Happy 2009 everyone! Best wishes for our next 365 spins around the planet.

Unfortunately Sydney's fireworks this year were loaded with wrong-headed symbolism. - Profligate expenditure on non-renewable resources at a time of global financial collapse, carbon footprint off the scale, and an artistic theme ("Firestorm") carefully calculated to attract tourists from Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo...

Will the world's ability to forecast events be any better than in 2008? One can only hope!
;-)

The thing about the rails is a bit muddled in The Age. It's really not difficult to get people to use any particular form of transport. It's the same as any business. Make your service frequent, reliable and pleasant, and people will use it. Make it infrequent, unreliable and unpleasant and they'll avoid it.

A typical first public transport experience for people in the outer suburbs on the weekend is coming to lonely bus stop and finding no timetable, and waiting for a bus which turns out to be 30-60 minutes apart to take them on a slow and rough trip of 20 minutes to the train station, then a train 20-45 minutes apart, 40 minutes on the train to the inner city, a total travel time of 80-165 minutes.

A more experienced public transport user will make it in the 80 minutes (still rather a lot for a 20-40km journey), since they'll know they can look up timetables online, and there's even a trip planner to lay it all out for them. But whether people use a service regularly is often determined by their first experiences with it, and first time users won't know this stuff.

A typical worker living in the inner city and working in the middle suburbs, or vice versa, living near a train station, trying to be at work at 0900, and expecting a 20 minute trip, they'll arrive at the station at 0820 to find a train scheduled for 0822, great! "Connex wishes to advise that the 0822 to Flinders St has been cancelled. Connex apologises for any inconvenience." Damn! Next train at 0832. "Connex wishes to advise that the 0832 Flinders St train has been delayed, and is now expected in twelve minutes." So it'll depart at 0834. It arrives and because the last train was delayed is packed. The worker struggles on somehow and spends a rather sweaty 15 minutes on the train. At the third last station a guy in a wheelchair gets on, the driver comes out to lay down a ramp and help him on, the worker steps off the train out of the way and three people surge in to take his place. The train drives off without him. He has to take the next train. He's late to work.

Suddenly the peak hour traffic and $18 a day parking in the inner city doesn't look so bad.

Let's not even consider what happens if you live in one outer suburb and work in another.

An infrequent, unreliable and unpleasant service loses customers. A frequent, reliable and pleasant one gains them. It's not very complicated.

The article in The Age misses this entirely. And really it's not a question of spending money on infrastructure, whether cycle paths or new train lines. It's management. Melbourne's train system with manual signals managed 270 million passengers annually, virtually the same set of railways with electronic signalling in 2008 struggled with 170 million, and Connex claimed a "capacity crisis". Indeed, capacity was stretched - but not that of the trains and rail and signalling, only the management capacity.

Similarly, sensible management of roads and neighbourhoods would make cars the least attractive transport option.