cuavas

Probably because a lot of the free web hosting sites disappeared, and GitHub and knock-offs don’t place any requirements on licensing (unlike SourceForge, which requires you to use an OSI- or FSF-approved license and submit a project description for humans to review), so people abuse them as free hosting.

Naming Melbourne Central and Watergardens stations after shopping centres was always a stupid idea. Shopping centre branding changes, and people want to know where a station is located in terms of suburbs, roads, other landmarks, etc.

North Melbourne Station is also poorly named. It originally served the northern lines, when they still only had access to the CBD via the Inner Circle line, and was near the North Melbourne freight yard before that was closed. But it isn’t actually in North Melbourne, and the two reasons for calling it North Melbourne are no longer applicable. They were going to rename it to West Melbourne and call the new station on the corner of Arden and Laurens streets (which is actually in North Melbourne) North Melbourne, but now they’ve decided to keep the name for North Melbourne Station and call the new station Arden Station.

Renaming Spencer St Station to Southern Cross was always stupid, and I always said putting a roof on a station with diesel trains was going to be a health issue for workers and anyone else who has to spend substantial time there. But Bracks wanted a bigger monument to himself than Jeff’s Shed, so here we are.

So they list “bedroom area dimensions” as something the existing apartments fail on, yet the replacement buildings have smaller bedrooms. What a fucking joke.

From experience with this kind of thing when I was a teenager, all the incidents I knew of where people died involved poor planning and/or misunderstanding how to swim across a flooded river. It was always quite doable if you planned your entry, exit and backup exit points correctly, taking into consideration the water level and flow rate.

The most common way people would die was attempting to swim directly across a flooded river and exit opposite where they entered. It’s basically impossible, and people would get exhausted and drown. The second most common was to not plan an exit point. You need a place where the flow rate close to the bank at flood level is low enough that you can stop yourself and get out, and not get slammed into something and knocked unconscious and down. Also, you don’t want to do it anywhere there are submerged objects there’s a chance of getting snagged on.

Swimming in flooded rivers needs to be treated as an extreme sport. You need to be fit, you need to be aware of the risks, you need to plan carefully. Too many people just jump into a flooded river without thinking

The budget has been getting deeper into the red for years, while they continue to gut health services and fail to deliver on much-needed infrastructure (e.g. see all the transport improvements they’ve cancelled).

But where’s all the money going? 30% worse debt-to-GSP ratio than NSW, and nothing to show for it (besides highest-paid premier in the country).

Still wouldn’t have added up as she was known by the community to be an experienced mushroom collector. Death caps don’t look like any edible Australian mushroom, and they only grow in symbiosis with oak trees. They’re very easy to avoid.

Almost all the accidental death cap poisonings that occur in Australia involve people who’ve arrived from China relatively recently. Death caps can look very similar to edible Chinese straw mushrooms. This is why it’s important to learn the local flora/fauna, as it may be different to what you grew up with.

It’s been nearly 7 years since I was in Melbourne, so this might no longer work - but an un-advertised hack then was: The ticket is valid for two hours starting from the next hour. So, if you buy a ticket at x:59, your ticket is valid for 2 hours, 1 minute. If you buy it at x:01, you get 2 hours, 59 minutes. That’s why I said 2-3 hours.

That was a holdover from the previous paper ticketing system (MetCard) – it would always give you an expiry time on the hour, so a nominal two-hour ticket would last at least two hours. Myki behaved the same way at first, but they changed it a couple of years ago to always give you exactly two hours, so you can’t use that trick any more.

That’s why I said 2-3 hours. When I was there, they’d priced a 2-zone return journey as being slightly cheaper than a daily fare. The daily cap didn’t exist, yet though - these days, it’d likely be $10 for the day either way.

The discounted return trip for a two-zone journey only applied if it was after 9AM. That was another holdover from the paper MetCard system. I believe it was phased out at some point, perhaps when they reduced the price of longer journeys.

The price for a day being the same as two 2-hour trips when you had a multi-trip ticket already existed with the paper MetCard system. There were three multi-trip tickets that were sold for the same price:

• 10×2 hour
• 5×Daily
• Weekly

The weekly ticket was pretty simple to understand. It was valid for seven logical days, starting on the day that you first validated it (a logical day ended at about 2AM, not midnight – the few services after midnight before transport stopped for the night counted as the previous day). The 5×Daily was pretty simple as well – you could use it all day on five logical days, but they didn’t need to be contiguous. If you travelled most days, including at least one day on the weekend, a weekly would be cheaper. But if you travelled no more than five days per week and sometimes travelled four days or less, the 5×Daily was cheaper, because you could carry over your unused days to the next week.

The 10×2 hour was more complicated. The first time you used it in a logical day, you’d use up one “ride” which would last no less than two hours (i.e. up to 2:59 if you validated right after the hour). The second time you used it in the same logical day, it would use up one more ride which would last until the end of the logical day. So you’d never use more than two of your “rides” in a single logical day, no matter how much you travelled. This meant that there was really no reason to buy a 5×Daily ticket – the 10×2 hour ticket got you the same number of logical days of travel for the same price, with some added flexibility if you occasionally only used a couple of hours worth of public transport.

They never advertised that the 10×2 hour ticket had this feature of upgrading you to daily on your second ride. I think it didn’t have that feature originally, but they rolled it out with no announcement and kept it until the paper ticketing system was retired.

I was actually a beta tester of the system, and still have the very faded “control group” sticker on my card. I sometimes wonder how many of the control group tickets are still in play.

Interesting that it still works after that long. Myki cards expire after a few years (originally three years, but I think they’ve introduced ways to it to at least five years if you continue to use the card). When introduced, Opal cards expired after nine years (I don’t know if they’ve changed this). Hong Kong Octopus cards also expire after a few years. In all three of those systems, you can get the value transferred to another card if your card has expired or will expire soon.

Not really. You probably caught something into town in the morning, and that ticket would be expired. They only last 2-3 hours. So, you caught a train in the morning, you buy another one to go home. At lunch, your tram trip across to your lunch spot is free.

Not how Melbourne works. As soon as you go over two hours, it bumps you to the all- day fare. So you went into the city, over two hours later you used a tram in the CBD and you're bumped up to the daily fare, you went home more than two hours later and you wouldn't get charged again. The free tram zone makes no difference because you're paying the daily fare whether the trip in the middle is nominally "free" or not.

Whoever told you this was wrong. You can get one at just about any newsagent, as well as a few Transperth locations in major train and bus stations. I don’t know whether you can get one at the airport, but i hope you can.

It wasn't possible to buy them like that last time I visited (which, as I said, it's years ago now). You needed to order one with a Perth residential address. I guess it must have been during the initial rollout that they were limiting it. It's good they've fixed that.

Speaking of smart cards for visitors, it's a lot easier to cash out unused Myki than Opal, which is a win for Melbourne. Hong Kong Octopus is easy to cash out, too. Sydney makes it unreasonably hard.

This is still unreliable. Train ticket machines should be able to handle your phone, but busses don’t. Busses barely support cash (they only have a few dollars change).

Oh, you could use cards at ticket machines in Perth when I was there, as you can in Melbourne. But in Sydney you don't need to do that. In Sydney (like London), you can just tap on/off with a regular credit card and it behaves like a full fare Opal (or Oyster in London). You only need an Opal card if:

• You want child/concession pricing
• You have more people than logical cards (e.g. if you and your partner have Visa/MC tied to the same account with the same card number)
• You want anonymity (in which case you need to rotate multiple cards, missing out on fare caps, and never top up with a credit card)

Buses in Sydney don't take cash any more, which can be a bit of a pain. You need to top up before catching a bus.

Still, a daily ticket is $17.80 - which is crazy expensive. And that wouldn’t cover the airport. That’s another ~$17 on top of that.

In practice you rarely hit the daily cap. You can travel from the eastern suburbs to the west for less than the Myki $5 minimum. For example Kings Cross to Cabramatta is $4. Most trips that most people make are just home to some destination (work, shops, school, friend's house or whatever) and back. For that, you end up getting a discounted return price and paying less than the $10 Myki daily price. If you're doing it every day, you hit the weekly cap and it's cheaper again.

You keep talking about the maximum price, but that isn't what the vast majority of people will be paying every day.

About the only time I needed a very short trip was zipping around the CBD on a tram. And such a trip is free. For the record, it’s also much faster than walking, plus the trams are frequent and on almost every main street in the grid.

Opal isn't only cheaper for very short trips. It's cheaper than the $5 Myki minimum fare for most off-peak trips within Sydney, and for most bus trips.

The free tram zone isn't much use unless you either drive or walk to the CBD in the first place - if you travel in by public transport, you've already paid for a time-based fare anyway. If you walk to the CBD, you're probably fit enough that walking within the free tram zone is faster anyway. So it only really benefits the people who drive.

It’s $16.80 plus whatever your fare is. If you’ve already paid $17 to use the network for the day, this is a pretty hefty hike on top of that charge. As for going to the airport more than once a week, I’m not sure how common that is. Most people only go there once.

All the people working at the airport make multiple trips to the airport every week. They're the people who'd be most affected by the surcharge if there was no weekly cap. Tourists are traveling to the airport infrequently anyway.

Our tickets kick both your arses. You can buy a cash ticket anywhere here as a tourist, the max you’ll pay is $5 for the day. Including the trains to/from the airport. It’s $4 daily cap if you have a SmartRider. If you are only going on a one-way trip, it’s something like $3. Transport in the CBD is free, Melbourne stole that idea off us.

Last time I was in Perth was a few years ago now, but you could only get a smart card ticket if you were a resident. There was no way to get one as a tourist, and NFC credit card payment wasn't supported, either. I hope they've fixed that. The airport bus was cheap, but infrequent. Same with the trains - there was always a lot of waiting.

You can avoid the airport train surcharge in Sydney by catching the 350 or 420 buses. You can also avoid SkyBus in Melbourne by catching the bus to Broadmeadows, although it's a bit of a walk from the main terminals, and it's infrequent, and Broadmeadows isn't exactly a central location.

Nah, Tokyo has better public transport than HK. There’s JR East, plus the subways, plus the buses. It’s really good.