Each level-crossing removal in Melbourne has unique challenges and opportunities.
The Bell-to-Moreland project on the Upfield line, for example, involves removing four level crossings and building two new train stations. To remove the crossings, the rail has been elevated to create “sky rail” over a 3km stretch.
The land below can then be re-purposed for linear parks, recreation and active transport such as walking and cycling.
While the government emphasises such uses, these appear to be incidental reasons for the project. “Level-crossing removal” rather than, say, “rail upgrade” or “linear park project”, suggests its main purpose is to ease traffic congestion.
The media was again incredibly frustrating at the 4pm covid update yesterday, and in this mornings Herald.
Having Audrey Young doing a grumpy old woman routine asking the same gotcha question a million times ( why are we not told these business now? , and the switcheroo why were this businesses blindsided by releasing their information before informing them? ) was bad enough but her personal annoyance has become the subject of her piece this morning in the paper, where for some vague reason the PM needs to be involved to rev up the MOH over some quibble that Audrey doesn t like.
What is frustrating is ONE WHOLE YEAR after the COVID pandemic began the main media companies are STILL treating the pandemic as primarily a POLITICAL story, using courtier journalists who were excoriated by the public for their addiction to the gotcha dialogue of banter politics and viewing everything through the lens of horse race political analysis. Why was Audrey Young there? Why has the NZ Herald stil
viz., a supra-national entity that has laws, courts and the means to enforce the peace.
RedLogix 1.1.1.1.1.1
In my view that while the ICC was undeniably a good idea, it never attained the commitment across the board to permit it to succeed.
I ll go back to my original parallel; the reason why nation states are mostly lawful and peaceful places is that ordinary citizens forgo the right to coercion and revenge and place it solely in the hands of the nation state.
In the case of the ICC that never really happened; while most nations signed up to the ICC, there was never the necessary commitment to cede the nation state s own authority and interests. And while I agree the USA is the most outstanding culprit in this respect, it s also understandable given that as by far the most powerful sovereign nation it had the most at stake.
RedLogix 2.1
Interestingly that article starts with a description of appallingly bad safety standards at a major petrochem site in the 1960 s. Yet remarkably everything has changed in the 50 years since; the events he describes are pretty much unthinkable in a developed country today.
In particular:
One day, Sherman was standing in a room, leaning over a large pipe to check a filter, when an operator in a distant control room mistakenly turned a knob, sending hot, almond-smelling, liquid chlorinated hydrocarbons coursing through the pipe, drenching him
I worked for decades in that control room, always aware that I could kill or main with a bad or unlucky decision. Yet the technology advanced dramatically, giving us tools and platforms that properly implemented, making incidents like the above orders of magnitude less likely. Organisations soon realised that investing in safety tech actually saved them cash, and in the past decade virtually every major new in
Invercargill and Dunedin have been closed by floods once a decade or so.
Graeme 1.1.1
Large parts of Dunedin are below mean sea level, some around a metre. Invercargill is just above, but close enough that a flood combined with a high tide makes things pretty wet. Both suffer from being built on very weak ground, especially Invercargill, so both are never going to be more than they are now and unlikely to get much future investment.
It s not only airports that are at risk from sea level rise. The State Highway and railway going past Dunedin Airport are only slightly higher and just as at risk in many other places.