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Victoria warned against ‘very inefficient’ hydrogen buses after trial announced
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Melbourne Trains
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There's a few things about this that surprise me:
Melbourne isn't already entirely, or at least mostly, electrified (not just trains, but buses too)
Regional Vic is having all of their buses replaced too. Naturally that's going to exclude vline coaches, but although big cities like Geelong and Ballarat make sense, smaller ones like Portland and horsham feel like much lower priorities to me
They’ll be using this demonstration project to better understand the TCO of the vehicles and situate them in ideal use cases. I don’t expect these ones to stay around in the city.
@LovesTha @Railison @Baku Build more trains, increase train frequency, and expand the rail network.
That's a real solution, not greenwashing with busses that are powered by hydrogen extracted from fossil-fuels.
@LovesTha @BinChicken @Railison @Baku Here's a link to the timetable for Sydney's Metro Northwest line, which runs driverless trains: https://transportnsw.info/documents/timetables/93-M-Sydney-Metro-North-West-20230929.pdf
Note that even off-peak or on weekends, the frequency is every 10 minutes, and every four minutes during the peak.
The technology is there to do far more frequent driverless trains, but Victoria hasn't invested in it.
@LovesTha @ajsadauskas @Railison @Baku Level crossing removal is good for a whole bunch of reasons, including (by my understanding) that it's a necessary requirement before you can get started with high frequency trains. Same goes for modernising the signalling system that IIRC was designed in the 1970s.
Victoria's public transport has had decades of dismal stagnation following the failed neoconservative experiment with privatisation. There was bare minimum of maintenance and little in the way of updates until recently. Lately, we've had serious effort put into level crossing removal, new trains, signalling upgrades, route extensions, and tunneling. Good to see progress but we still have a long way to go if we want Melbourne to have a modern metro.