Octopus Act – who’s the winner and who’s the loser?
No not the famous psychic octopus, the Railway Construction Act of 1884, which decreed that Victoria would be designed with its railways predominantly centred on Melbourne.
126 years down the track, let’s look back and see whether we can call Octopus a success or a failure. Has it served the state well? Was it the right policy at the time but now out of date? Was it simply wrong?
Please note, I realise the Act authorised the construction of a number of rail lines as well as decreeing the future of transport planning. I’d like to focus mainly on the planning and philosophy, more than the actual fact that lines were built.
Also, I’m focusing on suburban public transport systems as I understand them better than either country passenger or freight systems.
All Roads Lead to Rome
It may be simply that I’ve grown up with it, or it may be something fundamental to the human brain, but there is something inherently clean about the Octopus layout – everything centres on the major city, and all services (unlike Douglas Adams’ elevators) can only run either up or down. Once you get to the city you can get to anywhere else without having to change trains.
Redundancy for reliability?
The most obvious downside to the Octopus layout is the lack of any backup plan. If the Gippsland line is blocked, there’s nothing else you can do. If the Ballarat line is blocked, at least you can go round via Geelong. Cross-town lines can provide a useful function like this.
However, I want to put the view that this idea is flawed in the context of a modern high capacity rail system. It is uneconomic to maintain a high quality rail line if it’s not being used to at least 50% of its capacity. And obviously if a line is already more than half full, it can’t act as a backup for another line that’s more than half full.
Overseas experience
This is where I need some help from our well travelled members. I have seen a few examples of rail systems interstate and overseas but never for long enough to make an in-depth analysis of their efficiency or otherwise. Please weigh in with your findings, and correct me if I’m wrong on any of this.
- Perth – Octopus. Everyone knows the Perth system as a model for efficiency and good design – an interurban system rather than a metro, with an emphasis on the network of feeder buses rather than walk-up or park-and-ride passengers. Is this due to the Octopus layout? If not, at the very least we can say that they have proven that Octopus can be the basis of an excellent public transport system if the rest of the pieces are in place.
- Adelaide – Octopus. Adelaide has rail, interurban tram (actually a hybrid, interurban to the city centre then urban) and O-Bahn lines, all arranged in an Octopus-like manner. The rail system is relatively under-patronised, but this is most likely due to the low service frequencies rather than any consideration of Octopus vs Spiderweb layout.
- Sydney – Spiderweb. CityRail hit the wall a few years back, with service reliability low and falling, while punctuality was around 50%. This was blamed, rightly or wrongly, on the Spiderweb layout – which meant that delays on one line could ripple throughout the system. Rather than waste the cross-town links and rebuild the network in an Octopus layout they decided on the Clearways program, to ensure trains on separate lines wouldn’t interfere with each other. This has been successful, proving that the Spiderweb layout, unless compounded with other problems, is not in itself a recipe for disaster.
- Toronto – Octopus. Toronto is held by many people to be the ideal model for a well run public transport network for a city the size of Melbourne. However it has only a small metro rail system, and the bulk of the transport task is undertaken by buses.
- London – Spiderweb. The London Underground is highly regarded by the locals for its high frequency services, conveniently located stations and overall speed (compared to the available methods of transport above ground, in an Old World city where streets are narrow). However, when locals can casually talk about picking up a few extra pounds selling IT network topology maps to French tourists as Tube maps, or invent games like Mornington Crescent, we have to ask questions about how understandable the network is.
Hopefully someone who has been there can tell us about Tokyo, Paris, New York, Moscow, or in fact just about any other city in the world.
Why this sudden burst of philosophy?
The Eddington rail tunnel (or to use its DoT-sponsored name the Metro One Tunnel) is to run from Footscray through several under-served inner suburbs, through the city itself, down St Kilda Road and eventually to Caulfield. This breaks the Octopus. Instead of simply getting on a train to the city and then changing at Flinders Street, passengers will have to think about whether they’re going via Parkville or North Melbourne – and whether they’ll have to change trains by disembarking at South CBD (which we are told will be somewhere near the Town Hall), walking to Flinders Street and catching their train from there.
I realise that over time people will get used to it. After all, the City Loop was a similarly fundamental change in thinking, and passengers today are happy to change at Richmond or simply go right round. But as Yarra Trams pointed out to me in their inaugural briefing, a large and growing proportion of commuters today are not regulars who have been changing trains at Richmond since their school days. Most of these are overseas students – they have a language barrier as well as being in unfamiliar territory. Is our system easy for overseas students to understand? If not, we have failed.
I submit that today’s operation of the City Loop is incorrect. Trains should operate either through the city and out the other side, or via the Loop – and all trains from any given destination should do the same thing. Similarly with the direction – we need some loops clockwise and some anti-clockwise, but changing direction in the middle of the day is wrong.
Similarly with the proposed tunnel – I submit that since it’s not easy to understand (for an international student), it’s not the correct policy for Melbourne.
Viva l’Octopus.
I am lead to believe that there is potential for exits from CBD South to feed directly into Flinders Street, you could quite easily imagine access to Degraves Street subway similar to Perth with Perth Underground.
Before commenting on anything else, I’m going to rebut your comment that we need to cater for the international students; Sure, they are a growing proportion. But that means buggerall until you give us a percentage of total patronage or total population or whatever. They may be growing from 5% to 6% of patronage, in which case investing 10% of resources would be a waste.
I really despise that new rail tunnel, they’re going to spend five billion dollars and god knows how many years duplicating train and tram routes that we already have? I think it’s just crazy. Why not just run the existing system properly.
Tom, the rail tunnel is neccesary because even if the system were run properly, there wouldn’t be enough capacity to run the services we will need in say 2025.
Also, the trams along St Kilda Road and Swanston Street are apparently overcrowded (I’ve never used one, I’m going by other peoples’ observations) and a train service, offering much higher capacity, will be neccesary eventually.
Totally disagree re international students. They’re a significant proportion of current passengers (at least 20% I’d guess, apart from footy crowds) and by far the fastest growing. I would go so far as to say that more than half of the patronage growth is international students and immigrants.
Awww for chrissikes guys. International students mostly come from countries with working public transport systems. If they can’t understand how to change at Richmond, it’s because like me they can’t understand why Richmond is so badly designed for an interchange station. Unlike, say Admiralty.
They also can’t understand why the only transport bureaucrats in the world who never leave their own shores and visit another transport system, and experience it from the customer p.o.v., are the clowns on Exhibition St formerly of birdpoo house.
Given I’m addicted now to Battlestar Galactica stuff, I can see a clear case for nuking from orbit. Time for me to program some Cylons to run the system properly.
big whopping typo above.
Meej, you know I’m happy with interchanging.
Sydney’s problem wasn’t the interchanging (and never has been, they are aware of the multiple routes they have had since the 1930s) – rather the transmissability of delay by physically running on another line.
For example, it might look sexy to have the shores run through to Berowra on the main – but it is crazy to do so. Better to have them all terminate at Hornsby.
At Glenfield I’m hoping the stills will all go through to Leppington via a flyover and the mains will pass unimpeded.
As for the Eddingtunnel – it’s weakness I’ve identified long ago. It’s not the tunnel itself, but the routing through to Sunbury of all places. Sunbury.
So X43 on the Boort down wheat fails at Harcourt. Velo36 is stuck at Castlemaine waiting for it to be pushed out of the way. Velo36 eventually gets to Sunbury and delays the 08:40 to Domain and runs late the whole way. Moral of the story – several trains out of Domain are rooted and the service disrupted because a wheat train got stuck 120 km from Melbourne.
Now that just doesn’t happen on the Tube, the Subway or the MTR. Lots of things could bugger up those systems, but wheat loco failures isn’t one of them.
Eddingtunnel should be a separate new system. If they want to retro-metro one of the lines I would suggest Upfield. Or if they can sort out the RRL properly, then make it a Sunshine new service. No level crossings on the route, and all new track, signals and wire on the Sunshine section.
Meej, lets say your right that international students are now approximately 20% of total patronage growth, with growth being the key word. We know that over the last decade patronage has doubled, so I.S.
Ricc; the situation you describe wouldn’t happen if the RRL+Eddingtunnel plan included quadding from Sunshine to both Sunbury and RRLjunc as well as from the city to Sunshine.
Personally I support the combination of RRL and the Eddingtunnel, but I think that the latter should be a medium-term rather than short-term plan.
Dammit, hit send too early. Can someone delete the above?
Meej, lets say your right that international students are now approximately 20% of total patronage growth, with growth being the key word. We know that over the last decade patronage has doubled, so International Students represent 1/5 of that, therefore around 10% of total patronage.
Ricc; the situation you describe wouldn’t happen if the RRL+Eddingtunnel plan included quadding from Sunshine to both Sunbury and RRLjunc as well as from the city to Sunshine.
Personally I support the combination of RRL and the Eddingtunnel, but I think that the latter should be a medium-term rather than short-term plan.
“Ricc; the situation you describe wouldn’t happen if the RRL+Eddingtunnel plan included quadding from Sunshine to both Sunbury and RRLjunc as well as from the city to Sunshine”
Right Dave, but it won’t sadly. The best of new rail infrastructure mixed with some of the very worst. The Eddingtunnel is only a 30 year later repeat of the City Loop fiasco, lessons unlearnt.
As for the International Student issue – why is it an issue? Aren’t they passengers like any other?
I don’t buy the idea of stupid foreigners. Stupid Australians sounds more like it. The ones in Exhibition St. You know the ones I mean.
The only reaction I can imagine from foreigners seeing our train system is laughter; or a request for a refund for their ticket.
Midga, the problem with the Act was that aside from some lines that were needed, it is purely and simply pork-barrelling. There was no attempt to use it as a basis for future railway growth, it was all about Sir Thomas Bent and co getting rich off land speculation.
The main reason in my opinion we ended up with a hub-and-spoke system is that the two main termini (Flinders St and Spencer St) were close to one another, and a decision was made when the viaducts across the flats around the back of the Yarra off Batman’s Hill were done to connect the two, a decision to turn one into a suburban terminus and one into a regional terminus was taken.
Bear in mind that up until that point, the South and North Suburban Lines had operated independently of each other – the South Suburban lines were their own company, and the northern ones, all resulting from failures of private enterprises mainly, were run by the VR, which made the M&HBUR a massive offer that the directors didn’t refuse. From memory it massively overinflated the value of the lines.
I use the example of international students as they’re a significant proportion of passengers (or if not they soon will be). Really, anyone who hasn’t grown up with the system will be confused by it if it’s unnecessarily recursive. I should know, I was in several foreign cities last year and tried out their metros.
Yes they’ll soon get used to it, for their regular journeys. But if we want to make Melbourne a welcoming city with a transport system that’s easy to use, we need to make it much simpler to work out how to get from any station to any other.
People are smart, they’ll get used to it within a month. We don’t need to design the network for tourists.
Besides, once Metlink’s journey planner becomes a phone “app”, we don’t need networks to be understandable because the computer will do all the planning for that person.
Well then who do we design the network for?
Or maybe that should be a new post.
More who was the network designed for and why?
Notch, as you are saying, the network was designed for squattercrats and soldier settlers to get what would now be described as piddling amounts of freight to market and wharf, the cheapest way possible (mixed with a few grandiose schemes that should have been knocked on the head at the word go).
And a few oddities like the City Loop, GWY line and Laverton-Altona railway, built for passengers.
And it was largely built in the 19th century, without any effective competition in the ’same day transit’ and ‘bulk’ markets.
If Mr Benz and friends had put their efforts into internal combustion engines a bit earlier, they might have completely headed off the idea of a mass coverage rail system.
The other limitation about the Victorian rail system was that it was never the Australian rail system, particularly on the northern border where connectivity might have delivered separate Brisbane to Melbourne and Adelaide to Sydney main lines. As well as many missed opportunities to provide farm to wharf transport from the likes of Griffith or Parkes.
Meej, if you want to design anew network rationally (and please lets avoid more fantasy network discussions) you need to look at the actual urban planning and likely urban congestion, how specific traffic flows contribute to it, and how the existing network fails to mitigate this adequately. And then, and only then, propose new lines.
It pains me that Richmond station is still a beeping awful station, even after the proof of concept at North Melbourne, yet they want to spend vast sums on new trackage without spending what might be $100 million fixing Richmond for good (or at least, for a long time).
If half the Sandringham pax alight at Richmond and head for the loop, that means that as much capacity as that releases (say 500 pax per train, and that could be upped to as much as 20 trains per hour) then that is the minimum available capacity for Richmond to FSS. The key is to get those pax off the other trains and onto the ex-Sandy with the minimum of fuss.
And I can’t believe the reverse isn’t also true, that even with the trains coming in 90% full into Richmond from all lines, and losing a few for the FSS direct, that there isn’t space for the Sandy pax. It just needs better flow: better information, better pedestrian movement, get rid of the hinderances such as the platform furniture, consistent train movements from platforms eg Platform 8 should ONLY be for the Loop.
This stuff MUST be done ahead of any dreaming and digging.
Idea:
Richmond be redesigned so that Platform 7 and 8 become a real self-contained cross platform interchange, and discourage the practice of pax heading for 3 or 5 from 7 or 8 from the middle stairs.
Redesign the movements in west and east subways so that ex Sandy pax are encouraged to go to 8 from the west subway but only to 3 or 5 from the east subway. And then encourage the pax to spread out along the platform from the respective directions, keeping pax flows as “one way” as you can.
Meej,
I would have thought that it should be clear who we design the network for – the intended patronage, with resources allocated by proportion. If 95% of our passengers are commuters then we allocate 95% of resources to making that traffic efficent and reliable. That goes for everything; rollingstock, timetables, staffing, whatever.
Depending on the timeframe we’re discussing, who the network *was* designed for should be irrelevant (except in that we can learn from past successes/failures). If we’re building a new network out of the carcass of the old one, all we need to know is “what exists that we can and should recycle” – bugger what it’s being used for today.
Ricc, agree re: Richmond. Incidentally by modern station design standards it is deficient; the platforms are a bit too short, I doubt the ramps at either end are DDA-compliant and I think the platforms are a bit too thin (although I haven’t checked). The new standards, particularly on the latter point, were inspired by crowding at Parliament. I think it would be nice to make the central subway about twice as wide, and also have steps from the up side, making access a lot easier. Alternatively you could add another subway on the western side of Punt Road, and join both to proper bus interchanges (although that would corrupt interchanges between buses and trams there; how popular are they by comparison?)
Ah, the redesign of Richmond station. It has been waiting for a serious tart up since the last big bang in 1956 when it was expanded from 6 to 10 platforms, and that old fashioned Victoriana look was replaced by sleek modern exposed concrete and some dinky pastel tiles. The Octopus station skipped over eight tracks and went to ten like some deep-sea monster to cater for those thickening eastern and southeastern tendrils. Maybe North Melbourne station should do the same to cater fro the western tentacles……..
Some of us may have noticed the engineering firm SKM touting their sustainability credentials a few years ago with the Zero-carbon concept of a shiny new Richmond station. It is the almost sensible and inevitable outcome to redevelop above the station which has concentrated flows of valuable Bayside and Eastern suburban commuters, and adjacent to the greatest sporting precinct in the Southern Hemisphere, which is fast running out of areas to develop new arenas.
Unfortunately, whilst there was sensible land use planning, transport planning for the interchange seemed to get a bit twisted in the images and text descriptions, with commuters climbing to the deck about 8m above the railway to go down to the platforms which are also 5m above Punt Road and Swan Street. Smelt a bit like Southern Cross, climbing up higher than neccessary to go down to cater for the DFO – I think they call that a SOD – shopping oriented development rather than a TOD.
I digress. The central underpass is the initial key to fixing Richmond station as an effective interchange. Whilst re-designing the track would fix some flow issues and stop the peak-hour mosh pit in the subway, the initial challenge to improve widen it by widening requires DoT and Metro engagement with VicRoads as the wall of the subway is Punt Road. Maybe this could even be an example for Southern Cross!
Long have I looked at those futuristic concrete walls as I drive into the shadow under the station and wondered why they haven’t at least put windows in the non-structural elements to let the light in, or even cantilever over the admittedly narrow footpath to make it “twice as wide” and at least creep closer to DDA standards. However, it might make peak hour motorists feel silly if the scurrying commuters are moving faster between trains than they are.
Alas the left-turning Brunton Road lanes prevent a sensible bus interchange location at this point for north route buses. and traffic loading limit an interchange stop under the station. Trams, buses and trains are not currently designed to meet together in 3D or 4D except on 2D maps which hint at possibilities.
Richmond needs a bigger re-design than just track layout, looking for the TOD future and replacing the battered fill under the station with active spaces for people who use it! After all, like North Melbourne it is on the abdomen of the Octopus, not a tentacle. There is still a lot of this century left for new shininess…….
I would have thought that it should be clear who we design the network for – the intended patronage, with resources allocated by proportion. If 95% of our passengers are commuters then we allocate 95% of resources to making that traffic efficent and reliable. That goes for everything; rollingstock, timetables, staffing, whatever.
This sounds dangerously like ‘predict and provide’ transport planning that got us into the parlous state we’re in now. The network has already been re- designed around CBD commuters land PT ‘captives’. The real challenge is how do we design a network that breaks the cycle of ‘predict and provide’ to create a transformative network that caters for more than the captives or the low hanging fruit of patronage? How will the network look if patronage was to triple? CBD jobs (or students) won’t drive patronage then, it will be kind of network that uses the radial network as a spine, but with lots of buses in between to serve the areas off the rail network.
LS
I meant to actually address the octopus vs spiderweb vs loop idea that kicked this post off before ranting about Richmond and interchanges.
I’ve only really experienced a true non-octopus radial system in Japan, Singapore and accidently in Paris. Osaka has a loop about 10-15km circumference that links to a number of the pre-existing radial “shopping” lines that were redeveloped with the big department store owners early last century. Similarly Tokyo has the 30km loop line that connects existing and new above -ground an subway lines.
The radial forms are still both prevalent, although only once at peak-hour did I observe the serious Tokyo crush, of a fogged window of a passing train with a montage of hands.
Paris is different again, older and more established with a web of through metro lines and subways that blended and enhanced the C19 radial lines that stopped at the edge of the city. That is a bit of a clue, because Melbourne was only a small albeit growing town when the rail reserves were granted on the (edge of ) the floodplains unlike Sydney where Central was outside a well established centre similar to Those older cities. The loops and webs were created because there was no one dominant centre and existing development required new infrastructure and development to be more distributed.
My other drum that I usually bang is pertinent because the rail webs and loops that connected the out of centre radial terminii also distributed urban development. Postwar this meant Montparnasse and La Defence in Paris. The almost complete re-building of Tokyo and Osaka after Robert McNamara and Doolittle’s firestorm blitz meant that the development is (more evenly) distributed. Shinjuku is more than 10km from Tokyo station, but is where ’80s Tokyo went to town to create the Akirascape of huge towers, a sort of Houston with trains. Similarly, Osaka’s development is not as concentrated, although both cities have centres. The cycle of predict and provide is replaced by “speculate and provide” to distribute the destinations and pax flows.
This can be seen in both Sydney after their “loop” was built around Wynyard and west of George St and Melbourne after the MURLA which helped drive and fund office and retail development in the north and west. Its just that it was so expensive and the CBD landowners were paying for it that meant the loop was politically used for nearly all trains, maintaining a centralised (distributed) paradigm that stuffed the “capacity” improvements up.
The current subway proposals in Sydney & Melbourne are subliminally justified in distributed development (speculation) opportunity as well as some interchanging options to help people go where they want to go. Buy in Arden if you’re retiring in 20 years!
As to whether the systems work because they have dedicated metro style tracks that prevent cascading stoppages, there were many junctions of lines coming into the central system from the burbs, but the density of interchanges mean that if one line is stuffed, there are nearby options to connect elsewhere cross-town. Of course, in Japan there are different private and public systems that make this possible, but even the multiple shared tracks seemed to provide enough options to work around obstacles. In three weeks of trains in Japan, I only had one delayed train, naturally on my flight out. Although I didn’t understand a lot of the driver’s intercom apology and nervous breakdown over stopping, but the frequency and tone suggested that this was embarrassingly unusual, and someone was being chowed out across the network by a fat controller – I can’t imagine that happening here – more a laconic bitching about a sorry excuse for our rail system.
Chicken or Egg? Octopus and radials need central power and central destinations. That central focus has diminished. You need a commitment to (support) distributed development or prevent centralised development to facilitate multiple systems and cross connections.
Look at Singapore in the last 20 years! Central planning for loop-MRT supported distributed development.
Anyway I doubt you could triple daily pax again at Flinders St now unless there was another war on.
Octopus and Spideweb layouts as indicated have both winning and losing traits.
Although in Melbourne we have SmartBus links, these are slow, and is often quicker to come in via the key interchange stations, and they to head back out.
Most of the problem with commuters using either layout is the lack of TUAG (turn up and go) frequencies.
Do you provide the frequency to lure the customers in? Or do you wait till overcapacity to provide the services?