Why Dutch Bikes are Better (and why I bought one)

A little bit of #LazyPosting on the blog this week. 

Amsterdam Lelylaan: a model for level crossing removals

The current spate of level crossing removals means that more stations are being rebuilt around Melbourne than at any time in living memory. These stations, by virtue of the selection process, are generally adjacent to roads - and often those roads are major public transport corridors, whether for trams or buses. Perhaps because we've gone from zero to 100 so quickly, and therefore don't have a ton of station design experience in our local public service, some of these new stations haven't been ideal from an urban design perspective - in fact in some cases they are worse than the ground-level stations they're replacing. The Dutch, however, are very good at this, so I thought I'd go through a case study to see what lessons Melbourne can learn from it.

Not just carbon: the problems with planes

A plane flying over Uilenstede on approach to Schiphol Airport

Travel Diaries: United Kingdom (Part 4)

Edinburgh Waverley Station

Travel Diaries: United Kingdom (Part 1)

Travel Diaries: Amsterdam

So - after wending my way up through Spain, France and Belgium, I'd finally arrived in my new home in Amsterdam. It's taken me a while to get around to writing these blogs, so rather than just my first impressions, I can give my observations collected over the last several months.

Travel Diaries: European High Speed Rail

Partly for environmental reasons, and partly because I want to see more of the countries I'm passing through, I try to avoid flying as much as possible, and prefer to take the train instead. So now that I'd arrived in continental Europe, with its fairly comprehensive long-distance rail network, there would be no more flying and no more investigating airport rail - it's overland High Speed Rail all the way to Amsterdam.

Introducing Travel Diaries