’t especially busy, but there were certainly some people walking around browsing the shops, and some of the cafes were packed.

  

  On neighbouring Barkly Street, which is still a through-route and does have lots of parking, there were plenty of cars, but no people browsing the shops, though one bloke in the barber was having a haircut.

  

  According to this report from Victoria Walks, despite what the traders in Sydney Road might think, the Acland Street traders decided to study it rather than shout it down.

  The traders quickly discovered that more than half of all their customers walked to Acland St to shop – and only around a quarter drove. More than that, though: more than half the shoppers in the area lived locally, and locals made an average of 184 visits to the shopping precinct every year. In fact, almost a quarter of the people surveyed said that they shopped in Acland St every day.

  It’s also worth noting that Acland Street has substantial numbers of car parks within walking distance, so the removal of spaces on the street presumably didn’t have a huge impact even on motorists.

  I don’t know Sydney Road and Inkerman Road well enough to cast judgement, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Acland Street was far from unique.

  No shortage of studies have shown that providing better access for cyclists and pedestrians is actually an economic positive.

  In part this is because car spaces are just so space-inefficient, and limit the number of shoppers.

  A study of Lygon Street, Carlton, found that while the average cyclist’s retail spending is only $16.20/hr compared to a car driver’s $27.00/hr, six bicycles can park in the space required for one car. Therefore, while one car space equates to $27.00/hr retail spending, six bicycle spaces equate to $97.20/hr.

  I would also imagine that passing cyclists and pedestrians are far more likely to stop on a whim than passing motorists, because they can more easily see into shop windows, and don’t have problems parking – which in busy centres is an issue even where kerbside parking is provided.

  Perhaps it’s the same phenomenon as with park and ride — the most visible, space-hogging access mode is assumed to be the most important. Another factor might be that traders themselves might tend to drive, because they often have stock or equipment to carry to/from their shops, so they see access to their shops from the perspective of a motorist.

  In any case, actually getting some actual evidence about their customers (and potential customers) wouldn’t go astray — rather than just assuming they all need to drive.

August 17, 2019

• Club Troppo How Good are Refugees? This year’s MUST ATTEND dinner with Santo Cilauro. 12th Sept, Melb.

  If these kinds of things existed in my country, I wouldn’t need to be running for President to fix everything up.

  Elizabeth Warren

  The only thing that didn’t leave a nasty taste in my mouth last year was the food.

  Barry the hypothetical troll from last year (He’s been debunked, defrocked, unfriended and univited this year)

  You may not be in that exclusive group of less than 200 people in Australia who have been to one of my dinners for refugees. But whether you’re Donald Trump or Douggie Hourigan,¹ you’ll have heard of them. I can tell you they’re a blast. Born out of a birthday party that went strangely right, I have made this an annual event since. Each function has been in support of refugees.

  The basic idea of the dinner is to meet interesting people, have fun and raise a decent amount of money for refugees. Last year, with Christos Tsiolkas as our guest of honour, we raised over $10,000 for the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and, in so doing helped them establish a program to train refugees to become program evaluators. I’m thrilled to say that that this is now bearing fruit.

  This year, as with the first year, we’re raising money for Urban Refugees. It targets the refugees who are outside the UNHCR process and the protections it affords – that is the millions of refugees living not in refugee camps, or in host countries but largely on the outskirts of cities of the low and middle income world like Kuala Lumpur and Kampala.

  It will mostly be dinner and meeting and talking to friends and interesting people you’ve not met before, but Santo Cilauro from Australia’s best TV production company Working Dog will be our guest of honour and we’ll hear from him. We’re inviting you to pay your way at $60 which will include approximately $25 which will be receipted as tax deductible donation. ²

  So Book Now for 7.00 pm on Thursday Sept 12th at Tazios on this link. And NOTE: Though it’s still on Flinders Lane, Tazios has moved since last year’s dinner.

  I’m also hoping you can make an additional tax deductible donation. In fact I’m so hanging out for you to donate that, as in other years, I’ll match every dollar you donate over $100 up to a total liability of $5,000 for me. ³ (In the first year, Ross Gittins decided to play hard-ball and try to bankrupt me with a thousand dollar donation which took $900 out of my pocket right there! Bring it on I say! I’m planning to sponge off my kids in retirement in any event.)

  If you’re making a donation of over $200 (that’s over $300 with my matching donation) and would like to, please feel free to email me on ngruen AT gmail and I’ll send you my bank account details so you can avoid all charges.

  The first donor of over $500 will be flown First Class to London where they’ll be chauffeured by Theresa May driving the trusty Aussie hot rod ‘Rooter’ (How good is Rooter?) and taken to dinner with Boris Johnson who will arrive late with carefully towselled, bleached hair.

  And there’s a special deal for those from out of town. They can make an even larger donation as they don’t have to pay for dinner.

  And please pass this invitation around.

  1. My friend in Grade One – where are you Douggie? ↩
  2. The bloodsuckers of our financial services industry will impose upon you a fee of 30 cents plus approx 1.75% on your payment. ↩
  3. Note the bloodsuckers of finance will subtract 30 cents plus approx 1.75% of your payment and you’ll receive a receipt for the rest. This is altogether fitting and proper given their commitment to making the world a better place for all the little people. ↩

August 14, 2019

• Daniel Bowen SoCross: the interchange

  If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen this.

  A man rushed past on the stairs at Southern Cross. He ran down and around the corner, then doubled-back to the V/Line fare gates. My guess is he’d come from the Metro platforms.

  Here’s a short video of what happened next.

  Southern Cross interchange: I saw this bloke sprinting from the #MetroTrains suburban platforms to try and catch a #VLine train to Bendigo/Epsom. Will he make it? pic.twitter.com/ursIFlFEei

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) August 9, 2019

  (It’s only 18 seconds to play in full. You don’t need to hear the sound.)

  You can sense his frustration.

  On V/Locity trains, the conductor checks the platform, then advises the driver it’s clear to depart, and all the doors close. The conductor probably can’t see if someone’s trying to board after that. I would assume the driver can see via the mirror, but might not be authorised to stop the train.

  The Bendigo line shares parts of its route with the Metro Sunbury line (between Sunshine and Sunbury), so there’s also a risk that a delay might cause the train to miss its path – though with the Metro trains only running every 20 minutes (40 beyond Watergardens) this seems unlikely. There are also issues with the single track beyond Kyneton.

  Note the lady in the background. I think she had planned to meet him on the train. After it departed, she approached and they spoke and ended up sitting on a bench together.

  Of course we don’t know all of the context here – had his Metro connection been delayed or diverted? Or had he just not allowed enough time?

  It’s an hour between trains to Bendigo. That’s a long wait. Depending on how you measure it, Bendigo is Victoria’s 3rd or 4th largest city.

  

  Southern Cross (formerly Spencer Street) Station got a huge upgrade about 15 years ago. The former passenger subway was closed, and is now used mostly for maintenance vehicles, and as a conduit for numerous cables and pipes running under the station.

  The subway used to be the only way to get to and from the platforms. It wouldn’t cope with passenger numbers nowadays, but would provide extra capacity and be a quick way to change between platforms. It’s unclear if it is viable to bring it back into service.

  The station upgrade provided far quicker exit to some locations, such as Collins Street west, and to the northwest including Telstra Etihad Marvel Stadium.

  But capacity has been a problem in recent years, and interchange between some of the platforms isn’t great, especially at the Collins Street end. It’s a bit better via Bourke Street, and doesn’t involve exiting the paid zone to swap between Metro and V/Line.

  You can only feel for the bloke in the video, and all the others over the years who have missed their connection thanks, in part at least, to the distance between the platforms.

August 10, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Public transport Shapes

  This went super viral, at least by my standards. It started off as a reply to a Tweet from Tosh Greenslade (from Mad As Hell) – he pointed out a similar slogan, then I realised the BBQ Shapes box design is near identical to the livery on the trams.

  Someone suggested a look at the other modes… and it grew from there.

  Public transport Shapes
  
  (the full set in one tweet, ICYMI)
  Thanks to @sortius for bus and V/Line.
  There was no sponsorship from Arnotts for this! pic.twitter.com/xtFn3scjtc

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) August 6, 2019

  On Twitter it got plenty of Likes and Retweets, but the Facebook post in particular has gone gangbusters: in the first 24 hours, over 2000 likes, 2600 comments (many are people tagging others as a way of forwarding), and 4300 shares.

  At some stage, V/Line shared it, asking: “Pizza shapes are everyone’s favourite, right?   “

  Then the Premier’s Office asked if they could post it too, so it ended up on Facebook again, and Instagram.

  That triggered articles from the Herald Sun, Pedestrian.tv and Broadsheet, and a spoof from the Watsonia Bugle. The PT Ombudsman had a go, and even the public transport professionals on Linked In seemed to like it.

  Eventually Arnott’s responded… though I’m not sure they quite hit the mark.

  View this post on Instagram

  Hey @danielandrewsmp you forgot one! Let us know if you need us to advise on future transport designs‌

  A post shared by Arnott's Biscuits (@arnottsbiscuits) on Aug 7, 2019 at 9:40pm PDT

  I’m quite amused and astounded at how fast and far this spread. As of Sunday morning, five days after posting, Facebook reckons my post alone has been seen by 851,020 people.

  I wish I understood the formula for viral posts. I guess some stuff just is, and some isn’t.

  Who had it first?

  With at least some of the patterns being a close match, it’s pretty amusing that the colours also match up so well.

  The Barbecue and Pizza flavours in particular really are similar to the PTV patterns for trams and V/Line. The others a little less so – the biscuit shapes shown on the boxes are less geometric.

  How long has Arnott’s used this design? It looks like it’s less than five years old – the archived version of their web site from 2013 shows (as far as I can see from the low resolution images) that back then the boxes were plainer, without the patterns.

  The PTV design originated with Metro in 2009, and was subsequently adopted for the other modes in 2012. I don’t know for sure, but it seems not unreasonable to assume that the geometric shapes were influenced by the design of Federation Square.

  The colours had been first used by Metlink around 2004, but appear to have been inspired by colours used since early in the 20th century.

  

  Multimodal branding

  The Shapes viral image raised some chuckles, but has also got a few people thinking about the branding of public transport – and the importance of presenting a united network across separate modes.

  One weakness of PTV’s branding is that the logo isn’t a great one, so the geometric pattern in different colours is what binds the modes together, which in turn makes it difficult to then use colours to distinguish major lines, for instance to match the train map.

  Contrast this to say London where the TfL/Underground logo is incredibly strong, allowing the Tube lines to easily take different colours – shown not just on the map but also on the trains, platforms, interchange wayfinding signage, all over the place.

  Of course good branding doesn’t mean good service – a lot more work needs to be done to bring poor services up to scratch.

  On Thursday night I had a PTUA Committee meeting. So I went prepared.

  I’m heading to a @ptua Committee meeting. And I’m bringing snacks!
  If you like better public transport as much as biscuits, please consider joining PTUA – we need all the help we can get! https://t.co/nArsJ8xyaX pic.twitter.com/96MtwZ6A3G

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) August 8, 2019

August 06, 2019

• The Northern Myth Barry Hansen: The NT government is the worst government financial disaster in Australian history

  There is no legal obligation on the state and territory governments to spend the general GST funds distributed to them in accordance with the CGC assessments.

  After the end of each year each state and territory reports actual spending in each category under what is called the uniform presentation framework, and the CGC publishes their assessments and the actual income and expenditure reported by the states and territories.

  In 2015 I reported to you the underspending of $522 million on areas of social justice in the 2006/07year. I also told you that as a result of a Senate Inquiry in 2008 that the reporting framework reduced the categories of expenditure reported.

  However the pattern of underspending remained evident in 2009/10 through to 2013/14 which at that time was the most recent year for which we then had available data. Review of NT budget papers for 2015 and 2016 clearly showed that the spending patterns had not changed in any material way.

  In 2016 I dissected the allocation of GST funds to the NT by a three-stage reverse engineering process using published CGC ratios and data. My conclusion was that 68% of the NT budget expenditure should relate to indigenous people. The NT government’s own review stated that 53% of its expenditure was in relation to indigenous people. The difference is around $500 million a year.

  In 2017 I looked more closely at some of the items that would have been classified as indigenous expenditure in the NT government review. In particular I considered the number of full-time equivalent positions in the NT public service. Between 2003 and 2016 the population increased by 21.4%. In the same time the public service FTE positions increased by 41.7% the increase in the public service over and above the population increase is almost 3000 positions or about $400 million a year over and above keeping pace with population growth.

  The NT Public Service Commissioner’s 2015/16 report tells us that 39.4% of the NT PS is in the administrative stream i.e. managerial and clerical. That’s over 8000 people and around 6500 people more than figures from some other states and territories would suggest are necessary.

  Presumably the excess numbers in particular areas would still be regarded as “Indigenous expenditure”.

  In 2017 the Commonwealth government announced an enquiry by the productivity commission into horizontal fiscal equalisation and the GST distribution. The Yothu Yindi Foundation made a submission to the enquiry which we are pleased to say appears to have directed attention to the issues raised.

  Some of the issues highlighted were the geographic injustice in where NT government spent its money. For example we compared spending on Darwin roads that we considered to be unnecessary with the state of the central Arnhem Highway. Around $400 million spent in Darwin as compared to comparatively negligible amounts on the Arnhem Highway.

  We also pointed out that the NT government inherited a massive deficit in its infrastructure at the time of self-government in 1978 and that the CGC methodology prevents any catch up.

  What I have not said previously, but have thought about, is that the NT government treats indigenous disadvantage as a commodity to be used in arguing for more money from the Commonwealth. If there is underspending then a closed-loop can develop: dollars; underspending; relative disadvantage; leading to more dollars.

  At the time of preparing the Productivity Commission submission we did not have the full insights into the NT government that the Langoulant report has provided, although we did have our suspicions. When you interpret the bureaucratic language it is chillingly compulsive reading.

  When it says “the NT government requires comprehensive change to improve the integrity of the budget process” you should read “spending has been completely uncontrolled”.

  When it says “the level and duration of expenditure growth restraint proposed is unprecedented across the states and territories” read “this is the worst government financial disaster in Australian history”. And it has been achieved in only 40 years of self-government despite years of underspending on indigenous people. Perhaps the following points made in the Langoulant report have also contributed to the disaster:

  • up to 99% of expenditure in each budget is unscrutinised outside of any internal agency review;
  • successive territory governments have adopted a culture of continuous budgeting with significant additional expenditure approved outside the budget process; (p 10)
  • the current budget process prevents contemporaneous analysis of actual performance in the current financial year compared to the original budget; (p 13).

  In other words effectively uncontrolled and unmonitored spending has occurred. When the report says “given the magnitude of the fiscal challenges, returning the budget to balance should be identified as the primary objective.”
  It means “it’s sink or swim time”.

  You might recall NT government has said it will dispense with 53 ECO positions out of approximately 650. The report tells us that approximately half of the ECO positions should be converted to SAO2 or SP2 positions, with remuneration reductions of around $60,000 per annum for each position i.e. $18 million per annum in total.

  In 2018 I reviewed what would be reasonable processes for policy formulation. I concluded that indigenous people had never properly participated in any policy formulation process of which I was aware. That is, participated as a full equal partner from inception of the process with equal say and equal access to information.

  In my view the Commonwealth government had and has no valid claim to legitimacy in its policy formulation processes in relation to indigenous people.

  Now let us look at what life in the bush is like. It is not easy.

  The fundamental reality of remote area life is that everything—repeat everything—is far more expensive than in cities such as Darwin. Stores have the diseconomies of scale that comes with comparatively minuscule turnover as compared to Coles, Woolworths, Bunnings and others. On top of that you have to add in freight.

  Travel is typically by air or by vehicle on substandard roads; either way the costs are prohibitive to those on low incomes.
  The relative costs are illustrated by the ratios used by the CGC for very remote areas. Darwin is considered by the CGC to be a regional centre to which it applies a cost loading factor of 21% as compared to major cities, for schools.
  The cost loading factor for areas in the NT outside Darwin, Alice Springs, Katherine, and Tennant Creek is 91%. If we take the age pension as being the amount the government considers necessary for Australians generally to not live in poverty, then the $18.20 a fortnight remote area allowance is not going to be anywhere near sufficient to cover the additional cost of living in remote area.

  Tax measures such as Zone rebates are meaningless in this context because at these rates of income no tax is payable typically. Remote area fringe benefits tax concessions which strongly favour higher income individuals are merely rubbing salt into the wounds.

  So there you have it – historically underfunded by about $500m a year, and that is after huge administrative overstaffing in the NT is included in “Indigenous expenditure”, the massive infrastructure deficit inherited by the NT from the Commonwealth at the time of self-government which can never be caught up because of the CGC methodology, all compounded by geographic injustices in where NT dollars are spent, the inability to plead the case for the bush because of the total exclusion from policy processes, and all in an environment of living costs double (or more) those of major cities supposedly covered by the pension and Newstart remote area allowance of $18.20/fortnight.

  And it is not as if the NT Government has saved the underspent money I talked about earlier – it is in the worst financial situation of any State or Territory in Australian history.

  This is the context in which government assistance programs are delivered, programs that are intended to relieve the suffering and distress of a myriad of social issues. More often than not governments expect local communities to operate these programs or at least that their leaders be available for seemingly endless “consultations” about the programs. FOR NO PAY. Everybody at the table getting salaries and travel allowance except the only essential person – the community leader.

  The more you think about this, the easier it is to be convinced that there really must be a poor understanding within governments about the workloads they heap on poorly resourced community leaders. New programs are proposed, developed, approved, and dropped on harried community leaders without preparation or consultation.

  At the end of each financial year there is a flurry of activity in funding bodies to get money out the door, with the regular consequence of communities having to apply to carryover the unspent funds into the next financial year and the requirement to account for it separately from that next year’s funds.

  This is complicated because each funding agency has its own set of rules. This might not sound particularly onerous but for example a single audited grant acquittal can usually only be provided if the full audit is completed. The whole cycle is captive to the most onerous set of conditions. A small grant can cause major problems by applying conditions that would perhaps be reasonable for that grant in isolation, but not when it has a significant knock-on effect.

  On top of this there are the pettifogging program rules which can lead to demands for explanations up to 18 months after the event. Just so a box can be ticked on some spreadsheet somewhere for some purpose obscure to us. What is the point of collecting information 18 months out of date?

  The reliance of both the NT and Commonwealth governments on seriously under-resourced communities to deliver a multiplicity of programs is (to express it most politely) fundamentally flawed.

  This is not to say that our organisations lack the capacity to undertake the work; they lack the resources and time.

  It must be said that each department or agency lives primarily in its own world. Attending meetings to defend one’s own position is not collaboration, it is a silo, and leads to failures of communication, duplication, loss of focus, and blurring of objectives.
  Community leaders are highly motivated and focussed on local priorities, and have little time for such bureaucratic nonsense. Rather than having programs operate haphazardly, there needs to be a coherent and unified suite of policies which lead to community needs being fulfilled. This requires full indigenous participation and comprehension of the programs, with locally determined priorities. Governments are overly focused on delivering goods and services within Departmental silos, and not enough on effectively supporting the development of our human capital.

  What is required is a regional structure with culturally appropriate boundaries which oversees all programs and consultations in the region. The directors would be elected to salaried positions and there would be staff to support and advise the elected members. Local Government bodies could not fill this role because they are ultimately controlled by the Minister, and they have roles that conflict with a body such as I propose.

  This would eliminate the random and uncoordinated “consultation“ burden and replace it with something much more effective and productive. Elected members would be able to devote time and effort to policies and programs from the commencement, with advice from unconflicted staff. The constant worry of balancing commitment to community with personal income and family matters is overcome.

  Funding currently provided by the Commonwealth and the NT should be provided directly to the regional body. The end result would be a vast improvement on the current passing parade of public servants and others who seek to draw legitimacy from “consultation” for their particular program or project.

  Remote communities need staff who will work with the community, for community objectives. We are not interested in being a career move, a box ticked on a planned career path. Staff working for a government department or a Local Government Council cannot be expected to represent both their employers and the community – the conflicts of interest are obvious.

  Let’s consider how this could work::

  • Regional local authorities e.g. for north-east Arnhem land;
  • total funds assessed by the CGC applicable to that area is to be
    allocated in bulk to the Regional Authority;
  • the apportionment and expenditure of the funds is determined
    locally but is subject to the Commonwealth (through the
    Productivity Commission) approving the types of expenditure as
    being legitimate, and the proposed distribution of funds is fair.
    Priorities established are not otherwise subject to review but it
    must be said that the internal processes and discussions are likely
    to be robust indeed;
  • funds provided are as “money in trust” and any misuse is a serious
    offence;
  • staffing of the regional authority would not be by public servants,
    but staff would have similar roles, duties, and control mechanisms;
  • it may be that wider area activities are contemplated and pro rata
    funds are pooled e.g. a common use road;
  • priorities may change from year to year. For example a region
    might focus on housing for five years, and then focus on economic
    development;
  • There will be scope for establishing long-term relationships with
    preferred suppliers in accordance with private enterprise best
    practice, but with periodic review.
  • Economic development is by definition a legitimate use of funds
    but protection against speculative or high risk ventures would
    need to be put in place;
  • Local communities can set the parameters for how development
    can occur e.g. a mining development could be FIFO or by
    establishment of a local town such as Nhulunbuy; and
  • funds provided to the Northern Territory government for remote
    areas e.g. a major road will be trust monies, with administration
    fees not to exceed the average of indigenous regional areas.

  Our plea to Government is this: deal with the causes of our problems rather than the consequences.

• The Northern Myth Denise Bowden: we are prisoners to NT government incompetence and maladministration

  This is a lightly edited copy of the speech given on Saturday 3 August 2019 by Denise Bowden, Director of the Garma Festival

  Good morning and welcome everybody.

  In the places where Aboriginal people live in remote Australia we lack the basics that are taken for granted by the rest of Australia – if it’s not health facilities it’s housing support.

  If it’s not the power it’s the sewerage. If it’s not the absence of a decent road, it’s the lack of a proper school, or a safe place for old people.

  For many Australians these things are taken for granted and when they are not there it’s inconvenient at worst. For many Indigenous Australians these things can be a matter of life and death and they are part of day-to-day life.

  And that is what I want to talk about today – the way government has ignored the needs of Aboriginal people and the mismanagement of government spending on Indigenous communities. This year is the 10th year I have worked for the Yothu Yindi Foundation (YYF).

  Can I say that it is a privilege and an honour to serve the Chairman and the Directors of this great organisation for Yolngu and other indigenous Australians to have the same level of well-being and life opportunities as non-indigenous Australians.

  Thank you Galarrwuy, thank you Djawa, Yananymul, Barayuwa, Balupalu, Djapirri and Binmila. Thank you Eddie Gumbula, and Murphy Yunupingu. And thank you to our dear departed directors and members, some of who stand in our Hall of Yolngu Heroes, and all of whom we remember with tears and grief but also with pride and love.

  I remember in particular Mrs Gurruwiwi who lobbied for an Aged Care home in this region for Yolngu women like herself. I sat in a meeting in 2014 as Mrs Gurruwiwi pleaded with senior public servants to build such a facility with money that was already appropriated. She died a few years later in a place that was not fit for human habitation. She is not alone.

  There are many other elders who carry the ancient wisdom, knowledge and beauty of our people who die every year for simple and avoidable reasons. And today – 5 years later – this facility in Nhulunbuy has still not been built and we are still waiting for a tender process to get underway.

  This is one of hundreds of examples that make my blood boil.

  Few things focus your mind like grief and anger and over the last decade YYF has analysed spending patterns & formulas through the Commonwealth Grants Commission data, Northern Territory & Federal budget reports & audits.

  This work confirms everything we see in front of us and explains why many Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory continue to live impoverished lives.

  The data shows time & time again that hundreds of millions of dollars of untied GST funds sent to State & Territory governments to address Aboriginal issues diverted to other urban priorities, or are spent on administration in Darwin or other urban centres. Here’s an example of our frustration.

  Since 2006 the NT Government has spent over $300 million, presumably from its untied GST payments, creating a Waterfront precinct, which in large part has been turned over to property developers and business.

  In addition to the sunk costs, every year the NT Government grants up to $20 million to the Darwin Waterfront Corporation to run a conference centre and tourist facilities including a wave pool & an artificial beach & events like fireworks, concerts and driverless cars.

  Forgetting the hundreds of millions in capital costs, that’s an annual payment equivalent to 40 remote houses a year so local Darwinians and people visiting Darwin can enjoy themselves.

  Don’t get me wrong – we understand the importance of tourism to the economy but meanwhile in the bush the housing crisis continues, the housing deficit grows, indigenous people are living lives characterised by poverty and neglect and despair.

  Another child is born to another overcrowded home. Another kid gets no sleep and can’t get to school. Another assault takes place in a house full to bursting point, and so on.

  Recently the NT Government published a report by respected economist John Langalout which confirmed everything we have said for over a decade. Mr Langalout found the Territory is in a structural deficit.

  That is, the books don’t balance and this has nothing to do with short-term factors; it’s a locked in situation caused by decades of overspending and maladministration. He says that the Territory is in an almost bankrupt situation with forward estimates driving debt so high that by 2030 the interest bill alone will be $2 billion dollars a year.

  Thinking back to Mrs Gurruwiwi, who died waiting for health services that have still not materialised, can you imagine trying to process the news that $2 billion a year of Territory funds would be spent not on improving the lives of some of the most marginalised people in the world, but on paying the interest bill?!

  Again, that makes my blood boil. It is the high level of maladministration that is occurring that is the most extraordinary.

  Let me put some facts on the table:

  “99% of Territory government spending is unscrutinised outside of any internal agency reviews. As a result almost all expenditure is simply rolled over from one year to another with little external assessment of effectiveness, efficiency and alignment to government priorities”.

  • There are over 970 different allowances being paid to NT Public Service employees

  • The Territory Government does not have a single integrated management system for agencies capable of budgeting at the cost centre or providing consolidated cashflow information

  • Agencies have adopted a range of in-house solutions, including rudimentary spread-sheet based approaches to prepare manual monthly cash flow reports

  • Over the past two decades the Territory’s government owned corporations have collectively persistently … have operated at a net cost to Territory taxpayers

  If the Northern Territory Government was a corporation serious thought would have to be given to winding it up.

  If it was an Aboriginal Corporation its Cabinet ministers would be prosecuted. It makes me cry that we are prisoners to this incompetence and maladministration.

  Yet for all of this there seems no prospect of change. Why would they? For the moment the Northern Territory Government is unwilling or unable to respond to the deep outrage around deeply flawed processes, decision making and funding models.

  For its part the Commonwealth seems to have happily wiped its hands of the mess it created when it left the NT to a small group of inexperienced administrators in 1978. The Commonwealth created the system that is currently in play in the Territory and has sat by and allowed it to continue unabated, dining out on the back of Aboriginal misery.

  So we call out the Commonwealth Government as well. The Commonwealth is responsible for the Northern Territory under the Self-Government Act. It is responsible for the GST formula that gives the rivers of gold to the NT Treasury.

  Under the principle of responsible government the Australian Parliament is duty bound to set the mistakes of self-government right. We call on the Australian Parliament to do so – because the lived experience of the current arrangements are defined by poverty and frustration. Once again, it makes my blood boil. That’s a lot to think about, so let me conclude. Many of us – and I hope many of you too – see the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a light on the hill.

  A beacon, a flame of hope where for too long there has been none. There is no doubt we need a Voice and we will support that with all our heart. But at the same time we cannot lose sight of the urgent need to change a system that is fundamentally broken, a system that is impoverishing Aboriginal people by clipping the ticket of Aboriginal disadvantage.

  These are not easy truths and I don’t expect I will have made any new friends in Darwin but that comes with the job. I take strength from my Chairman who has weathered decades of attacks and undermining and has never deviated from his course.

  Under his leadership YYF has not and will not hesitate in exposing to scrutiny an awful system that lives off the misery and disadvantage of my brothers and sisters.

  I ask you to join us in this challenge and set thing right.

  Thank you.

  **********************

  Denise Bowden is a born-and-bred Northern Territory Indigenous woman. She has an extensive experience in Indigenous affairs in the more remote regions of Australia’s north.  Denise is the Chief Executive Officer of the Yothu Yindi Foundation (YYF) and has worked has worked in this capacity for ten years with the Yolngu clans.

August 05, 2019

• Daniel Bowen The circle is broken. But…

  You might recall I had put in a request to Vicroads to resolve a 13 year old problem with a local bus zone.

  The bus zone hours hadn’t been updated since last decade. In 2006 the operating hours of bus route 701 were extended so it runs until after 9pm in the evening, and Sunday service was introduced for the first time.

  Vicroads replied and said they had passed the query to PTV.

  Then PTV replied and said they had passed the query to City of Glen Eira.

  I was waiting for the inevitable next step: for Glen Eira to refer it to Vicroads. But no!

  Sometime in the past couple of weeks, they’ve fixed it. Behold, the new signage.

  

  And yet, this raises some concerns.

  Someone actually bothered to look up the timetable. The last bus of the night is scheduled for 10:03pm on weeknights, heading to Bentleigh. So they made the bus zone end at 10:15pm.

  But they messed up. Bus services actually start just before 6am. The first service of the day is scheduled at 5:59am on weekdays, heading to Oakleigh.

  And their research missed that this stop is regularly used for train replacement buses during planned works. When those run, the last service is at about 1am on weeknights, and there are all night services on weekends.

  This last occurred in July.

  

  Why not just make the bus zones 24/7? A few hundred metres south, I found this brand new bus zone for recently added bus route 627, a route with similar operating hours, which is 24/7. And this stop isn’t used for train replacement buses.

  

  24/7 bus zones, particularly where people are unlikely to park anyway:

  • help remove ambiguity for motorists
  • make the signs more readable
  • are future-proofed against future bus timetable changes
  • cope with train replacements and other circumstances that might see buses needing to stop there at unexpected times.

  And why separate AM and PM? I think this just makes the signs harder to scan/read.

  In fact, on one of the revised signs, the new Bus Zone hours format is inconsistent with the existing adjacent stopping rules. Ingenious!

  

  Have you looked at the bus zones in your neighbourhood? What do they say? Do they actually cover the bus operating hours?

  Do local motorists observe the bus stops? Some bus stops are unsigned, meaning 24/7 parking restrictions apply.

  Given these bus zones as now signed don’t actually cover bus operating hours – not even the regular route – I’ll try and send feedback to the City of Glen Eira and see what they do next. (Tried this morning – their web site spat out an error.)

  It’s a little depressing that collectively, three authorities had to play Pass The Parcel with this, and when it’s finally got done, it’s been messed up.

  If they can’t get the little things right, what hope is there for the big stuff?

August 01, 2019

• Daniel Bowen A year in the new car

  Sorry PT fans, this is a blog about driving.

  I’ve had the new car, a 2017 Mitsubishi Lancer bought brand new, a year now, and have got to just on 10,000 kilometres so far.

  The average in Australia is about 15,000 km per year, but some drive a lot further. My past average is about 7-8K, but circumstances (principally one son who just got his licence) has us driving more than in the past.

  I’m liking the car. The only thing I don’t like is the rear spoiler. I think it looks a tad silly, I doubt it has great aerodynamic benefits, and it partially blocks the view from the rear vision mirror and when doing a left shoulder check.

  

  Taking off the spoiler is theoretically easy. You just unbolt it. But filling the bolt holes is the tricky bit, especially in such a way that it’s not noticeable and doesn’t let leaks in. The car dealer even suggested checking spare parts places/wreckers for a replacement boot lid might be easier.

  I suspect the base model Lancer only had the spoiler to try and put off people like me who are grown ups and don’t really want a spoiler and should probably spend more on a car… but my fiscal sensibilities defeated them. And judging from the people I see driving the same model of car, I’m not the only one.

  Aside from the unwanted spoiler, no issues with the car, other than being new I feel like I have an obligation to keep it clean, which is tricky, especially with a gravel driveway that has lost most of its gravel. Might be time for a top-up.

  There has been a minor mishap (a low speed bump with a parking sign) necessitating a surprisingly expensive repair. But hey, I wasn’t driving it. Protip: if you have a large insurance excess, get a quote first; it may not be worth claiming.

  Given the car often sits in the driveway for many days at a time, I’m also pondering if I should sign up for Car Next Door, but we now have another driver in the house.

  Learning to drive

  I taught my younger son to drive. The elder isn’t interested just yet.

  This was an interesting experience. He had a number of paid lessons as well, and our practice drives complemented them nicely.

  What we agreed was really valuable was that we tried lots of different types of road. Freeways for instance don’t get a lot of love for learner drivers in Bentleigh/Moorabbin, because there aren’t any nearby. The art of entering a freeway (matching the existing traffic speed) is important, and seems to be lost on some motorists.

  One one drive we cruised around Elwood, taking in narrow streets, cobble-stoned laneways, and the fords of Foam Street and Wave Street.

  

  On another drive we hit the CBD late on a Sunday afternoon and got in a hook turn, the roundabout of death, driving safely around trams, and that tricky road on the northern side of Melbourne University – where I once saw a motorist stop dead in the middle of an intersection out of sheer confusion.

  And, surprisingly close to home, we found a dirt road (not the one pictured above), to sample the reduced grip of an unsealed surface – plentiful in rural areas.

  Come test day, he passed first time – and of course with each drive, he gets better.

  Nobody’s perfect of course, but he tells me that now he’s driving himself, he’s surprised at how many bad drivers there are on the roads. Yeah, ain’t that the truth.

  

  Car fuel consumption

  I switched the information display on the console to display how many litres per 100 kilometres we’re using.

  It looks like typically about 6-8 litres if driving with the air-conditioning off; about 8-10 with it on. Short drives are evidently less efficient; long freeway drives bring the fuel consumption down – as long as it’s not congested.

  Choice has an interesting article on driving for fuel efficiency.

  Of course the best way to cut fuel use is not to drive and the long term habit in our family is to consider carefully which transport mode we use, rather than jump in the car every time. We’re lucky to have viable choices for many of our trips.

  "We need a train station going through Clyde and Clyde North. Traffic is a nightmare and makes me regret moving here."
  – sometimes cheap housing has a huge cost, thanks to lack of infrastructure/services. https://t.co/fwMaE2jE94

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) July 31, 2019

  Cost per kilometre

  Given I now have an actual (not forecast) number of the kilometres per year, 10,000, I can re-calculate my estimated costs per kilometre:

  • Depreciation 11.1 cents
  • Insurance 7.1 cents
  • Registration 8.2 cents
  • Servicing 2.3 cents (thanks to fixed price in the first 3 years)
  • Petrol 10.8 cents

  That’s a total of 39.5 cents per kilometre.

  Based on 8000 kilometres per year, it was 43.9 cents per kilometre, so as you can see, the more you use it, the cheaper it gets, as the fixed costs such as insurance and rego don’t change.

  • 7/8/2018: The desire to drive, and how we must counter it

July 31, 2019

• The Northern Myth Peter Sherwin: He liked his revenge served cold

  

  Peter Sherwin, who passed away earlier this week, was, as this anonymous blogger noted, a man viewed through many prisms.

  For many he was the Cattleman’s cattleman, for others a reclusive bumbling hillbilly, a David tilting at Goliath corporate and banking windmills or a megalomaniac dreaming of control of 3 per cent of the nation’s cattle herd and 1 per cent of the land mass.

  Sherwin will always be the employer who saw tragedy when two of his young jackaroos perished in the West Australian desert and who couldn’t find it in his stoney heart to measure sympathy to the families of those boys. He was a fearless bare-knuckle pugilist who was said to wield a pistol against those whom he thought were against him.

  For blackfellas across the north of the country Sherwin was no icon, rather a bad neighbour resolutely opposed to the interests of Aboriginal people.

  For all the plaudits handed out at his passing of him as a cattle king or baron—he undoubtedly had an astute head for business matched with a ruthless courage— Sherwin had a glass jaw of magnificent proportions, not least in regard to the Aboriginal people who worked on or made claims to land he “owned.”

  According to Norm Barber, Sherwin would:

  … buy a station, cut off the water to anything that didn’t make money, overgraze the land, exhaust the infrastructure, not pay the employees, beat up anyone who got in his way, steal the jackeroos’ equipment, and spend big to arrive at a bush meeting with a lawyer flown out from Darwin. He was the hunter who returned with fresh kill, while others were afraid to pull the trigger.
  

  Tensions between pastoralists and Aboriginal people in the Top End of the NT date back to the 1870s when the first cattle herds were driven across the NT-Queensland border.

  Sherwin’s poor relations with Aboriginal people surfaced publicly in the early 1980s. In 1981 Senator for Western Australia Ruth Coleman raised her concerns with Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Senator Baume. Senator Coleman asked if the Minister had followed up on his comments to the media concerning the expulsion of 50 Aboriginal workers and their families from the north-western Gordon Downs station, then owned by Peter Sherwin.

  The West Australian of 16 January 1981 quoted the Minister as saying:

  I am concerned about the expulsion or removal of any traditional Aboriginal people from land with which they have strong ties. My Department has sent an officer from Kunanurra[sic] to Halls Creek to investigate all matters concerned with the reported expulsion. He will be reporting to me as soon as possible.

  The following day the Minister provided further advice to the Senate.

  The fact is that the Aboriginal people from Gordon Downs were evicted by the station management on 2 January and they then moved to Halls Creek. The people have established a camp at a rock hole about one kilometre east of Halls Creek town centre.

  Three years later Sherwin attracted the attention of the Northern Land Council (the NLC), which at the time was representing the Wompaya, Jingili, Ngarnji and Gurdanji people claiming vacant Crown land on the Barkly Tablelands in the Northern Territory.

  As Land Rights News reported in 1986, at the time Sherwin was—almost— at the top of his game, controlling the largest cattle empire in the world, said to be worth upwards of $100 million.

  The Wompaya, Jingili, Ngarnji and Gurdanji were claiming NT Portion 1099, 2300 square kilometres of landlocked vacant Crown land the southern, western and parts of the eastern boundaries of which adjoined land controlled by Sherwin. There were no public roads to NT Portion 1099 and in the course of pursuing the claim the NLC’s lawyers requested access across Sherwin’s Anthony Lagoon station so that they could visit the land and document sites of significance in preparation for the land claim.

  Sherwin’s lawyers refused the request for access. The Land Council, noting that access by helicopter was prohibitively expensive and that alternative vehicle access was difficult in the extreme—on one trip an NLC four-wheel drive vehicle travelled 15 kilometres in two days and suffered 9 punctures—sought relief from the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, seeking orders to allow access across Sherwin’s station.

  Predictably, that access was resisted by Sherwin’s lawyers, who claimed that the installation of a gate on the station boundary was unacceptable. The Land Commissioner took that assertion with a very large grain of rock salt.

  It is very interesting that Mr Sherwin doesn’t want a gate on his boundary with some other property. That is a luxury that would be almost unique in the Northern Territory: that he had a boundary with land, inaccessible Crown land, so he did not have the bother of neighbours to put up with … It does not impress me greatly. It would be nice not to have neighbours …

  The Land Commissioner ordered Sherwin to grant access and the claimants, notwithstanding a later appeal to the Federal Court seeking to overturn the Commissioner’s ruling, were able to access the property. Following the Federal Court’s decision that the Commissioner’s decision should stand, Sherwin launched a further appeal to the Full Bench of the Federal Court.

  Three years later Sherwin was locking gates and barring access to Aboriginal land claimants again. In 1989 Land Rights News reported on an injunction sought by Sherwin’s lawyers against access sought by NLC lawyers on behalf of traditional owners seeking to claim land at Pigeon Hole, on the Victoria River Downs Station, south-west of Katherine in the Northern Territory. In early April, NLC lawyers and claimants travelling to Pigeon Hole were confronted by “padlocked gates, and a roadblock of trucks and a helicopter” when they attempted to access Pigeon Hole along the Main Camp road.

  The following day they faced similar obstacles while trying to access Pigeon Hole through the Camfield Road to the east, and were served an injunction —by helicopter—issued by then Chief Justice Asche of the NT Supreme Court.

  The next month, Sherwin’s lawyers applied for a full injunction against the NLC and the two lawyers involved. Justice Nader refused the application, lifted the interim injunction and granted an order allowing one of the NLC lawyers access to interview claimants at Pigeon Hole.

  By 1990, having been bought out by Robert Holmes a’ Court’s Heytesbury Holdings, Sherwin was long gone from Victoria Downs Station but problems for the traditional owners at Pigeon Hole continued.

  In May 1990 Land Rights News reported that, in relation to Sherwin’s opposition to the application by the NLC to access the property, Justice Nader in the Supreme Court of the NT noted the evidence of one of the Pigeon Hole claimants about the conditions while Sherwin operated Victoria River Downs:

  The story this woman tells is the story of their being imprisoned there. The men are only allowed out to work; they cannot get visitors and they cannot visit other people. I find it extraordinary that people could behave so savagely in 1989 against fellow human beings.

  Meanwhile Peter Sherwin was facing other challenges. As the anonymous blogger has noted.

  Sherwin wanted to control more of Australia’s cattle properties, to double the size of Sherwin Pastoral Company through a takeover of Australian Agricultural. A broker said: “Sherwin had just been a herd builder. He was like a Hindu, where wealth is measured by how many cattle you’ve got. Shareholders needed cash flow, profits; but that was an anathema to him. He just wanted to get bigger.” Sherwin’s own barometer for success, size rather than profits, was only one of the problems; so too was his failure, or inability, to communicate. It sent the city types into despair.

  Norm Barber provides some perspective on Sherwin’s fall from grace in Death in the Sand, in which he examines the deaths of James Annetts and Simon Amos in 1986 on Sherwin’s Nicholson Station near Halls Creek in the far north of Western Australia and the—largely unrelated—financial catastrophe that followed.

  Sherwin was determined to camouflage the sad state of affairs, but auditors Pannell Kerr Foster refused to sign his 1987 accounts. They said his estimated herd size of 347,000 beasts hadn’t been independently verified. Sherwin was no smooth talking Alan Bond, but a taciturn recluse who thought he still retained absolute control of his company. Some creditors and shareholders saw him as sneaky. Maybe he was fiddling the books. Like a stock camp manager picking ‘killers’, corporate predators circled Sherwin Pastoral Company, like wild dogs slathering over a weakened animal separated from the herd. Shares floated at $1.00 slipped to 83 cents then the October 1987 stock market crash knocked them to 60 cents. Elders and Bankers Trust Australia began buying in preparation for a takeover bid. Elders offered Sherwin 88 cents for each of his shares in June 1988. Bankers Trust raised it to $1.12 eleven months later. But the bells tolled when Australia’s most feared corporate raider sent a plane over Sherwin’s herds. Its spotters estimated numbers might be as low as 280,000. 

  Traditional owners of Pigeon Hole were finally granted their application for a mere 31 square kilometres of their traditional lands in August 1992. Then NLC Director Mick Dodson noted that the once prosperous Bilinara nation:

  … has been decimated by more than a century of massacre and brutality, and they have been landless ever since colonisation. But now they have a small piece of land they can call their own.

  NLC Chairman Galarrwuy Yunupingu said that the action by the pastoralist [Sherwin] was a clear attempt to thwart the rights of Australians gaining legal title to their land.

  Great cattle empires were built on the sweat and blood of the Bilinara and they deserve their land. They deserve better than to be harassed.

  **********************

  • Bob Gosford is employed by the Northern Land Council in Darwin.

July 30, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from July 2009

  Another in my series of photos from ten years ago.

  This month: July 2009.

  Then-metropolitan train operator Connex was advertising the addition of more station staff around the network.

  

  Frankston station. I think the construction was an upgrade to the bus interchange… which was all replaced again in 2018.

  

  Mordialloc station (I think)

  

  Richmond station, before the entirety of the platforms got shelter.

  

  The old Bentleigh station, before the crossing was removed, with its almost unique red man and “Another train coming” displays.

  

  A non-transport photo: the Bentleigh Priceline made me laugh, with its placement of weight management and confectionery in the same aisle.

  

  Fears of distraction from mobile phones aren’t new – but back then, they thought you might be making a phone call, rather than staring at the screen.

  

  New sensors had started being fitted to the Metcard gates in preparation for the introduction of Myki at the end of 2009. This is the Elizabeth Street entrance to Flinders Street Station.

  

  Advertising for tram and bus lanes. Yeah, we could do with more of those. Lanes that is (and enforcement), not advertising.

  

  Victoria Street, Abbotsford – the Skipping Girl sign.

  

July 28, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Walking around Carnegie

  You always spot more stuff on foot than you would when driving.

  On Saturday morning I walked over to the new 627 bus route and caught it up to Murrumbeena, before walking home via Carnegie, my old neighbourhood.

  The bus wasn’t packed, but a few people were using it, including some boarding and alighting at stops along East Boundary Road, which didn’t previously have any bus service. Not too bad given the unspectacular 40 minute weekend frequency and the fact that the route has only been running a few weeks.

  

  Perhaps surprisingly for a Saturday, more people hopped off to go to Murrumbeena station (or possibly the local shopping centre) than stayed on the bus for Chadstone.

  

  Nearby is this bus shelter. It’s clean, free of graffiti, has good sight lines, and provides reasonable wind/rain protection. Up-to-date advertising shows it is actively maintained, and it’s still signed as a 24/7 bus zone. The only thing it doesn’t have‌ is buses. The stop moved closer to the station last year.

  

  Under the skyrail there were plenty of people cycling or walking along the shared path, and also some doing exercise. During my time in Murrumbeena (1987-88 and 2003-05) I don’t remember many people walking along the railway line like this, even where the path was provided.

  

  Anecdata like this isn’t data, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But to me it looks like a pretty good outcome in terms of usable community space, which wasn’t possible when the line was at ground level, and wouldn’t have been possible with a rail trench.

  Of course, one could speculate that the fear campaign forced the authorities to work harder on a good outcome. (It certainly didn’t result in an electoral backlash.)

  

  In Carnegie, another bus stop: why would they put the useful information (the timetable) on the side that can’t be seen from the seat/paved area? (The other side has a generic “Catching a bus with Myki is easy” notice.)

  

  Also in Carnegie, I found this. I know I may be slightly colourblind, but I’m pretty sure this is not a yellow line.

  

July 26, 2019

• Club Troppo There’s no such thing as a free launch: Launching John Quiggin’s Economics in Two Lessons.

  Delivered at Melbourne University, Friday 19th July, 2019 and cross posted at The Mandarin.

  Welcome to the launch of another book by Australia’s most overachieving economist. A global authority on decision theory, he also publishes in the daily press, in submissions to government inquiries on his blog and in academic journals in any number of other fields in environmental, agricultural, welfare, tax and finance economics to name a few areas I’m aware of. As you do.

  I’m not much of a fan of the endless KPIs into which academic life has descended (it’s an important reason why I’m not an academic). I hate the reductive gravity to which they subject pretty much everything in their path. Academics’ KPIs enable the performance of those whom we trust to be at the forefront of human knowledge to be judged by people who know nothing of their field or their work. What could possibly go wrong?

  Still, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, in John’s case I’ll make an exception. His KPIs have been achieved whilst actually addressing useful questions rather than disciplinary arcana. John’s been placed in the top 5% economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc and two Federation Fellowships from the Australian Research Council.

  I don’t really believe a word of this.

  The dark dirty secret is that these accomplishments stem from a time when John wore a big black beard that had people wondering who he really was – and why he looked so much like Captain Haddock from the Tin-Tin cartoon books. It’s not the kind of thing one is thanked for when launching a book obviously. But this is an existential matter for anyone who still clings – however quixotically, however much it offends the Nietzschean verities – to the idea that he’s still part of the reality based community.

  To speak truth to a poster-boy of our KPI riddled academic community, behind that beard he could have been any number of people – all at once.

  Since he’s cut his beard off his pace may not have slackened but I thought I’d get used to his unbearded face very quickly. However John lives in Queensland and I live in Melbourne. So I’m afraid I don’t really recognise him. It’s not the chin I used to know. So for me anyway, until I see that beard back, I think of him as the economist formerly known as John Quiggin.

  Anyway, not content with the five books he’s already published:

  • Work for All
  • Great Expectations
  • Taxing Times
  • Uncertainty, Production, Choice, and Agency: The State-Contingent Approach
  • Zombie Economics

  John’s written another book – which on my reckoning is the economist formerly known as John Quiggin’s second unbearded book.

  What’s the message of the book? I can explain that by telling you a story. I was once at a lunch following the launch of Nugget Coombs’ last book at which an acolyte was on my left and Nugget was on my right. She said that economics was far too complex and technical for her to understand. I responded that economics might look complex, but that it’s all based on one idea. Nugget, who, like surprisingly many economists towards the end of their days despair of their profession, leant across to her and said: “Yes and it’s wrong!”

  The idea I was thinking of is the idea of opportunity cost. Which is a simple, but sometimes subtle idea. And John doesn’t think it’s wrong. He thinks it’s right.
  It’s just that he thinks it hasn’t been taken seriously enough.

  Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson states the lesson thus:

  The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

  This is actually code for ‘the market’. Like a lot of economic rhetoricians (some of whom were fine economic theorists too), having called for a thorough investigation of all the impacts of policies, Hazlitt then proceeds to out-source this herculean intellectual task to the market. Hazlitt is trying to put one over on us – something he no doubt accomplished in the traditional way of the ideologue, by putting one over on himself.

  Quiggin reformulates Lesson One thus:

  Market prices reflect and determine opportunity costs faced by consumers and producers.

  Reducing the ambitions of Hazlitt’s initial goal to this reductive dreck is the thing that Nugget Coombs had lost patience with all those years ago. So John proposes a second lesson as a corrective.

  Lesson Two:

  Market prices don’t reflect all the opportunity costs we face as a society.

  Quite.

  Let me name some of the things that I like about this.

  • It’s simple and parsimonious
  • It’s not based on an elaborate model of the way the economy works, but on a simple principle which works whatever one’s model of how the economy works (within reason) and it’s been at the heart of economics since Adam Smith. If people face the true costs and benefits of their actions, they’re likely to be the best judge of them.
  • I like the way the economist formerly impersonating Captain Haddock has used this singular idea of opportunity cost and taken it as far as he can so that he cleans up all manner of puzzles, not by invoking the ‘government clause’ – Lesson Two – but by explaining how markets can be made to work better. He reels off lots of triumphs of market economics, but makes sure we don’t lose track of the finer points, where problems and puzzles remain.
    • Yes; airline deregulation worked better than what went before, but left us with some things that we’ll need lesson two for.
    • No; price regulating competitive markets will probably end in disaster, including in the area of rent control where John references a quote my father was fond of from Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck that “rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing”. I thought that was Milton Friedman, and my father used to say that rent control was more effective than bombing.
  • Then he shows how the notion of opportunity cost shouldn’t just be the underpinning of microeconomics, but provides a bridge between it and macroeconomics. For when there’s slack in the economy, all kinds of divergences open up between the opportunity costs of labour from unemployed workers’ point of view and their employer. That’s what justifies government action from outside the market sector to alleviate the divergence by targeting full-employment.
  • I also like the terminology of ‘one lesson’ and ‘two lesson’ economists. I have a particular dislike of tendentious labels like ‘market fundamentalist’. It’s the arguments that should do the work, not the name-calling. Still in the context of this book, the author has his revenge because after he’s been through it all, you don’t want to be a ‘one lesson’ economist.
  • John’s popular books always have interesting bits of disciplinary history I’m glad I read about. I knew of Pareto’s patrician values, but not that he ended up supporting Mussolini.
  • Friedrich von Wieser, the Austrian economist who coined the term “opportunity cost.” (‘Opportunitätskosten’ in German) along with the equally notable term “marginal utility”. But his elaborations of these ideas brought him to the same commonsensical conclusions about the different usefulness of money to poor and rich people that English economics had arrived at – courtesy of scholars like Marshall and Pigou – by the turn of the twentieth century. Still he put this humdrum insight, still struggling for recognition in today’s economic and policy discourse, in an arresting way.

  It is … the distribution of wealth that decides what will be produced, and leads to a consumer of a more anti-economic variety: a consumer wastes on unnecessary, guilty enjoyment that could have served to heal the wounds of poverty.

  What a pity that, in opening up valuable new vistas, Wieser’s students Mises and Hayek paid so little attention to such a commonsensical idea.

  • I hadn’t thought of using the geometric mean to measure per capita economic wellbeing, but it’s a good idea. And yes, John was right, we’ve all forgotten what a geometric mean is – or at least I had.
  • On page 69, John outlines a puzzle in which you get a free ticket to an Eric Clapton concert and can buy a ticket to a Bob Dylan concert on the same night for $40 which you value at $50. You’re asked what the opportunity cost of this is. It’s striking that, typically, economists don’t know the answer: Just another illustration of how economists are (sadly) taught to think of their discipline as nothing much more than the application of various techniques which get flashed in our work like we flash our credit cards at the counter, rather than according to the fundamental ideas from which the discipline is built. A disciplined unmoored from its intellectual foundations is a tragedy, but John’s book shows us that it’s a farce as well given how simple they are. As Keynes put it pithily, economics is an “easy subject at which very few excel!”
  • Finally I was mentioning this launch to a friend and colleague who sent me his favourite sentences from the book. “Whatever happens to Bitcoin, we must not lose sight of a more fundamental, and more worrisome, development. A financial product with a purely arbitrary value has been successfully introduced in the world’s most sophisticated financial markets.” Indeed.

  The book doesn’t break any new ground in a disciplinary sense, because it’s intended as a general introduction to economics for the interested public, rather like another excellent book by John Kay. If you liked John Kay’s The Truth about Markets, you’ll like Economics in Two Lessons.

  I thought I’d leave you with the thought that ran through my mind as I read this book. I wanted another lesson. I’m currently in the process of writing my own sixth book – well OK it’s my first book and I don’t have a publisher – so I probably shouldn’t get ahead of myself. But a central idea in it is this.

  The complementarity of the private and the shared, of competition and collaboration exists not only at the level of the whole economy – where it’s represented by ‘the market’ and ‘the government’ – but at every level in our society and economy. Indeed it inhabits all our social institutions right down to every conversation.

  Why am I telling you this? Because, although I’m not getting paid for this, there’s still no such thing as a free launch.

  So buy as many copies of John’s book as you can afford, but remember there’ll be another book coming out some time later, and you’ll want to buy at least one copy of it. Just think of John as Bob Dylan and me as Eric Clapton, each coming with our own opportunity cost.

  I’ll be watching sales of this book carefully. With the sellout 1946 edition of Economics in One Lesson now superseded by Economics in Two Lessons, keep an eye out and a small place in your budget for Economics in Three Lessons.

  Postscript and tangent:
  This book launch was at Melbourne University with an audience of agricultural and resource economists and as I was preparing my speech I wondered whether Alan Lloyd might come up. Alan was Dad’s best friend, someone he’d made friends with in the old NSW Department of Agriculture in the 1950s where so many of Australia’s economists of that generation cut their teeth.

  When Bill Malcolm mentioned Alan and his marvellous sense of humour in introducing me, I did my best to recount from memory some verses he’d written – just jotted in the margins of a newspaper he was reading – about the fact that the shearers at our farm ‘Bindango’ outside of Canberra (Now the suburb of Kambah) had declared our woolshed black for some infraction of their union requirements. This would have been in around 1964.

  I got in most of the punch lines, but mucked some of it up, so I was pleased to be able to recover the verses from a memorial to Alan in my library. I reproduce them below as well as a reference Alan wrote for a colleague. Both capture Alan’s remarkable humour and class as well as an Australia long since disappeared. All that’s left is its vapour trail lingering in margarine ads and Aussie ‘anthems’. (For the benefit of any international readers, this is a parody of The Man from Snowy River, by Banjo Patterson – who coincidentally was a cousin of my mother’s).

  There was movement at the station
  For the word had got around
  That Gruen’s sheep were ready for the shears
  And so they thought was Gruen
  (The professor from the town)
  They hadn’t seen a softer cop in years

  All the tried and noted bludgers
  To ‘Bindango’ made their way,
  To optimise this slicker heaven sent,
  Though the price of wool was falling
  They thought that in their pay
  They could insert some economic rent.

  Here is Alan’s reference for a colleague

  18th November, 1976
  RE : MR. C. M. ALAOUZE

  I have known Mr. Christian Alaouze for eight years, during which time he was an undergraduate and then a postgraduate student in my department (agricultural economics) at Melbourne University.

  Mr. Alaouze is an excellent example of the intellectual and emotional chaos of the times. He is a reformed anarchist “reformed” only in the sense that now he doesn’t even believe in anarchism. But most of all he doesn’t believe in econometrics, and if you wish to inject some skepticism (if not disillusionment) into your postgraduate body -Alaouze is your man.

  As an undergraduate his academic results were fair, but well below his ability. This was the result of an acute aversion to work, as well as a preoccupation with student activities, demos and various hallucinatory diversions. His academic performance was severely affected, I am sure, by distractions such as obscenity charges (he was found innocent) and various forms of harassment by police and dole inspectors.

  Alaouze’s political philosophy well illustrates the extreme fertility of his imagination. He espouses a form of syndicalist nihilism which should add stimulating diversity to political activity on your campus.

  In summary, I would say that if you can get Alaouze to work for you, you will be extremely fortunate.

  Professor A. G. Lloyd Melbourne University

July 24, 2019

• Club Troppo Market – what market? The catch 22 that stops ‘scaling’ innovation in government in its tracks

  Cross posted from the Mandarin

  There is a huge catch 22 driving impact measurement in human services. A lot of the evaluation is done because governments seek it, but then it goes nowhere – and for good reason. NGOs and others hoping to ‘scale-up’ innovation can’t escape this without something like an Evaluator-General, writes Nicholas Gruen.

  There’s a spectre haunting service provision. For decades now, we’ve presumed that new and innovative service provision will emerge from innovation out in the field, with successful pilots and innovative programs initiated by NGOs being grown to their appropriate size and unsuccessful ones being improved or closed down. But it almost never happens. 

  As Peter Shergold put it in 2013, things don’t actually work out this way: 

  Too much innovation remains at the margin of public administration. Opportunities are only half-seized; new modes of service delivery begin and end their working lives as ‘demonstration projects’ or ‘pilots’; and creative solutions become progressively undermined by risk aversion and a plethora of bureaucratic guidelines.¹

  As I’ve pondered this paradox over the past decade, it’s slowly dawned on me that, however well-intentioned we’ve been, it’s all built on a lie – a lie we’re not even admitting to ourselves. 

  There’s a catch 22 at the heart of the system.

  The way it’s done now

  Let’s say you’re running a pilot or a not for profit offering some innovative new approach to some service. You’re convinced it’s cost-effective and indeed generates all kinds of benefits for the community and overtime for the government – in lower outlays on health, corrective services and higher employment and productivity. 

  You seek greater support from governments, and the bureaucracy’s response is that you should have the program independently evaluated. Already there’s a problem: there’s no standardised way to conduct this evaluation – no published expectations of what success looks like, or measures of the success or otherwise of the existing services and how they compare.

  In any event, you then spend a hundred grand or more having the program independently evaluated: Deloitte or PwC start turning over the meter.

  You submit your paperwork, now bolstered by independent evaluation. But nothing happens. 

  That’s because once your independent evaluation makes its way to the hardheads in the central financial agency, they barely bat an eye. The fact is, your report isn’t independent: you funded and commissioned it, and we all know how creative consultants can be in arriving at conclusions that support their clients’ interests. Catch 22. Your money and time down the drain, your innovation might linger for years at the periphery of governments. Visitors might be taken to see it in all its glory. But it’s not going anywhere. 

  The required change of perspective

  Policymakers have in their head an idea that markets are spontaneously occurring phenomena, when, in fact, they’re forged over long periods of time and often involve concerted struggles that require the buy-in of the commanding heights of the system at both the administrative and political level. As I’ll show in a subsequent article, even if innovation started bubbling up from below, validating it is just the start of a process because successful innovations can’t usually be scaled without redesigning the systems all around them. 

  But there’s wisdom in starting small — so how might we do that?

  Already, in numerous areas, governments fund third-sector programs on condition that an evaluation is done. Accordingly, in those areas, funding is already in the budget and thus, implicitly provided by government. In these areas, governments should take greater responsibility to ensure that evaluation is commissioned independently – not by the advocate for the new initiative – and they need to commit to taking full account of it. And given this, bringing both monitoring and evaluation into the process would streamline things considerably. 

  Doing this would also pilot a wider scheme I’ve outlined previously – an Evaluator-General. 

  Enter the Evaluator-General

  To address the risk that this is done in a cumbersome “top-down” manner, the process should be steered by a board with strong representation from the third sector.

  The purpose would be to work towards a close, collaborative relationship between the third-sector organisations running these programs and the evaluators, who nevertheless remain independent. The goal should be for independent experts in monitoring and evaluation to help build the capacity for practitioners themselves to understand the success or otherwise of their own practice and how to continually improve it. Thus an accountability system would not be imposed upon practitioners from above, but built ‘bottom-up’ from their own self-transparency within a system they’ve collaborated in building. This is how Toyota built is own accountability for production line efficiency – workers on the line are trained in statistical control and endlessly measure and optimise it. 

  Governments would commit to publishing all such evaluations and also to conducting and publishing evaluations of existing practices. The process should be trialled in some specific area and commenced as soon as possible. Action in this area would be welcome from governments in any of Australia’s three levels of government.

  Tackling amnesia: The crucial step of following through

  There’s another problem, and it’s growing: amnesia.

  Governments commit to various actions but then don’t follow through. The problem is an international one, and well documented for Britain by the Institute for Government’s 2017 report All Change. It was brought home to me that same year when the PC reported on Data Availability and Use, largely replicating recommendations of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, which I chaired in 2009. The recommendations needed to be reiterated not because our recommendations had been rejected, but despite the fact that they’d been accepted!

  With this failure to follow through now ingrained in our system, I suggest an independent source – for instance, the Auditor-General – should conduct a retrospective review of learning from pilot programs in Australian jurisdictions. The review would explore the extent to which intentions to learn from experimentation in pilots and to identify and grow the best of those pilots had been realised. In particular, such an initiative would review the extent to which programs that work well are discovered, learned from and expanded, whilst those that perform less well are improved or defunded.

  • On the completion of this review, governments should commit to an explicit strategy to ensure pilots are well-chosen, evaluated and built on where they are successful.
  •  On the launch of this strategy, the government should commit to a regular Auditor-General review of its progress every two years.
  • Whatever size they are, those delivering services should commit to build their own monitoring and evaluation systems in such a way that they:
    • are built upon the self-accountability of those in the field seeking to continually improve their impact
    • build that self-accountability alongside accountability to an independent, expert critical friend who is ultimately responsible for monitoring and evaluation outputs from which the organisation’s accountability is built.

  References

  1. I think things are actually quite a bit worse than this. Ask yourself, when was the last time some small scale initiative grew to national significance? Perhaps there are more recent examples, but the last one I can think of is Landcare, although its pathway wasn’t really through the system of service delivery so much as the political system. The first local group, in Winjallok, near St Arnaud in Victoria in 1986, and within three years, Bob Hawke had announced the year of Landcare, with the ACF’s Philip Toyne and the NFF’s Rick Farley bringing their very different constituencies behind it.