Once a week for GroupthinkFC indoor soccer matches I strap on my money belt, put a can of mace and a rape alarm in my pocket, and leave the safe and familiar surrounds of Brunswick in Melbourne’s inner north for the unfamiliar badlands of the eastern suburbs. Before this season I’ve never bought a zone two public transport ticket and now I know why zone two residents have the king shits with trains (when they arrive) and drive their cars instead (even though most have no choice.) If I choose to leave Brunswick before 6pm for a return trip to the soccer venue it costs me a whopping $10.10 for a daily ticket, and if I leave after 6pm it drops to a slightly more acceptable $5.50 for a two hour ticket that is valid all night. Highway freakin’ robbery, I tells ya.

Last night I deliberately planned my journey so that I was catching the 6.02pm train from Brunswick and I dutifully pumped $5.50 into a ticket machine. I sat on the (late) train into the city listening to my iPod and thinking about the awesome service I was receiving in exchange for my money. At Southern Cross I alighted in order to catch a second train out to the badlands and standing on the platform I was horrified to discover that my ticket had gone missing from the pocket it was sharing with my iPod.

I swore loudly and profusely.

Fuming, I approached the ticket barriers where two bored ticket Nazis were waiting to arrest people for making eye contact. I explained that I had lost my ticket and would need to be let out of the barriers to purchase a new one to complete my journey. Of course they looked at me skepticly and prepared to fine me in triplicate, but I think the “if you fucking dare try to fine me or even reach for your ticket book I will go Martin Bryant on your arse” look on my face dissuaded them and they reluctantly let me through.

So I ended up paying $11.00 to make a return journey from one part of Melbourne to another. I should just buy a car.

Victorian Premier John Brumby, being an earnest and very serious accountant kind of man, is usually not too fond of cliches and pithy slogans like most political leaders, but something he said yesterday while announcing a re-jig of the suburban train timetable made me shudder like a grave had just been opened.

Premier John Brumby said population growth, more employment in the central business district and rising petrol costs meant more people were using trains.

He said the extra services would “ease the squeeze” on overcrowded trains.

The squeeze, it must be eased!

Please note: if you’re going to spend the entire journey fondling and kissing your girlfriend, do not wear a short, fitted T-shirt — no amount of stretching or tugging at the bottom of it will hide your stiffy as you limp off the bus. 

I’m in a filthy, filthy mood today. I’m world-hating and ready to glass anyone who comes near me with a freshly smashed beer bottle. It all started yesterday.

At 4:30pm I left home to head out into the wilds of Melbourne’s eastern suburbs for GroupThinkFC’s third match. I was aiming to get to Jeremy’s place a couple of hours early for a hardcore session of Guitar Hero before the soccer game at 7:40pm. But due to the terrible storms in Victoria yesterday afternoon the public transport system was in chaos. So instead of arriving at Jeremy’s at 5:45pm I arrived at the soccer match four minutes before kickoff and three hours after leaving home having walked through Camberwell in the rain with thousands of other stranded rail commuters, waiting for the 109 tram in the rain with thousands of other stranded rail commuters, and begging Ant to go far out of his way to come and pick me up.

Then with six minutes elapsed in first half of the game I rolled my ankle and had to leave the field with an icepack. The crunching and popping sound, along with the pain and instant swelling indicated that it was one of the nastier sprained ankles I’d ever suffered.

Then I had to sit on the sidelines and watch GroupThinkFC get annihilated 13-3.

Then I had to cancel my holiday that I was leaving on this morning since three days of hiking in the Grampians is not so much fun when I can barely hobble from the lounge to the dunny. I was really looking forward to this holiday.

So don’t mess with me, world. I’m not a happy camper right now.

That’s a sexy foot, right there

Few things infuriate me more than irresponsible driving. A car, in the hands of an idiot, is more deadly a weapon than a pistol in the same idiot’s hands. While a gun is only capable of maiming or killing people one bullet at a time, a single act of carelessness or stupidity behind the wheel can take out — as Thomas Towle tragically discovered — several people in one fell swoop.

As a daily tram user, I witness one particularly dangerous act of stupidity on a depressingly regular basis: drivers failing to observe the law that they must not pass the rear of a stopped tram, thereby allowing passengers to disembark safely.

In high school, a mate’s mother was killed in such an incident, so I’m especially sensitive about this all-too-common traffic violation. So are tram drivers, but the most severe censure they’re able to give motorists who zoom past their stopped trams is the embarrassingly impotent bell treatment: take that (ding!) and that (ding!) and THAT (dingding!) you naughty man or woman!

Of course, in most cases the drivers are so far beyond the tram by this time that they won’t even hear the bell, let alone realise how close they’ve come to injuring or killing someone. That is, until today.

This morning, at a very busy intersection, I was the last passenger disembarking from my tram. As I stepped down onto the road, I noticed an approaching taxi that didn’t look like it was going to stop. It wasn’t moving very quickly — the traffic light ahead was red — but it showed no intention of slowing down until it reached the stop line.

I held out my hand to indicate that the driver should stop, but he completely ignored me and kept driving. In a remarkable stroke of luck, the planets aligned and the timing was perfect for me to indulge my righteous indignation — so as the taxi drove between me and the tram, I sunk my knee into its back door. Really fucking hard.

It produced what I can only assume was the most satisfying crunching sound since George W Bush fell off his Segway.

Every day the Brumby ALP government in Victoria is looking more and more like the worst parts of John Howard’s shameful administration. Yesterday the head of the Transport Ticketing Authority, Vivian Miners, resigned from his job by “mutual consent” with the transport minister, Lynne Kosky. Miners is responsible for the smartcard ticketing debacle that is hideously over-budget and three years overdue, and in a completely unrelated coincidence he was due this morning to give evidence at a parliamentary committee investigating his apparent conflict of interest during the smartcard tendering process. This is the kind of accountability and transparency that John Howard was famous for.

But his resignation has highlighted the ridiculous salary that Miners was being paid: $545,000. That makes made him the highest paid public servant in the State, and it’s more money than John Surname earns in a year. How can we possibly justify such an astronomical salary for somebody whose job, while important, is to oversee only one aspect of one portfolio of the entire government? If over half a million dollars is justified for the head of the public transport ticketing division then why isn’t the Premier on at least double that figure? And since I can bring my classroom photocopying in under-budget every term why aren’t I paid as much as Vivian Miners is was?

A crime was committed just up the road from GrodsHQ in the wee hours of this morning.

A security guard was shot in the shoulder outside an adult entertainment business in Brunswick early today.

Police said a man wearing a balaclava and armed with a small handgun shot the security guard standing outside the premises in Sydney Road at 1.30am (AEDT).

The victim, believed to be in his late 40s, was taken to the Royal Melbourne Hospital in a stable condition.

The armed man, who ran off down an alley, was described as 180 centimetres tall and of medium build.

Police have released a photograph of a man wanted for questioning over the crime, standing in front of the strip club in question.

If you see this guy do not approach as he is armed and dangerous

Apparently the Melbourne public transport system has an image problem.

ALMOST half of Victorians think the state’s public transport system is worse than five years ago.

The latest Age/Nielsen poll found that 49% of Victorians think public transport is worse, while 27% say it’s better.

Dissatisfaction with public transport appears to cross the political divide, with 48% of Labor voters and 54% of Liberal voters saying it is worse.

And of course public transport Minister Lynne Kosky is completely dodging the issue and further enhancing her image as a complete tool.

The report, released by the Department of Infrastructure this month, found 30,000 more people were working in the city centre in 2006 than in 2001. Despite this jump, almost 5000 fewer people drove to work.

And the number of people who walked to work in the city centre rose to more than 5%, up from less than 3% in 2001.

Ms Kosky said she was extremely pleased with the results. “People are voting with their feet,” she said.

Remember, this is the same Minister who has blamed train commuters for delays by taking too long to get in and out of carriages, blamed commuters for expecting that the train or tram will show up when the timetable says it will, and demanded that workplaces and schools change their behaviour to match the public transport service rather than the other way around.

Now, everyone has a couple of hundred public transport horror stories but here’s my most recent.

On Sunday McBec and I wanted to get from Brunswick to St Kilda to meet friends at the pub. We left home just after 2pm and didn’t expect the trip to take much longer than an hour. The Sydney Rd Street Festival was on so we thought we’d walk our way through and grab a tram at the end of Sydney Rd. However, we got there and found the tram service replaced by buses. After waiting 20 minutes for a bus we walked, frustrated, to Jewell train station to catch the 3.04pm service to the city.

Of course, Connex regretted that the 3.04pm to the city had been cancelled.

So we walked back to Sydney Rd and watched a bus go past just before we got to the stop. 20 minutes later we finally got on a ridiculously overcrowded bus to Elizabeth St in the city. It was 3:20pm. By the time we got to St Kilda it was just past 4pm — a travel time from Brunswick of two hours. We could’ve driven to Bendigo in the same amount of time.

We don’t own a car because we live in the inner city and there is public transport almost everywhere we need to go. But every single day I thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I don’t rely on public transport to get to work like so many other poor saps who either have no choice or try to do the right thing by leaving the car at home. I get homicidal when trains are cancelled when I’m trying to get to the pub, let alone get home after a ten hour day at work.

It’s time for Lynne Kosky and the Brumby government to wake up and provide a public transport system that meets the demands of the people of Melbourne and that justifies the overblown cost of a ticket to use it.

We love to slag off taxi drivers for being unable to drive, unable to find major landmarks, and unable to speak English. I’ve done it. But honestly try to put yourself into the shoes of a Melbourne taxi driver and understand just how utterly shithouse the job would be. First there’s the pay.

[T]he driver, having split his fares 50/50 with the operator, will earn $8.50 an hour after tax and GST. For the shorter version of a standard 60 to 80-hour week, for full-time cabbies that’s $450. Hardly a rich reward.

That’s when you’re even getting paid the fare.

Three weeks ago, my driver was affable Ranji Mullick, from India’s Punjab, who said, “I’ve had a good run,” before checking himself. “Well, I’ve had two runners, the last one a woman in her 20s, who I drove from Chapel Street (Prahran) to a block of flats in Kensington. She got out, went into the flats to get money to pay me and, of course, I didn’t see her again.”

Plus you have to question whether the paltry coin makes up for the risks.

TAXI driver Praboj Rhani heard the racist insult on a Saturday night, about the same time his shoulders became footrests for one of the three young men in the back seat.

Mr Rhani had collected his passengers in King Street just before midnight, about the time pubs and nightclubs start disgorging the first of their well-tanked clientele. “Drive us to Sunshine West, brown c—,” he was instructed.

As the invective flowed, Mr Rhani, from Rawalpindi in Pakistan’s west, knew he’d be doing no such thing, and pulled over. His firm “Please leave my cab” was met with “Make us, c—”.

So where are the police when passengers get abusive and threaten violence? Oh, that’s right. Victoria’s finest aren’t really the finest.

[Rhani] got out and was met on the pavement by a young policeman, who asked him what the problem was. “My passengers are abusing me, sir, and I don’t want to carry them. This is a dangerous thing, I don’t want to be involved with them.”

Mr Rhani said his entreaties and the policeman’s command to “get back in and drive the cab, you’re a taxi driver, take them to where they want to go” became repetitive. Finally, the policeman became impatient and said: “Get back in the cab and drive the f—ing thing.”

To protect and to serve. Apparently.

Of course, Premier John Brumby has the power to, you know, make laws that increase the safety for taxi drivers and the quality of taxi services but he’s just employing the tactic that is working so well with teachers at the moment: bitch about the quality of those doing the job but do nothing to help those people do it better.

Shortly after becoming Premier, John Brumby said the two worst things about Melbourne were a 42-degree day and the city’s taxis.

Why not do something about it, John?

Recently, the media has been working itself into a frenzy over the revelations that John Howard’s office has been editing Wikipedia articles to show him in a more positive light. I seriously doubt Howard knew about this (as technical matters are beyond him), but what would happen if you used WikiScanner (the site that busted them) to look up the IP addresses of other people?

For instance, what would happen if I looked up the IP address of (and this is a completely random example) Age journalist Chris Johnston, who has an alarming habit of leaving anonymous comments both here and on Random Brainwave, as well as googling himself to see if he the darling of the Australian blogosphere (he isn’t)?

Clearly bored with self-googling, he has now moved on to editing (and occasionally vandalising) Wikipedia.

His many, many, many edits include Airbourne, the tragic 1998 Grand Final (in which he sagely notes that “Many believe North Melbourne’s defeat was due to the presence of a bloke called Mario”), Age editor Andrew Jaspen (he created the page), the Bra Boys, Henry Kissinger, Big Brother contestant Simon Deering/HotDogs (in which he enthused that HotDogs posed naked “with a strategicly [sic] placed hampsster [sic] covering his genitals” and that “He lists his favourite food as Kinder Suprise [sic] - “It’s a delicous [sic] snack and a toy, bonus!”), Wayne Carey (he removed a link to the Herald Sun), the talk page of The West Australian (in which he defends his employers honour - “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black: how can you mount an attack on a paper’s journalistic style with a one-sided rant such as this, packed with unsourced [sic]and unsubstantiated claims?”), and puzzlingly, Sunrise host David Koch (where he states “*Koch rates turkey slapping, co host Mel, as funniest incident of 06.”)

His ongoing contributions can been seen here, and we applaud his excellent work.

Update: The good people at Girlfriend Magazine have also been hard at work.

The Editor updates (29 Aug): Chris has popped in to deny that he is responsible for these edits. Even so, they’re still hilarious edits for Fairfax staff to have made.

Update (30 Aug): Telstra go nus on Wikipedia. Very entertaining.

We’ve all heard the favoured insult — un-Australian — of politicians who wish to strike out at values not aligned with their own, but now there’s a new un word that we in Melbourne can hurl around with gay abandon: un-Melburnian.

This latest bastardisation of the language comes courtesy of Melbourne Lord Mayor John So (who is definitely not John Surname’s bro.) He has branded a public art vandal un-Melburnian for taking a sledgehammer to the Sandridge Bridge. But as with the concept of un-Australian, to truly understand what is un something we must first know what it is to be that something in the first place. So, dear readers, help me to work out what somebody must be lacking to be accurately labeled as un-Melburnian.

A taste for real coffee? A sense of smug satisfaction at being better than Sydney? A love of “unique laneways”?

Large sums of money are changing hands: Melbourne train network operator Connex has been fined $62 million for poor performance since April 2004 while tram operator Yarra Trams has been slugged just under a million bucks for the first three months of 2007.

However, these hefty fines shouldn’t be a problem for the private companies running Victoria’s public transport infrastructure. The Victorian government paid them $1.2 billion in subsidies between 1999 and 2006, with the subsidy total tipped to hit $2.1 billion by 2010.

Why would these companies make any effort to improve their services if they know any fines paid will be reimbursed many times over in the form of ever-increasing subsidies?

So I’m sitting on the 96 tram from East Brunswick yesterday afternoon when a crazy looking lady gets on. You know the type: those people who look right at home on public transport with their mis-matched clothing and bizarre features like glitter hair clips and rainbow socks. She was carrying one of those plastic tartan $2 bags that are only used by people moving house or people without a house.

Weird lady sits down across the aisle from me, puts the $2 bag on her lap, unzips it and — wait for it — pulls out a cat.

I shit you not. A fully grown, long-hair domestic cat.

I was waiting for the cat to jump down and run like hell up and down the tram clawing passengers’ eyes out like our Napoleon would if he were in a similar situation, but this little furball was obviously used to such treatment as it sat calmly on the weird lady’s lap while she cooed loudly and kissed it on the head. After a while she turned it over, cradled it like a baby, and started grooming it with a brush.

Some ten minutes of grooming later the weird lady noticed with a start that she was nearly at her stop so she roughly shoved the cat back in the bag, zipped it up, and ran off the tram.

Who’d drive a car when such fantastic entertainment is available for free on public transport?

Why didn’t I think to invest in Hitachi trains?

From The Age:

In 2002, it decided to scrap and sell its ageing Hitachi train fleet. Mr Horne picked up half for the bargain price of $2600 per carriage. Last November he sold three carriages back to the State Government for $60,000, a profit of more than 700 per cent.

The closest I have ever come to a deal as dick-hardeningly good as that is when I traded the Split Enz single Late Last Night that I bought for $2 for an autographed CD.

Hitachi trains were first introduced in 1972, and were widely admired as they were the first train to be made entirely from stainless steel. I like to imagine that people in the 70’s used to watch the Hitachi speed past, shake their heads with a rueful chuckle, and dream of the future.

Now the Hitachi trains are, to put it lightly, total garbage. They shake, they rattle, they roll, and when some goober has opened a window you can’t hear anyone near you talk.

“WHAT?” you will shout in vain.

“I’m sleeping with your best friend!” she will cry, arms flailing.

“What?!” you scream, eyes popping from your forehead in a vain attempt to comprehend the muffled sounds eminating from her lips.

And so on.

Today, I was unfortunate enough to catch a Hitachi for the first time in ages from Camberwell. The interior of the train brought to mind a homosexual’s nightmare, as many-a gay man has woken from his slumber screaming after dreaming of fake wood panelling.

I mean, really!

Is stock from the early 70’s really what Melbourne should be using in the new millenium? For once, the blame can’t be levelled at Connex as they don’t own the trains - the government does.

Mr. Horne is really cleaning up:

That deal would be worth between $150,000 and $200,000 per train, including the $25,000 cost of trucking each carriage to Melbourne. But in another deal the Government got a bargain, securing another six-carriage set from rail enthusiast group Elecrail for $35,000.

Incidentally, I also visited the infamous Nobbies visitors centre this weekend. Two Bracks screw-ups in two days, aren’t I a lucky boy?

(Cross posted on the excellent Random Brainwave)

Lynne Kosky is coming up with all the great ideas about how to improve Melbourne’s public transport system and none of them require the government to do a thing. Last month she admonished commuters for unreasonably expecting their trains to turn up on time, and now she wants schools to stagger their start times to ease demand on the transport system during peak times:

Public Transport Minister and former education minister Lynne Kosky wants to run a pilot scheme encouraging schools to change starting times to spread the commuter peak.

“If we changed some of our schools’ starting patterns, and it probably is the ones that are located close to the city, that would provide incredible capacity on our train system,” Ms Kosky said.”

For crying out loud, why can’t the government “provide incredible capacity” on the train network by investing some bloody money? The government’s public transport strategy at the moment seems to require commuters changing their behaviour to match the crumbling and inadequate system rather than building a system that matches commuters’ needs.