Primer: Should you buy an electric car?

Electric vehicle and charger (via Walter Baxter)

Knowing my keen interests in transport and climate change, people sometimes ask me whether they should buy an electric car for environmental reasons. The short answer is "it depends", and the long answer is annoyingly complicated, so to help others who might be wondering the same thing (and to help illustrate a point I want to make in tomorrow's blog post) I thought I'd summarise the key points here. 

What's the best place for a Eureka Stadium Station?

Eureka Stadium (via Wikipedia)

Eureka Stadium (aka Mars Stadium) in Wendouree has had a lot of upgrades over the last few years, and they've recently started playing AFL matches there. It's great to see this kind of thing happening in Ballarat, but it's clear that in order to run something like an AFL match you need more than just a good oval and a big grandstand - you need a lot of surrounding infrastructure to get all the punters to the ground before the game, and away afterwards.

Primer: Gauge

Australia uses mostly 1067mm Narrow Gauge, 1435mm Standard Gauge, and 1600mm Broad Gauge. (Source)

The issue of gauge is quite an important one in Australia, but because of its technical nature it tends to be overlooked by laypeople. The first thing you need to know is some basic terminology.

Primer: Line-on-a-Map Syndrome

A related phenomenon to the Coverage vs Patronage tension is Line-on-a-Map Syndrome. This is what you get when public transport advocates look at a map and say "There's no coverage here! Why don't we invest in some public transport to serve this area!" Or they might say "Hey, there's a freight railway line here, why don't we put a passenger train along there!" Or maybe "Hey, there's still an old railway station here, why don't we bring it back into service!"

Primer: Patronage versus Coverage

Public Transport has two primary goals, which actually compete with each other rather than complement each other - Patronage and Coverage. This distinction between the two functions matters a lot for how public transport networks are designed, and which projects are worthy of funding - but it's a distinction that's rarely made explicit. So you'll often have one group of people arguing for a project on the basis of Coverage and the other against it on the basis of Patronage - neither side is really speaking the same language, so the debate goes nowhere.