I was about to get this done at my local service place along with the big engine service, when I happened upon a professional suspension place, and Izzy told me he would be happy to do a special deal.

While getting serviced, the forks went down to suspensions-r-us where the kit was put in and the springs replaced. All tuned up for me, customised and done right.

I now have “the best suspension for a 250 Suzuki in Victoria” and how can I argue, it is wonderful to ride, pulls up great, turns effortlessly and rides over those nasty speed bumps unnoticed.

Thanks Izzy.

Contact him at www.suspensionsrus.com.au or Phone 03 5998-1021

The Connex group who has the primary contract for running metropolitan railways services here in Melbourne, after months of discussing options on how to ferry more passengers, after amending their timetables to help just a little, who back-stepped on rejecting bicycles on trains, who haven’t yet delivered on their promise to remove seats and call commuters land sardines, have now come up with a brilliant plan to make rail commuting a wondrous thing…

They are going to change the seat covers.

Yes, bright new seat covers to some 43,000 seats are going to make the conditions better. No more sitting on torn seats, or ones with holes, they will now be comfortable, at least to those who can actually get a seat, we still have many more standing-sardine commuters yet to satisfy. Perhaps some new floor coverings for those on their feet?

These new covers are the latest technology in hard wearing materials, they will last longer, better, stronger and faster, we hope. Really? Has there been some materials manufacturing revolution in the last 5 years that I wasn’t aware of? Is it really possible to make cloth covered foam better now than at the turn of the 21st century?

Will somebody actually do something to improve public transport in Melbourne?

Something, somebody, anything… No new services, no new carriages, no extended services, no new ticketing system. All of these things have been discussed and considered and even truckloads of money spent on developing and investigating and yet… Nothing.

Speaking of passenger comfort, what is with these bus drivers and how smooth they drive?

I have been using them for a while now, going to the city for work every day, the regular commute. It is not the sardine can that the train system has become or the nightmare of the tram network but it does have it’s issues and when you see it and use it every day it’s easy to start to find fault. This is what I do and I don’t mind saying so when it gets to me. This blog is my way of getting irritations of my chest even if nobody reads it.

Are all bus drivers bad drivers? Can they not understand that bouncing your foot up and down on the gas peddle like your peddling the thing along is harsh for the bus, bad for the fuel economy and an all round pain for the passengers? I sit on the hard seat trying to enjoy the ride (reminds me, we could do with some new seat covers) while the bus lurches from the stop, new passengers still walking to seats are flung down the isle toward the rear and then when up to speed, not the road speed limit, just some arbitrary speed the driver decides, pulls the foot off, then plants it again, then off, and on, then on one big final time before hitting the brakes, pulling up short, then pushing forward again, 3 feet past the waiting passengers to a stop, almost with a screech. Pchshshsh… Passengers get on and then are flung down the isle.

It’s painful, my back hurts trying to hold myself in the seat, people are flung all over the place, it is not very customer friendly.

It must be bad for the fuel bill to, using that accelerator like a water pistol, squirting diesel into that straining motor again and again. The drive train stretching from push to pull, grunting the bus forward and back.

And then there are the traffic lights, pulling up behind a few cars at a red light and stopping. Then for no visible reason launching forward all of 6 inches and stopping again, closer to the stationary car in front of us, and again, another 3 inches. Then the lights go green, there is a pause, but the bus goes anyway and then in a realisation the car hasn’t moved yet, slams on the brakes, as the car takes off with the traffic and the bus is there, stationary for another moment before taking off again. What a waste of effort.

There is no feedback system, it doesn’t matter if a driver screws up, if the busses are late, if they continue to miss their stops or just not arrive at all. If they are bad drivers or are abusive it doesn’t matter because the companies above them don’t care. Seriously, they don’t want to know, they don’t want to listen and god forbid, if they actually knew enough about reality to do something constructive for their clients, the p-a-s-s-e-n-g-e-r-s.

Their business is to maintains their rolling stock, employ the number of people required to drive them and above all else, negotiate contracts with the government to own the situation. Nothing more.

They don’t provide a service to the public, never have and never will and they don’t care what happens because they are not accountable.

What a fucken liberty!

Take for instance another wonderful bus trip last night. The weather here is turning colder and at last a bit wetter, it’s getting into winter and that makes public transport all the more uncomfortable.

So I get out of work and go up the street, zipping my jacket up against the cold. A few minutes later my 220 turns up and I get on and after a few minutes it takes off. I really don’t know what timetable he’s running on but based on my last blog, that’s of no more concern.

We go through Footscray and like our normal run, pause at the ‘220′ stop there and move on with a fresh load of passengers. A bit further up the road the drivers change outside the Library (strange, we don’t normally do driver swaps here). A bit further up again and we take a right turn, very strange, this is not the right direction, but nobody seems to care (other than me) and we go along a parallel road so I am not too unhappy.

At the end of this road I see an elderly couple talk to the driver, so I unplug my headphones and get in on the convo, I find out I we are going another way. So I say to the driver… ‘This is the 220′ and he says, no, 216 (actually a passenger butts in and contributes that part), so I repeated myself, ‘No, this was the 220 when I got it in the city, and it was the 220 when it stopped in Footscray’ and the elderly man agreed with me, yes it was the 220. It wasn’t just me going mad. So the bus driver summoned all of his customer management skills, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I dunno, I got on after that’. The polite passenger then informed me that where I wanted to go was 2km up the road in the other direction than the bus. ‘Yes, I know where I am going’, looking back at the driver, ‘do you know where you are going’? ‘and why your now kicking us off a bus in the rain’? I think I also added something about getting their act together as I got off.

So, not happy Jan, and a bit confused about getting on the right bus now, let alone what timetable it might be running to.

At this point in Collins Street there is a list of times they should be leaving my stop, a timetable printed on the post at the stop. The 4:13pm never happens (after 4 months I am yet to see this bus), the 4:28pm often there, often late and then the 4:35pm when you get desperate it appears just in time to rescue me from total despair. But this night the bus was there, and I asked the driver when he was scheduled to leave, I asked again to understand his grunt a little better and got a ‘27′ out of him, weird, it’s ten minutes to the 28 past but close enough. I will stand next to the bus and wait because sometimes the earlier ones comes past, and I would prefer to be ready for that and leave earlier if I can. 5 minutes later the guy closes the doors and starts to take of, “wait on” and he stops and lets me on looking at me surprised. so the 4:13 never appears, the 4:28 leaves at 4:24 now and god help you if you came in the next few minutes expecting a bus cause I doubt there would be one.

At my stop this morning, I have this view (right) and like so many other stops the timetable is missing. Is this just vandalism? Do people actively rip them from the post for fun or is there something more behind it? Perhaps, it may seem that if there is no timetable displayed then the people waiting wont get as upset if the bus is late, or feels like leaving early, or in fact, never shows up, what evidence would the travelling public have without their timetables on display. Well one is that I have a phone with web browsing and I can look these things up, it’s pretty cool to view this while waiting patiently at the stop. But this goes further, and then becomes a conspiracy in that if you take these minor infractions together and include the possibility of another significant and regular event the scale of things become enormous…

Train cancellations are done on purpose!

I have had it suggested to me that some services may be delayed or cancelled because it will cost them less, in that Connex delivers a rail passenger service to the Victorian Government and has to at least provide some 92% of their planned services reliably before they get penalties applied.

This means that they can fail 8% of the time without repercussions and the constant cancellations are a form of proof that this is being done on purpose to save 8% of their operating costs. Some are legitimate problems, accidents, failures and theft can cause stoppages, but in reality how many can be better managed and resolved or do they just prefer to fall back to their minimum contracted requirements?

Now they are looking to improve services, more trains, increased runs and more carriages, will this actually help?

No. Under the current arrangement I expect that the reality is they don’t have to deliver any improvement, there is no incentive to do so. Connex have won the contract to perform at a specific level, and that’s not increasing, it actually could mean that they can cancel more services, provide no more service, maintain the status quo and still get paid the full contractible amount.

So the way it is going I wouldn’t be surprised to see them pick up all their copper when the contract expires and run off to China and sell it for scrap, or public transport system is going to be demolished beneath us as we use it and find ourselves paying for high fuel prices, or perhaps walking to work in the not to distant future.

For us in Australia, this price comparison between $US/Gallon and Our $AU/Litre is hard to judge. We are paying now upward (and over sometimes) $1.50/Litre for petrol (or Gas) and off-hand we have no comparative concept of what that equates to, so I did some calculations…

The table below list some comparisons, the US would be unpleased to know that they are probably paying much less than anywhere else in the world, particularly in comparison to Australia as I have shown.

OK, here’s the real interesting part, why is there any difference?

Oil is sold on a world market, it makes no difference as to where the oil was from North Australia, Texas or the Middle-East, it all goes on the world market to be sold to all at a similar/standardised price. This price is per barrel and has just peaked at about $112US for the crude raw product to make all other fuels from, Diesel, Unleaded and even Turpentine and plastics etc.

Next to this each country may impose additional taxes. Australia is really good at this, we add some 25% additional expenses on top for roads (which we also pay for through other insurance and registration, council, state and local taxes too, but petrol also gets a slug) and then also environmental additions and all that.

So somewhere between the $112 per barrel, Australia pays currently 50% more at the pump for gas than the US. The same product (under a different name, at a different ratio) still adds up to a marked difference in retail price to get a car from point A to point B.

Then on that, would you say this is a bad thing? For the reason of difference I say yes, if we all pay the same amount for the crude, then the retail product should all be sold at a similar price. Not doing so flies in the face of competition and consumer regulations, a cartel effectively in each country controlling the overall price, a price not maintained entirely by market forces.

On the other hand, and personally I agree, that we don’t pay enough for petrol!

When we pay more then we discover alternatives, we reduce our consumption and the overall result is better. Now that petrol is getting realistically expensive we are getting hybrids, we are beginning to accelerate our technology of battery power storage, we are all buying leaner and greener cars. If petrol remained cheap this would not happen.

Your thoughts are always welcomed, comments are available below if you wish. You can register with this site directly or use an OpenID to login now and have your say.

These are real changes that will improve the situation, for many of our branches the train serves delivers people to.

It comes none too soon and it’s a big question as to why this was not done last year, or at least flagged the year before that but, there it is, it’s coming and it will help.

Well, it will help some, for me I catch a bus, and as we go into winter it seems my route is getting busier too. Today I counted 22 people standing after every seat had been taken, quite a full death trap had we managed to hit something, aside from those seated, the poor ones standing on the 40+ minute ride would not have been in good condition, but there you go, as late as we were, anybody that ran toward the bus got full attention and the driver piled more on without any due thought.

Funny thing with busses is that when they run late and get caught up a little they then are attending to more waiting passengers, so they get further behind still. More people wait at the stops and the bus has to pick all the extra people up too, slower and slower still it goes until the next bus can catch up to the earlier one. This is a picture of my bus, the 220 and the interesting thing being, that I am travelling on a 220. I waited for 40 minutes to get a bus, and once I got on, we were getting chased by another one, both quite full and busy, but none the less… late.

I don’t know what you can realistically do about that, you cant avoid picking up passengers, or dropping them off, you just have to roll with it. I think for us, we are delayed when people have to buy tickets on the bus. This really holds up the driver from moving on, if this could be done quicker it would be a big improvement. On our Trams we have ticket vending machines and the drivers do not do any of this with the passengers, I am not really sure why this wasn’t done on busses too, but no, each bus has one ‘validation’ machine, next to the driver, so it’s all “one person at a time please” and “oh, your buying a ticket with 5c pieces again, well done”…

So, because I have some more pics to put up here, I will also mention the road works out on Footscray(ry) Road. They are making the main road down near the dock go up and over a railway so they can move containers in from the docks without interrupting the traffic flow. This will be really good because I have been caught here many a time for ages waiting for a long train of containers to go trundling bye. Its quite impressive to see the work done to build the bridges, pinning concrete pylons into the ground, constructing large concrete towers and craning on spans to bridge the gaps.

Down at the ‘Docklands’ area they are also building new shopping complexes and a big Ferris wheel. They got the main structure up now and are just about to get the carriages on. It’s going to be a big 2008 for new stuff down there, lots of change and new things to watch. This looks really cool and I can’t wait to have a ride, might actually get me down there for a visit, even though it’s 15 minutes from my house, I don’t visit near enough.

So if anybody wonders what it’s like, for those that are in a long queue on a major road (another symptom of the overall problem) then over the next few weeks I may take and post some photo’s here, showing the extent and reality of the situation. Like this one…

About 5.45pm I returned back to flinders street from Brighton to catch a train out toward Sydenham. This is what I was presented with, and it is NORMAL! The trains were not late (much) and this is what was waiting. It actually shows two problems, one that the situation for transport is bad and also the other, that Australians, and Melbournians are leaving work well after 5pm, if they haven’t left town after closing, why are they still waiting for trains at almost 6pm?

So yeah, unfortunately I didn’t take a picture on the train that I caught, so many faces staring at me from a standing position I felt I would have been beaten to death for even thinking of taking a photo. Really, in that next train that left from Flinders Street it was packed, and through the tunnel it got worse, more people loading on at every stop. Past Footscray we went with few people getting off there, it got no better. I didn’t see anybody that I could point to as a politician, I think they all had chauffeur driven cars getting them home earlier than the rush hour so it went without saying, the people responsible for this fiasco do not know what’s going on, they don’t have to pay for the tickets to ride on this cattle service, and speaking of cattle, they get treated better than the people do.

The UK has begun banning Australian wool because of mulesing, well they should stop using Australian products because of exactly the same reason, this country is treating it’s workforce like cattle and then smacking them with a red hot branding iron to make a point. So wake up, get more trains and busses and improve the situation because our states and cities are not coping with the flood of population increase and if you want more babies, then they better have somewhere to live, work and commute when they grow up. Stop talking about options, stop introducing new ticket schemes that never actually get started and operating, just DO SOMETHING. Oh and this great idea of removing seats so we can cram more people into a carriage is (dare I say it) reminding me of a German transport system of the 40’s…

So I will take more pictures, just camera photo’s to share and perhaps a new section of this site might soon appear to take your submissions also, or perhaps, like the one above, send them through to the newspapers and other places from your mobile to get the actual picture, the reality and the situation out there to the people that matter.