For an area which recently has started becoming a hub for newly renovated apartments and town houses, and still has the same amount of sporting events, I'm surprised!
But thankyou to the PTV team for FINALLY releasing such good stats!
Melbourne is becoming like London, Paris, NY, etc.. people are working out that it isn't always best to go to their nearest station, but that sometimes a slightly further walk can result in a more direct service.Until you leave the 10km radius centred around this place called "Melbourne" and have to catch a certain thing which doesn't run on rails, commonly called the bus. The last of the untamed, unpredictable beasts. Humans have been able to conquer and control everything from the horse and carriage to cars, trains, aircraft and even space travel, but the bus remains a mystery yet to be explained.
Caulfield station is around Monash University where parking is around $8/day.
2. Is car including only parking in station car parks, or is it including parking in nearby places which might be all day? What about "kiss n ride"? I am surprised that you can get large numbers for car access from Armadale, Hawksburn and Malvern (and why would it be Malvern? Why not Caulfield if you are going to drive?)
I would also attribute Melbourne Central's faster decline to the 401? It is getting more popular should be taking quite a load off the station.
Also on North Melbourne - it seems that the number of people walking to the station and transferring from buses is quite low. Why does it need barriers?
No parking in the surrounding streets? There are plenty of people who drive a kilometer to get closer to the station rather than walk the whole way.None at all - not anything more than 2 hours! I think Malvern has a small area of impromptu car parking, but Armadale has nothing at all!
You are quite correct - North Melbourne didn't get barriers because of passengers walking to/from the station, but it did get them because of the 401. When the barriers at North Melbourne are closed (hopefully post V/Line implementation when the number of paper tickets dramatically reduces), it will target passengers going to/from the 401 bus - which helps to protect revenue and enables easy checking of concession entitlements by AOs at the station. The cost of installing barriers isn't actually as high as many people think. Let's assume North Melbourne barriers cost half a million (I'm not sure what they cost, but it would be something in that ball park). Over twenty years, that's about $25K a year, about $500 a week or $100 a day. This obviously excludes staffing costs and maintenance costs, but it gives a good idea that provided you stop a few hundred people fare evading each day, then that's more than paid for them. Gating North Melbourne also stops people from catching one train into the station without touching on in Zone 2, alighting and touching on in Zone 1 before travelling on (eg. when they change trains). So that's a benefit. The other thing is that it means that we can do rear door loading of 401 without risking revenue - which means faster boarding/alighting times which leads to increased efficiency (and therefore defer the need for an extra bus - so you need to consider that saving). If you can reduce the dwell time of the eight buses on 401 by one minute each, then that's the equivilent of adding over a bus of additional capacity (for example). All figures above indicative, but they give you an idea of the sorts of issues that were considered in the decision to gate North Melbourne. Plus you also need to factor in patronage growth - when you install gates you make certain predictions about patronage growth.Yes, but we shouldn't be putting barriers around willy nilly. There should be some threshold in place.
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