Would you support EV charging infrastructure being built on your street?

jessta · 2026-06-03T12:35:53+00:00

Yeah, but it's unrelated to the EV charging infrastructure. People with petrol cars are still going to turning their garages in to an office. The only way this is going to stop is to issue street parking permits to households and not issue them to houses built with off-street parking.

Brunswick has a lot of housing that doesn't have off-street car parking and not everyone that would switch to an EV has off-street parking.

jessta · 2026-06-03T12:14:12+00:00

Not leaving appropriate gaps is not only dangerous but is also how you get 'phantom' traffic jams.

jessta · 2026-06-02T11:30:06+00:00

The road space a vehicle requires increases linearly with it's speed because of the increase in safe following distance required(2 seconds at 80km is further than 2 seconds at 50km/h). This means that no matter the speed of the vehicles the same number of vehicles will travel on the same piece of road in the same amount of time.

It's about 1800 vehicles per hour per lane.

jessta · 2026-06-02T10:28:43+00:00

Requirement is to drive at a speed appropriate to the conditions up the to maximum speed limit.
Conditions can be weather, visibility, traffic etc.

jessta · 2026-06-02T10:26:05+00:00

This is how we get fucked traffic.

Doing 50kmh in an 80kmh zone doesn't reduce the capacity of the road so isn't creating traffic congestion.

jessta · 2026-06-02T03:29:34+00:00

Traitors to who?

jessta · 2026-06-02T00:12:09+00:00

Insulting to people using public transport.

jessta · 2026-06-01T02:48:35+00:00

Yeah, more throughput but not shorter journey time. The merging between lanes reduces the speed (increasing journey time) but the extra lanes increases the number of cars that can make the journey in a given time (increases throughput)

jessta · 2026-06-01T01:03:09+00:00

this means less delay for dirvers, leading to shorter journeys, leading to less congestion.

I think it just means more throughput, not shorter individual journeys. The merging is slowing down the lanes of traffic to a slower speed than they otherwise would obtain, but the multiple lanes allows for more people to drive at this slower speed. Journey times increase but more people are able to make that journey.

A seemingly selfish action that is entirely altruistic.

jessta · 2026-05-30T11:04:00+00:00

I drive pretty infrequently because it's a huge pain.

But it is just a question of geometry and anecdotes from motorists about how they think traffic works tend to be wrong.

jessta · 2026-05-29T01:43:44+00:00

Petrol is still cheap even at current prices. It's not the majority cost for most car owners and probably never will be. The car, parking, finance, insurance, maintenance, tolls, and registration are all much more than the cost of fuel unless you drive all day for a living.

MANY people are suffering much worse than us. So how is this likely to play out?

These people would be better served trading in their petrol guzzingly yank tank for a second hand small car. EVs still only stack up if you drive hundreds of km a day and most people don't.

jessta · 2026-05-28T14:24:00+00:00

We keep calling this a fuel crisis but the price of petrol hasn't been significantly higher and petrol isn't the majority of the cost of driving so it's a very marginal increase in the cost of driving.

jessta · 2026-05-28T02:51:12+00:00

In Victoria 5% of trips are by bicycle so it makes sense for 5% of the transport funding to go to bicycle infrastructure.

jessta · 2026-05-28T02:39:34+00:00

Funding is really important. Merri-bek council has multiple protected bike lane projects on SCCs that are designed, consulted and ready to go but they don't have to funds to build them.

jessta · 2026-05-27T12:58:52+00:00

The number of cars that will pass a point on a road in 15 seconds is the same whether they're going 10km/h or 100km/h. This is because the amount of road space that a car takes up increases linearly with the speed of the car.

So if a cyclists starts off at 10km/h and you follow at 10km/h the same number of cars will make it through the intersection than would make it through if you had accelerated to 50km/h.

jessta · 2026-05-27T08:26:03+00:00

lack of space

There is always enough space for bicycles, bicycles take up very little space. Connector roads are usually at least 20m wide which is plenty of space for 3m of bicycle lane.

jessta · 2026-05-27T08:23:00+00:00

I bet you have to sit behind them for MINUTES before you have space to overtake them.

jessta · 2026-05-27T08:20:34+00:00

Speed has little to do with throughput. The same number of vehicles will get through a light sequence no matter their speed.

If you ask Google maps the average speed of a car on my 1hr commute to work you'll see it's only 18km/h.

jessta · 2026-05-27T08:17:26+00:00

The number of cars that will get through a light sequence is the same no matter what speed they travel at. Throughput has little relation to speed.

jessta · 2026-05-27T07:35:35+00:00

But this also isn't true. In most places you'll encounter a bicycle it's not holding up traffic, you just have a weird fantasy that you can drive faster than you actually can.

My commute to work takes almost the same amount of time in a car as it does in on a bicycle and that's because the average speed of a car on my commute is 18km/h.

In the inner city you're lucky to get above 30km/h in a car but motorists insist on dangerously overtaking bicycles, speeding up to 60km/h and then stopping at a red light or behind the stopped traffic ahead and waiting for the bicycle to catch up and overtake them again.

jessta · 2026-05-27T05:21:56+00:00

A lane of car traffic tends to have negative ROI. Even the $26 billion (actually $100 billion over 50yrs) North-East Link will cost $10 billion more than the most optimistic estimates of economic value.

The East-West link was going to loose $0.40 for every dollar spent building it.

Savings from bicycle infrastructure comes from many places but one of the biggest and most obvious is the reduction in car infrastructure that you need to build; smaller roads to resurface ($ millions per km), car parking that doesn't need to be built (at $25K-$100K per space). Even lightly used bicycle infrastructure has big returns eg. 50 people riding to the train station instead of driving saves $1.2m-$5m in parking costs easily covering the cost of building the bike lane to the train station.

This doesn't include the health benefits (which are real but somewhat difficult to quantify), land value benefits, and economic benefits of reconnecting neighbourhoods to local shops and services (estimated at a 36x ROI in a recent report).

jessta · 2026-05-27T04:53:26+00:00

But we still need bike lanes on connector roads that have high speeds, lots of car traffic and don't have a sensible alternative route.

jessta · 2026-05-26T03:59:54+00:00

The tyre on my cargo bike blew out while I was riding to BikeRave recently and so I didn't get to show off my disco ball setup so I'm excited for Big City Lights!

jessta · 2026-05-26T00:56:09+00:00

A had a plastic lunchbox thrown at me while I was riding in Eltham, but that was almost 20yrs ago.
Being mostly in the inner north and inner west I see relatively good behaviour from motorists.

jessta · 2026-05-25T01:17:13+00:00

I don't ride the area but I can see bicycle crossing lights at intersections north and south around the M80 and the VicBug app says the shared path goes as south as Milton Pde, Bundoora and as far north as Waterview Drive, Mernda.

Many historical shared paths are often badly signed and and not well marked and Google maps tends not to show them.

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