During December 2019 Yarra Trams and the City of Melbourne completed a whirlwind of work to upgrade William Street through the Melbourne CBD. But it isn’t just buses that they forgot when building the new tram stops and bike lanes – they’ve screwed up the pedestrian crossings. Pedestrian crossings at major intersections have been widened. […]
Melbourne’s tram network is one of the biggest in the world, with 24 routes traversing 250 kilometres of track, dating back over a century, and progressively extended and upgraded in the years since.
Today the challenge is to keep services moving despite increasing traffic congestion, carrying more passengers than ever before, while meeting new accessible transport standards. This is difficult activity given no two parts of the network are the same – so how can the Melbourne tram network be categorised by the environment they runs through?
The other day I was riding a route 30 tram along La Trobe Street, when I looked up at the onboard route map. Unlike the rest of the tram network, route 30 is so short that every single stop can be included on the diagram. But how many tram stops have been removed since then?
Earlier this week Yarra Trams closed another tram stop in the Melbourne CBD – this time it was stop 6 at Elizabeth and Franklin Streets. This isn’t the first stop to disappear on this street – so why did they go?
Over the past few years Yarra Trams have been closing tram stops all over the Melbourne CBD, as they embark on a program of building new platform stops that provide level access to the modern fleet of low floor trams. The most recent removal is stop 121 at the corner of Bourke and Spencer Streets, used by trams on routes 75 and 86.
