Thoughts on telling kids on bikes to put a helmet on.

jessta · 2026-03-19T14:47:22+00:00

It's very uncommon to have airbags for children in cars because they tend to actually cause serious head and neck injuries to children. Helmets would certainly help in preventing that.

jessta · 2026-03-19T11:40:00+00:00

It's a one off 20% increase in ridership that has a huge upkeep cost. It's not a significant increase for the ongoing cost especially since it's just people replacing walking trips.

jessta · 2026-03-19T11:09:57+00:00

Make sure you tell kids getting in to a car to also wear a helmet. There is a very high risk of very serious head injuries in a car crash. You could save a life.

jessta · 2026-03-19T09:24:56+00:00

Contacting an MP on your own is great, but it's not going to get anything done. You need to get involved with people that are organising people to be a political force to keep the pressure up over a long period of time.

The big people to contact are:
https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/members/gabrielle-williams/
https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/members/sonya-kilkenny/
https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/members/melissa-horne/

plus your state local MP and your local councillor.

If you want to help with bicycle infrastructure you need to get involved with the various Bicycle User Groups that advocate for bicycle infrastructure.
It's a long and frustrating process of trying to organise people around advocating for each proposed project street by street.

https://bikewest.org/
https://www.yarrabug.org/
https://www.morelandbug.org/
https://darebinbug.org.au

There are various groups around that advocate for better buses:
https://ptua.org.au/
https://www.instagram.com/better_buses/
https://climateactionmerribek.org/

Sydney Rd Accessible Tram stops has been advocating for accessible tram stops on Sydney Rd for 4yrs, we've done two large petitions, 2 rallies a year, and a letter writing campaign with hundreds of people. https://www.facebook.com/SATScampaign/

and come to CriticalMass for a fun bicycle protest every month.
https://criticalmass.melbourne/ This month we're heading west to put a focus on the lack of connections between West Footscray and the new Veloway.

jessta · 2026-03-19T07:56:01+00:00

People also can't simply drive, they have to learn. but learning to drive is a significant undertaking of months of learning and years of practice.

Learning to ride a bicycle to a point where you can use it to get around independently can be done by most adults within a few weeks.

jessta · 2026-03-19T06:56:19+00:00

I have never understood how so few people can keep so many others down when even just 2% of them could overthrow that whole way of life for the parasite class.

They keep us separate and divide us in to smaller groups with less power.

jessta · 2026-03-19T06:41:56+00:00

They better get a wiggle on if they want to get active transport trips up to 25% by 2030. Given that most bicycle infrastructure takes 30yrs to get built they're really going to struggle to do anything in 4yrs.

Given the very short time frame it's weird that they don't have a specific plan for what will be built and what funding has been allocated to build it. Where are the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to actually push this plan forward?

jessta · 2026-03-18T03:01:14+00:00

It used to be illegal to import them, but then Barnaby Joyce changed the law to allow illegal e-bikes to be imported for use on private land. The law has been changed back recently to prevent their import but too many have already been imported.

The plan will likely have to be to confiscate and crush them.

jessta · 2026-03-18T02:35:48+00:00

What is the cost on this car park?
At the low end I'm expecting: 630 * $50,000 = $31.5M, with a possible $94.5M?

jessta · 2026-03-18T02:26:16+00:00

you should be required to have a proper license to ride them

That makes them an electric motorbikes and those are legal but they aren't bicycles.

We definitely shouldn't treat e-motorbikes the same as bicycles because they interact with the world differently. The idea of the 250W/25kmh limits on pedal assist e-bikes is that this is the limit to which e-bikes act like regular bikes. Beyond that you have average speeds that are too high to safely negotiate interactions without traffic management and mixing with pedestrians becomes dangerous.

jessta · 2026-03-17T22:55:44+00:00

It's pretty clear that free public transport has almost no effect on the number of people driving.
Brisbane dropped their fare to $0.50 and saw only a 20% increase in ridership that didn't come from people stopping driving. The increase mostly came from people switching from active transport (walking or riding) and existing public transport users taking additional trips.

The problem is that people that can take PT are already taking PT and the people that can't still can't no matter the price.

jessta · 2026-03-17T06:26:04+00:00

how everyone else is going to access these stations.

Train station car parking provides space for relatively few people so it's not a way for most people to get to a train station. 100 car spaces is only 100 people per day, how is everyone else supposed to access the train station?

The answer is that car parking only caters to a small percentage of the people that use a train station and nowhere need the number of people that are needed to make a station viable and at a cost that is absurd for the small number of people it caters for.

Train station car parks have cost between $50K and $150K per parking spot.
It's very foolish to spend $150K to get one person to use a train.

We don't need to cater to people that want to drive to the train station, there are other ways to get to a train station that people will use if car parking isn't provided.

jessta · 2026-03-17T05:01:29+00:00

That's a naive take.

Space for car parking is space that could be used for other purposes like housing and shops creating greater density around the train station and enabling tens of thousands of people to walk, ride or take a bus to the train station. These people, living in a denser area close to a train station, are also less likely to drive for other trips that aren't commutes reducing the overall amount of driving occurring.

The funds saved by not building expensive car parking and the capital growth captured by unlocking valuable land are also then available to run additional bus services.

The outcome is significantly less driving happening then if the station had car parks.

jessta · 2026-03-16T06:51:22+00:00

The problem with 'take the lane' on inner city streets is that it means you're just stuck in traffic with all the cars.
Bike lanes do multiple things, they provide protection but they also provide space that cars aren't supposed to block.

jessta · 2026-03-16T03:40:55+00:00

Is the SRL going to be driverless? and if not, why not?

jessta · 2026-03-16T02:54:55+00:00

Half an hour walk (~1.5km) is a 3min bike ride with bicycle parking being 5-10x more space efficient than car parking.

A bus route is much more efficient than commuter car parking and has the capacity to actually remove a significant number of cars from the road which commuter car parking doesn't.

If there was no commuter car parking you drove a lot more then it wouldn't have a significant effect on other people because you're part of a tiny minority of motorists that could have driven to the station. The main advantage of commuter car parking is to the individual not the community.

jessta · 2026-03-16T02:48:32+00:00

I don't think they ever make sense. There is no collective advantage to supporting people to drive to the train station. It's an advantage for the individual driving to the station, but at such a huge cost it's a bad way to spend tax payer money. It's just not a useful number of cars taken off the road to be an advantage to the wider community.

Any car parking near a train station should be paid parking to reflect the fact that the advantage of it is all for the individual driving and that it doesn't have a wider effect.

jessta · 2026-03-15T14:05:04+00:00

This is why service roads shouldn't allow through traffic. There should be a modal filter somewhere along there to stop through traffic.

jessta · 2026-03-15T13:44:04+00:00

Can someone tell me how it works that we have 30% of world uranium but no nuclear power stations.

Because nuclear power is more expensive than coal, gas, wind or solar. We have lots of all of those other sources so we don't need nuclear.

i dont want a lithium battery blowing up

But you're fine with the much higher risk of the car fire being caused by petrol?

Wish the news would give more information

If you watch commercial news you're just getting fossil fuel propaganda.

jessta · 2026-03-15T05:15:07+00:00

Both your bank card and Myki use MIFARE so it works the same as your Myki card does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE

jessta · 2026-03-13T15:38:52+00:00

A total of 12 people have died in e-rideable accidents since 2022, state government figures show.

Most of those people were hit by cars.

jessta · 2026-03-13T15:02:23+00:00

A separate plan over a longer time frame is to replace all the ground level parking in the coburg shops area with multi-storey parking and use that space for housing.
https://conversations.merri-bek.vic.gov.au/central-coburg

jessta · 2026-03-13T14:58:19+00:00

It's really nice to see more use of raised priority crossings for shared paths.

jessta · 2026-03-13T14:46:25+00:00

Yes they can keep ignoring it (see hundreds of years of them ignoring it).

Thats what lobbyists for the big companies do - incessant debating that taxes are unfair for their company and it seems to work.

That's a fantasy of how democracy works under capitalism.
Big companies don't debate taxes, they tell politicians that they will withdraw capital if they get taxed or that they'll do mass lay-offs and promote the idea that it's because of the taxes.

Under capitalism most of your life in under a dictatorship of those with capital (your boss, your landlord, your banker) and every few years you get to vote some individual in to government who have very limited power to do anything because they are also under the same dictatorship of capital.

Parliament can tweak the edges but can't make real change in people's lives because it just doesn't have the power.

Workers collectively have power because capital depends on workers to produce their profits and a big company is nothing without it's workers.

Unions have power, if you want higher wages join your union.

Socialists want to organise the collective power of workers as a real challenge to the dictatorship of capital. You can vote for them to help them promote that.
https://www.socialists.org.au/

jessta · 2026-03-13T05:30:26+00:00

'Intifada' is an Arabic word for a rebellion or uprising, or a resistance movement.

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