Melbourne Times Weekly: East West Link protesters show united front (18 June 2013)
Roberto Dandra (pictured) joined fellow protesters who packed out Fitzroy Town Hall on June 13 to fight the state government’s controversial East-West Link.
About 400 people gathered for the launch of the
Trains Not Toll Roads campaign, including City of Yarra mayor Jackie Fristacky and former Western Australian planning minister Alannah MacTiernan.
Campaigners say the road is financially irresponsible and will delay progress on rail projects which would alleviate the congestion on Melbourne’s roads.
Presentations from the Trains Not Tolls Campaign Launch:
Tags: Campaign · City of Yarra · Trains Not Tolls Campaign
Yarra Mayor Cr Jackie Fristacky at Trains Not Tolls snap protest, 11 June 2013
The Age: State bypasses roads body on east-west link (17 June 2013)
The business case for the east-west link toll road has not been submitted to Infrastructure Australia for scrutiny and has no prospect of getting the advisory authority’s recommendation for federal funding this year.
The Napthine government’s decision not to hand over requested information about the road project before a crucial June deadline has been interpreted as a snub of the authority, which was set up to take the politics out of funding major infrastructure projects.
Roads Minister Terry Mulder said in April that Infrastructure Australia had asked to see the east-west link business case before it completed its annual update of which major projects most deserve federal funding.
”They indicated they’d like it by June, we’re doing some further work on that,” Mr Mulder said.
However, Infrastructure Australia chief executive Michael Deegan said on Friday the authority had not seen the business case. [Read more →]
Tags: Campaign · City of Yarra · Trains Not Tolls Campaign · YCAT News
Imagine buses turning up every five minutes, and schedules that could deliver passengers to just about anywhere across the city. Impossible? Laughably expensive?
Professor Mark Wallace from the Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology says it’s a goer. Mathematics, not massive infrastructure spending, is the key.
“You’d need twice as many buses, not 10 times as most people might imagine,” he says.
Some of the initiatives to make it work include adaptive scheduling (where the local schedule is flexible, and responds to direct consumer demand); more bus lanes; and, a system where local bus networks talk to one another and have coordinated changeover stations, so you have more efficient use of the limited bus numbers, which works against traffic congestion.
Some of these strategies are already being trialled in other parts of the world – and adaptive scheduling is already working in some parts of Melbourne.
The bus strategies are the brainchild of Beyond Zero Emissions, a not-for-profit research and education organisation. There are other research organisations around the world working on new ideas to solve ever-worsening traffic conditions.
On Tuesday evening, Professor Wallace will be talking about some of these possibilities at a public lecture “Cheap solutions to the transport problem”. [Read more →]
Tags: Trains Not Tolls Campaign · YCAT News
