blog, jurgen dot ca.

What sort of a message does it send to an international tourist or groups alighting a SkyBus in Russell Street then having to carry their bags to … [a hotel] in Swanston Street?

I ask: What sort of message does it send to an international tourist or groups alighting an aeroplane at Tullamarine to be shepherded into an expensive bus, rather than a relatively cheap train link directly into the city?

Even Brisbane - BRISBANE! - a city so public-transport-phobic that they bury their busses in a tunnel under the CBD - has a train to the airport.

Mr McLeod attributed Coles' sales growth to increased customer transactions, double-digit growth in sales of fresh food as a result of quality improvements, and higher standards of customer service.

We were just talking today about the contrast in the attitudes of the two major chains to perceived "quality" labels: free-range, organic. Our local Woolworths has dramatically scaled back its organic and free-range selection, while Coles seems to have embraced it whole-heartedly. Our food hierarchy remains consistent though:

1. Prahran Market
2. If not at the Market, then: Aldi.
3. If not at Aldi, then: Woolworths.
4. If not at Woolworths, then: Coles.
5. If not at Coles, then: lower price sensitivity and start again.

I'm going to keep an eye on the relative pricing at Coles and Woolworths, and maybe try Coles more in the future.

Six thousand people have found the best picnic spot in Sydney this morning - sitting down to breakfast on the Harbour Bridge.

Oh that's just fantastic. What a great idea! I would love to be a part of that - as long as the weather wasn't too windy. I wonder if the BridgeClimb thing was happening at the same time - that would have been a very bizarre sight.

''Melbourne cannot survive this kind of sprawl - we are going to end up the way American cities are going. It is a horrendous future and the Government has got to stop it happening,'' RMIT University associate professor Michael Buxton said.

I've been saying this since I got here. Melbourne's sprawl is embarrassingly huge, and there are huge environmental, social and financial problems with that. The Government has warned the community sector that funding will not be increasing at the same rate as the population - and for the same reasons, infrastructure spending will be heading in the same direction.

A ticketing system and half-a-tunnel will not do anything to help the situation with public transport - and that's just one aspect of the problem.

Vancouver's able to contain its growth, because there are physical limitations on three sides: water, mountains and Americans. Melbourne doesn't really have those kinds of limitations. Whenever we run out of space, the easiest (and most guaranteed not to piss off inner Melbourne voters) solution is to just say that Melbourne is allowed to take up more space. Wrong answer.

We need to go up, not out. Density must be increased around transportation corridors. New single-family dwellings within a certain radius of the CBD (and other activity centres) ought to be actively discouraged through zoning, taxes and fees. To preserve historical elements of the city, some exceptions will need to be made. By and large though, what we're doing is simply not sustainable.

What are all these PC products doing in an Apple Store? No, really, did they take over a lease and move all the Macs out overnight?

Myki is costing $850 million to build and just under $550 million to run over 10 years — a staggering $1.35 billion price tag. There is a severe shortage of trains and trams to service Melbourne right now — $1.35 billion can buy a lot of trains and trams.

This article is full of fantastic pull quotes. Somewhere, a decision was made that we shouldn't buy a (much cheaper) off-the-shelf system and adapt our fare structure to that; rather, we hired all these consultants to adapt a system to our apparently-weird fare structure. Sigh.

And there's that number again. 1.35 BILLION.

Victoria has 4,645,000 people in it, more or less. That's $290 from every Victorian, for the privilege of paying for public transport.

"We can't know what they were actually thinking or feeling, but reading their action there's no reason not to believe these birds were saying a magpie farewell to their friend."

I've always thought that magpies are pretty smart. They seem more interested in communicating than other birds are.

Apple has designed its new 27" iMac model to serve as an external display for DisplayPort devices such as recent MacBook and MacBook Pros.

This is a clever idea, and the linked article compares display prices, the 24" LED display, the 30" Cinema Display ... and the 27" iMac (which is a nice big screen that happens to include a Mac inside...). They're getting to the point of being perfectly adequate TV replacements.