Friday, August 06, 2021

UN 100: What makes a good railway station?

Only a few words today since this Part 100 special is a video documentary.  

What makes a good station from an accessibility and connectivity point of view?  

This is the question posed and answered in this video. 

Follow me as I examine best practice and compare recently built stations in Melbourne. 



I hope you enjoyed it. 

Would you like to see more videos like this? 

Would you prefer this approach instead of (sometimes long) text posts? 

If so please let me know in the comments below. 


Index to Building Melbourne's Useful Network items

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing your insights and your commitment to improving public transport and walking in Melbourne Great to visit the stations on your video tour. I think its a good idea to mix up the text and videos.

Malcolm M said...

Mentone needs convenient bus access more than Ormond. A ptv spreadsheet I have for 2013-14 shows that 23% of Mentone's 18,770 weekly passenger entries accessed the station by bus, whereas at Ormond only 10% of its 16,350 entries accessed it by bus. Hopefully the convenience increases bus entries of the rebuilt Ormond station, particularly to Monash Uni, and not too many of the current bus passengers are put off by the inconvenience at Mentone.

Malcolm M said...

Your video shows little shelter on the platform at Mentone, whereas Ormond has all-over shelter for about half the train length under the road bridge.

Could you do a post on railway station shelter? The newer stations in Adelaide such as Oaklands and Adelaide Showgrounds have excellent shelter that extends across the track, whereas in Melbourne this has only been done on the skyrail stations where the height would otherwise make the platform much more exposed to the weataher. The budget for the Adelaide Showgrounds station was lower than that for Southlands, yet they were able to include a high roof across 3 platforms, whereas Southlands only has shelter like litle bus shelters. A forgotten part of waiting at a station is the waiting room, particularly at major interchange stations. Once I had quite a long wait at Footscray on a cold night when the train frequency was low and was grateful for the warm waiting room at this station.

Anonymous said...

Excellent video Peter. Mentone is definitely poorly designed with only one entrance to the station for such a busy station. The station should have been built next to Balcombe Road in its original location with two entrances to allow quicker and easier access to the bus interchange. Ormond is much better designed with two entrances and adequate shelter and should be the standard for all new stations.

Peter Parker said...

Malcolm - good point. Mentone has potential catchment from a lot of areas around Moorabbin Airport to the east and Beaumaris to the west which lack trains so needs feeders. Agree re station shelters. A good topic when next out and about.