Melbourne flooding no surprise
Posted: March 8, 2010 Filed under: Infrastructure | Tags: drainage, flood, Melbourne, stormwater 6 CommentsThe scenes in Melbourne over the weekend of extensive flooding, especially in the CBD, didn’t surprise me. Although these were unusual events, I recall reading a report some years ago by the French engineering firm Aegis on the water and sewerage system of Melbourne. Apparently the drainage system in most of inner Melbourne was only designed to accommodate a one in five year storm. In fact some inner areas were designed for a one in two year storm. In contrast, newer areas are designed to cater for a one in one hundred year storm without property damage. They have the space to channel excess stormwater along overland flow paths to parks and creeks whereas in the inner city where the surface is almost entirely impervious the excess tends to flood.
What can we do about traffic congestion?
Posted: March 6, 2010 Filed under: Cars & traffic | Tags: road pricing, sprawl, State of Australian Cities 2010, traffic congestion 14 CommentsThe Federal Government’s State of Australian Cities 2010 Report was released yesterday. It says the avoidable cost of traffic congestion in Australia’s capital cities was $9.4 billion in 2005 and is expected to rise to $20 billion by 2020.
What can we do in a city like Melbourne about congestion? There are four basic ways to address the issue:
- Increase road space
- Shift travellers to a less-congested mode
- Suppress demand for road space
- Manage the level of demand
The first approach involves building more road capacity e.g. new or widened freeways. However people seem to have an almost inexhaustible demand for travel, so as soon as a route gets faster due to added capacity, it pretty quickly fills up again until once more it becomes congested. Read the rest of this entry »
What the bookies are saying about the Federal election
Posted: March 6, 2010 Filed under: Miscellaneous | Tags: ALP, betting, Coalition, election, Pollytics Leave a commentIf you’re pondering who will win the next Federal election, you might want to take note of what the bookies think. According to Pollytics yesterday, the current implied probability of the outcome (derived from the odds offered by the five main betting houses) is 74.4% ALP and 25.6% Coalition. The ALP was 77.9% a month ago. The trend is down for the ALP but they’re still looking damn good. BetFair has the ALP at $1.30 and the Coalition at $4.00.
Home affordability in Australia
Posted: March 5, 2010 Filed under: Housing | Tags: affordability, Christopher Joye, home prices, mortgage, price to income ratio Leave a commentClaims that home affordability is at disastrous levels appear to be exaggerated. The always interesting Christopher Joye points out today that the average Australian home price is $428,000 on Dec Qtr figures (median is $400,000). Read the rest of this entry »
Limitations of My School
Posted: March 5, 2010 Filed under: Education, justice, health | Tags: Camberwell, ICSEA, Julia Gillard, Melbourne Grammar, My School, NAPLAN 7 CommentsThe My School web site launched by the Deputy Prime Minister earlier this year has some important lessons for any disciplines that rely heavily on spatial measures to capture social and economic information.
With two school age children, I’m sympathetic to Julia Gillard’s push for more information to be made available on schools’ performance. I think providing the NAPLAN information is a good start and I’m looking forward to seeing time-based data next year. Read the rest of this entry »
Decentralising population growth
Posted: March 4, 2010 Filed under: Decentralisation | Tags: Decentralisation, Housing, Melbourne, population growth, SBS, sprawl, suburbs 13 CommentsI watched SBS’s Insight program on Housing 36 Million earlier this week. A theme that recurred during the program and in the subsequent on-line discussion was the idea of decentralising a large proportion of the projected population growth from the major cities to provincial centres.
Decentralisation was tried in the 70s as an alternative to capital city growth but, while it had a measurable impact on major country centres like Albury/Wodonga and Bathurst/Orange, it didn’t significantly relieve growth pressures on the capital cities. Read the rest of this entry »
Infrastructure costs on the urban fringe
Posted: March 3, 2010 Filed under: Housing, Infrastructure | Tags: Infrastructure, Inner city, Melbourne, Suburban sprawl, The Age 8 CommentsIt is amazing how quickly supposed facts become accepted wisdom. A feature article in The Age last week, Fringe Benefits, repeated the highly questionable claim that “for every 1,000 dwellings, the cost for infill development (in existing suburbs) is $309 million and the cost of fringe development is $653 million”. Read the rest of this entry »
Possible rail link to Melbourne Airport
Posted: March 2, 2010 Filed under: Airports & aviation, Infrastructure, Public transport | Tags: airport, Melbourne, rail, The Age, traffic congestion 15 CommentsThe Age ran an editorial this week arguing that a rail line should be built from the CBD to Melbourne Airport to deal with growing traffic congestion on the principal radial freeway route. I have a lot of difficulty seeing how this could ever work financially, much less why it should be a priority compared to other potential transport projects. I’ve been on both the new Sydney and the new Brisbane airport rail lines and judging by the low patronage I’m not surprised they’ve both been in deep financial difficulty. Read the rest of this entry »
The Melbourne Urbanist 