Australian urban planning, public transport, politics, retrocomputing, and tech nerd. Recovering journo. Cat parent. Part-time miserable grump.

Cities for people, not cars! Tech for people, not investors!

  • 32 Posts
  • 63 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 5th, 2022

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  • @sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

    There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

    WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).

    Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

    WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)

    As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.







  • @AllNewTypeFace Of course there were.

    For commuters:

    * More densification around existing stations and tram lines instead of suburban sprawl.

    * Upgrading buses across Melbourne to a 10-minute minimum frequency and straightening out existing bus routes.

    * Rolling out high-capacity signalling and automatic train control across the Melbourne suburban rail network

    * Building Metro 2 from Newport to Clifton Hill would double the number of trains that can run on the Hurstbridge and Mernda lines.

    * Building the Doncaster Railway.

    * Building the Heidelberg to Box Hill section of the SRL first.

    * Extending the 48 tram to Doncaster and giving it dedicated lanes for more of its journey.

    And then for freight, there’s a bunch of things too:

    * Converting more suburban lines to dual gauge.

    * Converting more regional Victorian lines to standard gauge

    * Electrifying regional rail and freight services

    * Building more multimodal facilities near existing rail lines.



  • @alcoholicorn Yeah, that’s not how it tends to work in Australia.

    What happens is a state government puts up a good chunk of time construction costs (as much as half in some cases), plus public land.

    In some cases, the freeway already exists, but the state government wants one more lane built, because it thinks that will ease congestion (as happened with sections of the Tullamarine and Monash Freeways in Melbourne).

    It gets handed off to Transurban, who builds it under a long-term operating agreement (30 years is common).

    In some cases, the agreements have clauses saying railways that compete with the toll road can’t be built.

    As the end of the lease approaches, Transurban offers to build one more lane — in exchange for extending the agreement.









  • @awelder @jedsetter @nictea @philip @fuck_cars You often hear from Melburnians that it’s the world’s most livable city, and how the CBD is laid out nicely in the Hoddle Grid is laid out compared to inner-city.

    And how Melbourne’s inner-suburban tram network means it has much better public transport than Sydney.

    And it’s true. Colonial Melbourne, funded by its gold rush, did a much better job at planning than early Sydney.

    But after the World Wars, it’s a very different story.

    Sydney is at least constrained by Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to the north, the Royal National Park to the south, and the Blue Mountains to the west.

    That means the only places for new sprawl are either northwest past Rouse Hill, or southwest around Campbelltown and Camden.

    As a result, there’s a lot more pressure from developers to densify.

    Meanwhile, Melbourne just has the Dandenong Ranges to the east and Port Phillip Bay to the south.

    As a result, even right now, you have new housing estates past Pakenham, Melton, Wyndham Vale, and Craigieburn.

    As for sprawling Australian capitals, I think Perth has definitely been punching above its weight since the 2000s mining boom.

    There’s now continuous McMansions sprawl right down the Coast from north of Joondalup to south of Mandurah.

    And there’s new subdivisions that are closer to Bunbury than they are to the Perth or Fremantle CBDs.







  • @thegiddystitcher @helenslunch I think hashtag feeds being overrun with vertical videos is an excellent point. (One I hope @dansup considers!)

    But beyond that, I think vertical videos through Loops on the Fedi are likely to be far less obtrusive than they have been on other platforms.

    What’s so annoying about them on Instagram and YouTube is that the algorithm automatically drops vertical videos into my feed.

    And there’s *lots* of them in my feed, often on topics I’m not interested in.

    They’re not there because I’m interested, but because they serve the commercial interests of the social media app’s owners.

    Hashtags aside, on the Fedi, they’ll only appear in your feed if you follow a Loops account you’re interested in, or someone you follow finds one interesting enough to share.

    And if people on your Mastodon server all find them really annoying, there’s always the option to just block the Loops servers and be done with it.