cuavas

You can use Suica/Pasmo to pay for things from vending machines and some convenience stores in Tokyo. Hong Kong isn’t the only place where you can use public transport cards for payment.

Sydney’s point-to-point ticketing system sucks. The prices of tickets suck.

Melbourne has no off-peak discount, and although the most expensive Opal trip ($16) is more expensive than the most expensive Myki trip ($10), the cheapest Opal trip is a lot cheaper. Sydney’s caps kick in faster, too. In Sydney, there’s no need to pre-purchase a “pass” as you need to with Myki – the cap just kicks in as soon as you travel enough.

The fact that the fastest way to get most places 1km away in the CBD is to walk, sucks.

That’s true of Melbourne as well. I used to commute from Flemington to the CBD daily, and walking was a more reliable way to get to work and back. Making a city more walkable is a noble goal.

Sydney might have better coverage to Melbourne out in the suburbs, and certainly have better busses out there. But again the ticketing shenanigans negates a lot of this. Unless you have a periodical ticket (weekly/monthly), there is no flexibility. You paid a fair to North Ryde? You’re going to North Ryde. You can’t change your mind. You can’t decide to hop off at Woolies on the way home and get back on. Your ticket is valid for just the journey you initially paid for. Did I mention it sucks?

You obviously haven’t actually been in Sydney for over a decade.

It sure is nice to hop on a train to Sydney Airport, though. Pity it costs $25 or something to do it.

What? It’s under $20 for a trip from the airport to the city. There’s also a weekly cap on the surcharge that kicks in really quickly, so if you need to go to the airport more than once in a week, you’re effectively paying regular train fares after the first day.

Going to the airport in Melbourne with a two hour Myki fare plus SkyBus is substantially more expensive than using the airport train in Sydney, and there’s no fare cap on SkyBus for people who need to travel to the airport multiple times in a week.

As someone with apartments in both cities, these constant, “Sydney sucks,” rants full of misinformation really don’t paint a good picture of Melbourne.

See this is bullshit. People were moved out of Victoria St (Flemington) to the towers in Flemington and North Melbourne, and now the towers are set to be demolished. You can promise them a home after the site is redeveloped, but that's another disruptive move, pushing it up to three moves in just a few years (Victoria St, towers, who knows where, and back again).

Given the density of the towers (about 400 bedrooms across 180 apartments for the standard tower design), I don't even know where they plan to move everyone. It's a lot of people to house with public and social housing already over-stretched.

Then what do you do for the people who rely on their trusted neighbours? All the old people with mobility issues who call a younger, more able-bodied neighbour to assist them when they need it? Or the people who call a neighbour when they have a medical emergency to help out until paramedics arrive? Or the people who call a neighbour when they need a babysitter in an emergency? Or even just looking after each other's kids after school on alternate days? Or just knowing who your neighbours are that will look out for you?

What do you do about people with ties to the rest of the community? For example the Việt Catholic community centred on St Vincent's in Flemington? The Muslim community associated with the mosque on Boundary Rd? All the people working in the local supermarkets and cafés? A lot of these people don't drive, so they'll be forced to get another job, and lose entitlements like years of service for long service leave entitlement.

Forcing children to change schools can be particularly disruptive. If they're also moved to a different area, they usually lose contact with their circle of friends. This is particularly devastating for children with autism spectrum disorders who can't deal with change easily.

Calling the company they outsourced housing to "Building Communities" is particularly insulting because all they're doing is destroying communities.

Yet Labor has simply continued privatisation, even going as far as privatising public housing. They're knocking down public housing and replacing it with a mix of "social and affordable housing" which they've contracted out management of to a company called Building Communities for the next 40 years.

Neither party has a good record on infrastructure. Cain had a policy of "no road overpasses", leaving us with all the railway grade crossings and killer intersections on arterial roads.

Labor left the Upfield line with manual gates at level crossings, and hand operated miniature lever frames with rotting 1910s-vintage 2-aspect somersault type semaphore signals. It was Kennett who put in the automatic boom gates and 3-aspect colour light signals.

Going back further, it was the Liberals who introduced the "new deal for country rail", finally updating the steam-era timetables for more efficient use of diesel traction.

Kennett's implementation of privatised metropolitan rail was stupid. He seemed to be trying to imitate London in ways that don't fit Melbourne. The train network in particular doesn't lend itself to an east/west split. The terms of the deal effectively ensured the refurbished Comeng fleets would be incompatible, and the new trains would need to come from different suppliers. We're still paying for the inefficiencies that caused. The way revenue and maintenance was split effectively doomed M-Train from the beginning.

Labor appointed a series of incompetent transport ministers. For example Batchelor with his claim that the Liberals' plan to abolish Metcard zone 3 would "cause too many people to catch public transport". I mean, you can say the infrastructure wouldn't be able to meet anticipated demand without upgrades or something, but if more people use it, it's doing its job.

Labor's back to breaking promises on infrastructure. Signaling and trunback upgrades for the western lines have been cancelled, capacity upgrades for Upfield (e.g. Gowrie turnback) have been cancelled. Additional track on the corridor to Ballarat (at least as far as Melton) has been cancelled. The airport train will likely never happen. Yet somehow there's money for elevated rail through Brunswick (scared of losing to the Greens) and more upgrades for the sand belt (more marginal seats).

As far as I can tell the state Liberals don't really have a coherent plan for anything at this point.

If you compare Victoria's toll roads to NSW, CityLink is somewhat comparable to the M5 and M4 tollways built by the Liberals. Labor promised to pay tolls for residents of areas served by these roads. They actually did it. With increasing density, the cost eventually became excessive and the Liberals removed the tolls on these roads altogether. The Liberals also removed the surcharge from suburban stations on the airport line, and put a weekly cap on airport station surcharges that kicks in after one return trip (so airport workers are only hit worth about $20/week). Victorian Labor has no intention of winding down CityLink tolls, and put in a very generous extension for Transurban as part of the WestGate Tunnel deal.

Fundamentally, I see Kennett as a symptom rather than the actual disease. Labor ran up crippling debt with little to show for it, and Kennett was elected on the promise of sorting out the state's finances. His plan to do that was to sell everything. With the way Labor is running up debt again, it's only a matter of time before the next Kennett is elected, but this time there won't be anything left to sell. I'm not looking forward to it.

They blame him for stuff he didn't do as well. For example I've seen him blamed for introducing pokies (Kirner) and tolls on Eastlink (Bracks after backflipping on the "no new toll roads" promise).

Also, you'd think a quarter of a century (yes, Kennett left office 25 years ago) would be long enough to make a few changes, yet here we are as the state with the lowest spend on health per capita, lowest spend on education per capita, lowest proportion of public housing, highest debt-to-GSP ratio, and a completely ineffective anti-corruption body. Labor keeps granting extensions on toll roads to Transurban, allowing Crown to keep operating no matter how dodgy they are, and doing property developers favours. Yet we have the highest paid premier in the country.

How long can you keep blaming Kennett for stuff neither party is interested in addressing? I have no coincidence in Victorian politicians at all.

Well considering there are people still blaming Kennett for everything 25 years later (even things that happened before and after he was in office), I’m sure people can keep blaming Dan for stuff for at least a decade.

Seriously, where’s the money going? Victoria has the second highest GSP of the states, yet has the lowest spend per capita on health, lowest spend per capita on education, lowest proportion of public housing, and 30% worse debt-to-GSP ratio than NSW. The state is relatively small in terms of area, so Victoria doesn’t have the burden of maintaining infrastructure to keep a sparse population connected across a large area like Queensland and WA do.

NSW Labor have had their fair share of corruption scandals (e.g. Obeid, Tripodi and Kelly), yet they managed to get through the ’90s and ’00s without running up the kind of debt Victorian Labor has amassed under Cain and again under the series of Labor governments since 1998. Victorian Labor seems to have a unique talent for pissing away money with little to show for it.

You really need to design the network to support driverless trains. The upgrades to support it on an existing network are almost prohibitively expensive Sydney’s “metro” line from Hills to North Sydney (and being extended to Bankstown) uses driverless trains, but the entire line was built relatively recently.

Drivers are a small proportion of the total staff anyway. There are still station staff, signalling staff, infrastructure maintenance staff, cleaners, security staff… You can’t exactly clean a train, wash down a platform, help a person in a wheelchair off a train, and so on, from home.

Isn’t brave enough to stand up to developers? He acts like he’s on their payroll. He’s effectively privatised public housing in Victoria:

• First they spun off Homes Victoria from the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing to manage public housing.
• Then they creates a not-for-profit company called Building Communities and contracted out managing new “social and affordable housing” to them for the next forty years.
• They are now demolishing public housing and replacing it with this “social and affordable housing”.
• In some cases, only one third of the new residences will be “social housing” (supposedly similar terms to public housing but not managed directly by a government department), while the rest will be “affordable housing” which in practice is meaningless.
• Thousands of people are being displaced from their homes, communities, and support networks.

Calling it “Building Communities” is a bad joke when they’re in the process of destroying communities. It’s sickening. In privatising public housing, Andrews has done what even Kennett wouldn’t dare to do.

Dan’s been far too eager to help out the property developers and construction companies. The extension on CityLink tolls that Transurban got as part of the West Gate Tunnel project was just too good to be true. Meanwhile, Vic Labor is running up more debt, which will inevitably lead to another Kennett being elected when servicing the debt becomes crippling. But this time, there won’t be anything left to sell off to pay down the debt.

The lines are at capacity already, and they've cancelled the signaling upgrades for the western lines promised before the last election because they can't afford it. They've also cancelled building additional track to Melton to increase capacity (yet another broken promise). They're saying they'll extend platforms to allow 9-car trains, but I doubt it will be enough.

I don’t think it’s the fare drop, it’s all the dormitory suburbs they’ve built along the Geelong and Ballarat lines.

You must be joking. Passenger volumes on the Ballarat line just keep increasing as they build more dormitory suburbs along the corridor. Morning peak trains are routinely at crush capacity before reaching Melton, making it very difficult to actually catch a train to work in Melbourne from Melton.