Melbourne isn’t already entirely, or at least mostly, electrified (not just trains, but buses too)
Regional Vic is having all of their buses replaced too. Naturally that’s going to exclude vline coaches, but although big cities like Geelong and Ballarat make sense, smaller ones like Portland and horsham feel like much lower priorities to me
They’ll be using this demonstration project to better understand the TCO of the vehicles and situate them in ideal use cases. I don’t expect these ones to stay around in the city.
@LovesTha@Railison@Baku Build more trains, increase train frequency, and expand the rail network.
That’s a real solution, not greenwashing with busses that are powered by hydrogen extracted from fossil-fuels.
@LovesTha@ajsadauskas@Railison@Baku Level crossing removal is good for a whole bunch of reasons, including (by my understanding) that it’s a necessary requirement before you can get started with high frequency trains. Same goes for modernising the signalling system that IIRC was designed in the 1970s.
Victoria’s public transport has had decades of dismal stagnation following the failed neoconservative experiment with privatisation. There was bare minimum of maintenance and little in the way of updates until recently. Lately, we’ve had serious effort put into level crossing removal, new trains, signalling upgrades, route extensions, and tunneling. Good to see progress but we still have a long way to go if we want Melbourne to have a modern metro.
They’ll probably continue to be used around hydrogen hubs. Government is doing a lot of work to scale green hydrogen production, part of which requires there to be demand for what’s produced
Eh, I’m not sure I think hydrogen is the best option honestly. It seems like a lot of effort to go to, and certainly more than chicken some solar panels and a few batteries at a depot/on buses
@Baku@Railison Battery electric busses are a well established technology, used widely, normally hard to get grants for.
Despite this they got a 50 bus grants for the battery technology, plus 2 for hydrogen. If you want to get free money for these things it needs to be novel, and H2 is.
Regardless, anything is better than diesel. I ride my bike on a now almost all electric bus route. I hold my breath much less often now. The reduced particulates is enough to show in the graphs for Wellington
There’s a few things about this that surprise me:
Melbourne isn’t already entirely, or at least mostly, electrified (not just trains, but buses too)
Regional Vic is having all of their buses replaced too. Naturally that’s going to exclude vline coaches, but although big cities like Geelong and Ballarat make sense, smaller ones like Portland and horsham feel like much lower priorities to me
They’ll be using this demonstration project to better understand the TCO of the vehicles and situate them in ideal use cases. I don’t expect these ones to stay around in the city.
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@LovesTha @Railison @Baku Build more trains, increase train frequency, and expand the rail network.
That’s a real solution, not greenwashing with busses that are powered by hydrogen extracted from fossil-fuels.
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@LovesTha @BinChicken @Railison @Baku Here’s a link to the timetable for Sydney’s Metro Northwest line, which runs driverless trains: https://transportnsw.info/documents/timetables/93-M-Sydney-Metro-North-West-20230929.pdf
Note that even off-peak or on weekends, the frequency is every 10 minutes, and every four minutes during the peak.
The technology is there to do far more frequent driverless trains, but Victoria hasn’t invested in it.
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@LovesTha @ajsadauskas @Railison @Baku Level crossing removal is good for a whole bunch of reasons, including (by my understanding) that it’s a necessary requirement before you can get started with high frequency trains. Same goes for modernising the signalling system that IIRC was designed in the 1970s.
Victoria’s public transport has had decades of dismal stagnation following the failed neoconservative experiment with privatisation. There was bare minimum of maintenance and little in the way of updates until recently. Lately, we’ve had serious effort put into level crossing removal, new trains, signalling upgrades, route extensions, and tunneling. Good to see progress but we still have a long way to go if we want Melbourne to have a modern metro.
Probably. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get a few photos before that happens though. I don’t see them sticking around that long
They’ll probably continue to be used around hydrogen hubs. Government is doing a lot of work to scale green hydrogen production, part of which requires there to be demand for what’s produced
Eh, I’m not sure I think hydrogen is the best option honestly. It seems like a lot of effort to go to, and certainly more than chicken some solar panels and a few batteries at a depot/on buses
@Baku @Railison Battery electric busses are a well established technology, used widely, normally hard to get grants for.
Despite this they got a 50 bus grants for the battery technology, plus 2 for hydrogen. If you want to get free money for these things it needs to be novel, and H2 is.
Regardless, anything is better than diesel. I ride my bike on a now almost all electric bus route. I hold my breath much less often now. The reduced particulates is enough to show in the graphs for Wellington