Daniel Bowen Blog

Very busy at the moment. Still catching up in my ten year old photo posts, here’s May (ish) 2016. Next Stop Mars – seems a tad unlikely. Meeting the cardboard PM The CBD shopping centre that started as “Australia On Collins” was renovated to become “St Collins Lane”. That started off promisingly, but obviously wasn’t getting enough patons, so they desperately tried turning it into a maze by running the escalators in stupid directions, which backfired completely, driving people away.

Here’s a quick comparison: Victoria has half price fares until the end of 2026. So how does Melbourne now compare to other capital cities? It’s a bit complicated. These are current adult fares for short to medium distance trips: I would expect that most people pay the top of the price range shown.

Continuing my catch up of old photo posts from ten years ago, here’s April 2016… okay plus a few from March 2016 – I’m discovering that my filing of photos back then was imperfect. Comparing old and new e-Tag sizes for a blog post I never wrote. Level crossing works had started in Bentleigh. This local shop wasn’t happy the disruption. After the project was finished, they moved. The whole chain was later bought by Dulux Paints.

I’ve fallen behind in my series of ten year old photos, so I’ll try to catch up. Here’s some from March 2016, as well as a few from a couple of months earlier that I missed. A V/Line loco-hauled train departing Southern Cross towards Gippsland. These days these are all served by VLocity diesel railcars. Summer 2015-16 and I noticed they had installed water sprays on the viaduct between Flinders Street and Southern Cross.

Well, here we go, the Tap And Go (aka Contactless) trial has gone well, and from tomorrow Sunday 7th June it’s available on about half the train network: all the lines through North Melbourne, South Yarra, the Metro Tunnel and V/Line (at stations currently using Myki). The rest of the Metro network will be switched on a week later. No date for other modes, but I understand trams won’t be too far behind, then buses after that.

A quick one – there’s a media story (web paywall, but you can read the text here) getting attention today about crime on public transport hitting a ten year high in 2025. The focus is on assaults and other offences related to personal safety. ABC Radio asked me to comment, so I had a quick look at the source data, because anecdotally, while there are incidents, the system hasn’t seemed markedly less safe recently.

Back in March 2020 I posted an article about tram patronage by route, across Australia. Via data in this Age article in February which provided recent Melbourne data, here’s an update: (I’m experimenting with interactive charts. If this is not viewable on your device, try this image.) Some notes: Wrestling with the chart captions was a bit of a trial.

The awful incident at North Melbourne last week highlighted the need to continually improve rail safety. It may have been a freak accident, but one with huge consequences for the individual involved and all who witnessed it, as well as flow on delays to thousands of other passengers. The exact circumstances will need to be investigated, and that will help determine causes and measures that could help prevent similar future occurrences.

It was a budget day last week. I haven’t had a chance to write a blog post so I thought I’d try this: I’ll do a quick video. Hmm yeah okay it turned out to be 7 minutes long. Not as quick as I thought. If you prefer to read, no problem. The rest of this blog post is a transcript of the video, with light editing. On Budget day these books are highly sought after for just a few hours. We get them in the budget lock-up.

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