PhD student at UNSW City Futures Research Centre. Committee member of WalkSydney (https://walksydney.org/). Interested in access, walkability, sustainable transport in general, open source urban analytics. Transport cyclist, climber, plant based.
@maegul @ajsadauskas yeah the design doesn’t cue this at all. I was on one of them recently too and didn’t notice the signs or realise it was meant to be a pedestrianised street. There was a raised footpath, so I stayed on it. Making the whole street level, probably with discreet bollards to keep some safer space for pedestrians, makes it much more obvious.
@tom_andraszek @ajsadauskas @TheOne but this is all just tinkering compared to competitive speed, frequency, and reach/door-to-door time.
@tom_andraszek @ajsadauskas @TheOne Well not perhaps, obviously more difficult. Discounted monthly passes already used to exist, and I don’t see that they’re technically incompatible with smart-card systems.
Monthly or yearly passes could be salary sacrified and/or a welfare benefit, resulting in many people getting effectively free PT - but seeing it differently from general free PT, as a thing of value that they paid for/were given and should take advantage of… maybe.
@tom_andraszek @ajsadauskas @TheOne Free PT is one way to align payment frequency (well, remove the pay-per-trip and replace it with nothing), but another is discounted long term public transport passes, creating pre-commitment to taking public transport. And another, perhaps more politically difficult, is road fares per car trip…
@tom_andraszek @ajsadauskas @TheOne I don’t think people are entirely rational economic access-seeking actors on a per-trip basis. I’m more interested in the psychological difference between pay-per-trip (transit) and pay-once-a-year (car insurance, rates - plus monthly payments if you have a lease, but you can’t just not pay them if you don’t drive, it’s a long term commitment too).
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars Most positive spin I can give Business Sydney is that they are concerned about difficulty operating genuine commercial vehicles (deliveries to shops etc) in the CBD, which is fair, delivering in the CBD already looks like a difficult job. But they should be onboard with ways to filter out the private traffic and keep the commercial… cordons and congestion charges being most obvious to me.