Of the technologies in this picture, which one do you think represents the future? Here is a post to irritate two completely different communities at the one time.

All advocacy and campaigning organisations must play bad cop. At some point, they make a deal with the established system, and then sell the deal to their disgruntled members.

At the moment, we have a small, poignant example of this in the apparently innocent world of Melbourne cycling. Our overburdened and privatised local train service carries bicycles for free, while cyclists are actively discouraged from putting treadlies on the train in peak hour. After all, they are awkward, and take up space. Other commuters get a chance to roll their eyes, act sniffy and indulge in righteousness – a piece of pack behaviour all too familiar to cyclists, dog owners, breast feeding women, owners of young children and backpackers (no hierarchy implied in the order).

This year, the train companies have decide to outright ban bikes on trains in peak hour. Bicycle Victoria, the representative body of interested cycle activists, has agreed to this, in return for the free bike deal and a test program of bicycle parking cages at stations.

On its website, BV advises people who need a bike during the day to keep one at work. Unfortunately, public transport is one of those crucial bits of infrastructure which trigger hugely important domestic decisions. There is a cohort in Melbourne who catch trains and cycle at either end, as this letter from Ken Shannon of Pascoe Vale to The Age illustrates -

‘Three years ago I decided to reduce my greenhouse gas emissions by riding from my home in Pascoe Vale South into the city and then catching a train out to Brighton Beach where I would once again get on my bike and ride to Moorabbin, where I work.

Generally I sit in a carriage by myself as the train is outbound and very quiet at 7am. At the end of the day I ride the full distance home, unless the weather is unpleasant and then I catch the train back to the city and ride home from there.

The journey keeps my car off the road and contributes to relieving congestion in the city; it also gives me exercise and saves me a considerable sum of money each week.

With the ban on bikes, I will be forced to start driving my car across town each day as the full distance is a 60-kilometre round trip….

This is surely a smart strategy – the cheapest way for the community to deal with the huge public transport problem created by the fact that workplaces are distributed around the sprawl of Melbourne. I presume any sensible transport plan for 2020 would contain a heap of people doing this, keeping fit, uncluttering the road and reducing greenhouse emissions.

At least the government can claim that the private transport operators have crowded trains etc etc and many huge brained planners are trying to work out how to relieve the congestion. But the situation is even more ludicrous in the country. There is a huge commuting population who train in to Melbourne from around a 100k ring. Land is cheap(er), the towns are rejuvenated, and the government feels enough political pressure to attempt ineptly to develop fast train services to serve them. Ineptly because these fast trains tend not to stop at these newly-dormified towns because the folks at the end of the line want to chop ten minutes off the trip.

Cycling to the station makes a huge amount of sense – in extreme cases, families don’t have to maintain a second car – which is why the bike cage program is being trialled. But many people also take their bikes on the train so they can ride at the other end, as per our Pascoe Vale suburban example. People really depend on this, because driving is not a practical alternative. As a consequence, the new V-Line trains have a designated space for bicycles on them, creating a social good and causing a flutter of angels in transport heaven.

Now, any poor sod who transfers to a city service in the middle can’t bring a bike. And, even worse,

“BENDIGO commuters and bicycle groups have reacted with anger and disbelief to a New Year law that bans bicycles on peak-hour country trains.
The State Government introduced the state-wide ban of bicycles on public trains from January 1 on peak-hour services to and from Melbourne, arguing that it would free up more space on crowded trains”.

This piece of dumbness has tested the skills of Victorian government spin doctors, but they have risen to the task, proving they are truly shameless -

“A spokeswoman for Victorian transport Minister Lynne Kosky, Stacey Hume, said service provider V/Line and Connex had requested the ban.

“Because of increased demand during the past year on peak V/Line services, space is at a premium and that is why the ban applies state-wide,” Ms Hume said.

Ms Hume said all the peak-hour services also passed through Zone One in metropolitan Melbourne.

V/Line spokeswoman Rebecca Cusack said the priority was to ensure as many people as possible could travel comfortably and safely and that the high number of people taking their bikes on packed trains was becoming a problem.

Ms Cusack said V/Line did not expect to issue penalties for notices, but would not allow people with bikes on to the peak-hour services.

She said V/Line would continue to monitor the situation when new V/Locity middle carriages arrived from the middle of the year.

Ms Cusack is using similar language to the metropolitan companies, and the coincidence of both crises occuring at once does suggest that a few verifiable statistics would help. Although it does turn out that the V-Line bicycle support system is at the cosmetic end of real.

“In fact, the Red & Blue single carriage trains known as “Sprinters” can only accommodate about 2 bikes, whilst the newer Purple & Green multi-carriage trains known as “Velocity Trains” can accommodate a few more, but usually no more than about 6.

Not what you would call promoting a social revolution. As my older readers will know, this is also a subtle effect of the collapse of the railway’s role in parcel transport – bikes could once go in the guardsvan along with the parcels and crates full of racing pigeons. It was even possible on long journeys to camp next to the bike and sleep overnight. The state-wide bus service, by the way, simply bans bicycles completely, even though it has often replaced the train.

The whole thing is taken up at Melbourne Cyclist, along with a host of links and collected letters. Cyclists are getting very cranky. Maybe we could start glueing bikes to trains?

The anti-bike brigade really is everywhere, and they have minds like weasels.

Meanwhile, I am enchanted with that huge steampunk contrivance in the image at the head. It turns out that “Big Lizzie” as catalogued by the State Library of Victoria in the act of comparison to a bicycle is well known to enthusiasts. It was towed by this giant 45 ton tractor, and usually had not one but two trailers, each of which had a 35 ton payload. Power was provided by a 60 horsepower single cylinder crude oil Blackstone engine housed somewhere in the shed on top. This picture shows the rig configured with a small blacksmith’s shop on the front, which could be replaced by the long arm of a crane. The beast could lumber around picking up bales of wool to load on the bogies; I guess the small steam tractors were driven up on a ramp.

Built to replace camel trains carrying wool to Broken Hill, it was designed to endlessly walk on itself with the Dreadnought system, patented in 1907, which functioned rather like the later tank track. The monster tractor never made it to the desert, but was used to clear land at the post WW1 soldier settlement community of Red Cliffs. Sans engine and one trailer, it is now preserved in the middle of the town. According to an account on the ABC,

“LES GATES: It was some 34 foot in length alone and it stood 18 foot high to the top without the crane. When it first left Melbourne, all up it was carrying something like 4,000-odd gallons of fuel. It didn’t fuel for the three years. It carried so much. It carried over 700 gallons of water just for domestic use so it carried all of its own stuff. They virtually had to take everything with them. They had their own chooks on board on top of their trailers because it wasn’t loaded with freight. Their sleeping quarters were on top of the trailers.”

It was said to be the biggest tractor ever built, with a top speed of 2 mph, a turning circle of 200 feet requiring 80 turns of the wheel, and a cow tethered to the rear. Though it could unload those two steam engines like space cruisers and clear 50 acres in a day, using a chain stretched between the rigs.

A good representative history is here. Frank Bottrill, who designed, built and ran the machine, was a blacksmith from Adelaide, born in 1871.

“In 1926-28 the engine was used at Glendinning near Balmoral and was then abandoned until 1971.

In 1926 Bottrill set up as an engineer at Vasey near Glendinning. In 1931 he moved to Lismore near Camperdown, working as a mechanic, and in 1934 became a blacksmith at Dareton, New South Wales, not far from Mildura. Independent, modest, of strong build and unusual endurance, Bottrill was a vegetarian and teetotaller; he had a rich bass singing voice. His favourite book was the Bible. In 1919-24 he had been a founder, an elder and treasurer of the Mildura Seventh Day Adventist Church. He was elder and treasurer of the Dareton church until his death in hospital at Mildura on 7 January 1953. Childless, he was survived by his wife.”

At its final resting place, Big Lizzie needs a more contemporary comparison to remind us it is Really. Very. Big.

Vast, clanking, self-sufficient and gradually falling to bits, it reminds me of the preposterous gigantism of the current plans about public transport. Literally a big train set, it deals in people by the million, and fails to engage with the distributed subtleties which the system needs to match human behaviour. The bicycle, of course, is the ultimate in city-scale transport on a human scale.

To strain a metaphor even further, the land that Big Lizzie cleared nearly a century ago in that grand plan to create an oasis of prosperity is slowly turning into a desert, kept alive only by irrigation from a river strangled by drought. This was Mildura in 1967 -

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Austrapolitics, history. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.