I pulled over to take a closer look, and found a car belong to SGS S.A. – a Swiss multinational company which provides inspection, verification, testing and certification services.

There was a piece of tripod mounted equipment labelled TIRTL on one side of the intersection.

And a second unit on the other side.

Also connected to an equipment box.

So what was it all for? The green thing labelled ‘TIRTL’ is actually a ‘The Infra-Red Traffic Logger‘ unit:

The transmitter sends two cones of infrared light across the roadway, and the receiver records vehicles as they break and remake these cones. TIRTL transmitter’s infrared cones cross each other and form two straight and two diagonal beam pathways.

When a vehicle crosses the beam pathways, TIRTL records two beam events; it records one from the vehicle breaking and one leaving the beam pathway. These two beams events are recorded for all four beam pathways. Thus, eight timestamped events are generated per axle. The velocity is derived from the timestamps of these beam events.

This velocity data is then compared with the velocity data calculated by the speed camera system itself, as part of the testing and maintenance procedures required under the Road Safety (General) Regulations 2019.

Quarterly:

– Speed accuracy and speed reliability testing
– Camera system asset inventory
– Camera system sensor evaluation

Which leads to the issuing of an annual test certificate for each camera.

Footnote: and another one

I’ve also found the speed and red light camera at the corner of Flinders Street and William Street undergoing testing.

Back in 20114 it was the speed camera which issued the most fines in Victoria, with 20,774 in one quarter. While in 2017 it claimed the dubious honour of Victoria worse location for motorists running red lights, with almost 2000 fines issued in one quarter.

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Some history

Blink and you’d miss it is the story of most buses in Melbourne, and route 605 from Gardenvale is no different.

For many years route 605 travelled in a loop around the Melbourne CBD via Flinders Street, Queen Street, Lonsdale Street and Exhibition Street.

But was rerouted in 2017 to travel via Queen Street and Flagstaff station, as part of a package of changes made due to Metro Tunnel works at Domain Interchange.

The State Government boasted about the changes when they were announced.

The Andrews Labor Government has announced changes to the route of bus 605 to ensure passengers can continue to get where they need to go when work ramps up on the Metro Tunnel.

Parliamentary Secretary for Public Transport Ros Spence announced the new route for bus 605 today, which will travel around the works for the new underground station at Domain.

Route 605 currently travels between Punt Road and Swan Street into the city. Starting 25 June this year, the route will travel along Anderson Streets and Birdwood Avenue into the western end of town, along Queen Street as far as La Trobe Street.

The new route will allow passengers to connect to trams along St Kilda Road, as well as trains at Flagstaff Station.

It will now pass Melbourne Grammar School and Melbourne Girls Grammar School, providing students with direct connections into the city.

The new route reached Flagstaff station via La Trobe Street.

Stopping outside the Supreme Court at William and Little Lonsdale Street.

And then back to Queen Street via Lonsdale Street.

As for bicycle lanes on William Street, cyclists once needed to fight their way around cars, until the 2014 installation of chevron separated lanes in the space between parked cars and moving traffic.

Enter the William Street works

Tram passengers and cyclists were quoted as the main beneficiaries of the work on William Street.

We’re upgrading city tram stops on Route 58, to make travelling by tram easier for everyone – including passengers who are vision impaired or using wheelchairs, prams, and other mobility aids.

Stops 5 and 7 on William Street in Melbourne’s CBD will be upgraded in late 2019 to improve safety, accessibility, and journey times.

William Street is being upgraded around these new tram stops to keep pedestrians, trams, and bikes moving, helping everyone get around.

In partnership with the City of Melbourne, we will deliver new separated bicycle lanes along William Street between Little Collins and La Trobe streets.

Doing these works together means we can limit impacts on the community through fewer road closures and deliver the benefits of these upgrades sooner.

But buses were a mere footnote.

Bus stops will be moved to enable dedicated bicycle lanes to be built along William Street.

Works commenced in November 2019 with a full road closure.

With route 605 bus operator CDC Melbourne publishing a diversion notice, and PTV publishing a terse version at the Flagstaff station bus stop.

Saturday 23rd November – Monday 9th December 2019

Due to roadworks on William Street, there will be a diversion in place that will affect Route No 605 on the affected dates above.

The following diversion will be used for the 605 route travelling towards Flagstaff Station.

The bus will travel along Queen Street, Melbourne and conduct a u-turn at the roundabout near Queen Victoria Market to go back onto Queen Street and resume it’s normal route.

Come December the works were completed, with new bike lanes in place, and platform stops making life easier for tram passengers.

But route 605 buses were still missing in action.

RTE 605:
Due to planned works along William St, Melbourne – services are diverting in both directions
Buses will not service Flagstaff RS in both directions until further notice
Please plan your journey

— CDC Victoria (@CDCVictoria) December 13, 2019

The PTV website pretends everything is fine – only Southbank Boulevard and New Years Eve diversions are listed.

But every day operator CDC Melbourne publishes a new diversion notice via Twitter.

RTE 605:
Due to planned works along William St, Melbourne – services are diverting in both directions
Buses will not service Flagstaff RS in both directions until further notice
Please plan your journey

— CDC Victoria (@CDCVictoria) December 14, 2019

Day.

RTE 605: Due to planned works along William St, Melbourne – services are diverting in both directions
Buses will not service Flagstaff RS in both directions until further notice.Please plan your journey

— CDC Victoria (@CDCVictoria) December 16, 2019

After day.

RTE 605:
Due to planned works along William St, Melbourne – services are diverting in both directions
Buses will not service Flagstaff RS in both directions until further notice
Please plan your journey

— CDC Victoria (@CDCVictoria) December 26, 2019

So how long until PTV realises something is wrong, and does something about it?

So why can’t buses use William Street?

The former route 605 bus terminus at William and Lonsdale Street is now occupied by a separated bike lane – so buses can’t stop there.

With the rest of the road turned over to the police to park their cars.

There is a bus stop around the corner at Lonsdale and William Street – but route 605 buses can’t stop there for extended periods between runs, because multiple Lonsdale Street routes also pass through this stop.

The Queen Victoria Market bus terminus on Franklin Street is another option – but it’s a block further north, extending the kilometres travelled, and the payments that PTV needs to make to the bus operator.

How about cyclists and bus passengers sharing the road?

Turns out Melbourne has a precedent for bus stops on a bike lane, and on the very same route – down on Southbank Boulevard, completed in July 2019.

Where cyclists on the bike lane have to give way to bus passengers.

Just the same as Swanston Street and tram passengers.

So why wasn’t the same design used on William Street? Turns out one can’t use Southbank Boulevard as a precedent – route 605 buses have been diverting from the area since the stop was created, awaiting the completion of works in 2020.

So perhaps bus operators ran away screaming that the thought, and rejected the same solution on William Street – putting route 605 back to square one.

Update: the obvious answer!

As soon as I published this post, multiple people asked – “why don’t the buses use the tram tracks“. Good question – route 605 buses do exactly that along the route 58 tracks on Queensbridge Street in Southbank!

The only possible explanation I can see is that the turn for buses from La Trobe Street into William Street is too sharp, and there isn’t an easy way for buses to exit the tracks again at Lonsdale Street – but they don’t seem like an impossible issues to resolve.

March 2020 update

Looks like PTV have given up on buses along William Street – route 605 has been renamed “Gardenvale to City (Queen Street)” to reflect that the interim A’Beckett Street and Queen Street terminus is a permanent change.

From Sunday 29 March, Route 605 bus services will return running along Birdwood Avenue.

It'll also be renamed Route 605 #Gardenvale to City (Queen Street) to better reflect the starting point and destination.

For more info and to view the new timetable: https://t.co/1GlRQ1M1nH pic.twitter.com/9NpDmyiRFG

— PTV (@ptv_official) March 9, 2020

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Back on 29 January 2018 I spotted this example near the corner of William and Bourke Streets – a bike rack running 90 degrees to the road and blocking the footpath.

I tweeted about it the next day, and a week later the City of Melbourne entered the discussion – agreeing that they were stupidly placed.

They are part of our target to provide an additional 2000 on-street bicycle parking hoops by 2020. We have arranged for the hoops to be reorientated to 45 degrees so that there will be more space available on the footpath for pedestrians.

— City of Melbourne (@cityofmelbourne) February 6, 2018

Presumably cyclists thought the same thing, as the bike hoops were often empty, compared to the hoops across the street.

Presumably cyclists didn’t want their valuable bike jutting out into the footpath, ready to be smashed into by passing pedestrians.

But some still took the risk.

But eventually the City of Melbourne got around to doing what they promised – a year later in February 2019 the bike hoops had been cut off at footpath level, and two new hoops installed parallel to the kerb.

Leaving clear space for pedestrians.

Footnote

I guess we should count ourselves lucky that these bike hoops were never noticed by business owners – advertising bikes are even worse.

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In Melbourne you only need to look down Bourke Street of a morning towards Parliament House, and there is the sun.

And in the afternoon, look down La Trobe Street towards the West Gate Bridge, and there it is again.

However the other morning something really threw me off at the corner of William and Collins Street – the sun shining down on me from the south.

The cause of the unexpected sunbeam – light reflecting off the new Prima Pearl apartment tower at the corner of Queensbridge and Power Streets in Southbank, located directly south from me on the other side of the Yarra River.

Footnote

The long axis of the Melbourne CBD grid is orientated 70 degrees clockwise from true north, allowing the streets to be roughly aligned to the Yarra River. Most of the other major roads in Melbourne are orientated 8 degrees clockwise from true north.

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If you can’t find it, it was hiding at the top left of the photo. Here is a closer look at it – this particular unit is located above the footpath on William Street, just south of the Flagstaff Station exit.

The above device is an electronic people counter, manufactured by an Australia company named Beonic. It works by creating two curtains of infra red laser light that scan the area beneath the sensor, counting the number of pedestrians passing beneath while avoiding false positives from items such as shopping trolleys and large suitcases. Data from the sensor is then fed back to a computer, where the data is logged and analysed.

Normally the result of the data analysis would fall into a black hole away from public view, but in the case of the City of Melbourne, they have decided to build a website to graphically present the information gathered by their network of 18 sensors located around the CBD. Called the ’24PM’ pedestrian monitoring system, you can find it at http://pedestrian.melbourne.vic.gov.au along with a set of FAQs.

From the website, you can drill down and see exactly how many people walk down a given street in Melbourne at a given time of day – the lead photo in this post was taken on September 4, 2012 at 8.55am and the screenshot above shows how many people walked past during that hour – 5416!

Here is a comparison of the average pedestrian count per hour registered outside Flagstaff station on two different days – ‘weekend’ data is from Saturday 1st September, 2012 while ‘weekday’ data is from Tuesday, 4th September 2012.

The variance in numbers illustrates how dead the western end of the Melbourne CBD can get – thousands of people flood the area during morning and afternoon peak on a weekday to access the station, but other times it is a ghost town. Traffic especially dies off on weekends, due to the closure of the adjacent Flagstaff Station.

All up there are 18 pedestrian counting points: six along Swanston Street, five along the Yarra River, four at Docklands, two near Parliament Station, and the one I found outside Flagstaff Station.

Want just the raw data? The City of Melbourne have also made it available in CSV format!

I can only imagine what other fun conclusions can be drawn from this data!

Sources

• Background of the City of Melbourne ’24PM’ pedestrian monitoring system
• How the laser sensors work
• Datasheet for the Beonic SNSSKE15 laser sensor pictured above.

Footnote

An article from today’s edition of The Age regarding a campaign by local traders – Push for Flagstaff to open 7 days.

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Most people walk right past the building without a second thought, but if you stop and look through the windows, one finds an abandoned foyer covered with years of dust. So how does an entire skyscraper lie empty for over a decade?

Communications House was constructed in 1966 for the Postmaster-General’s Department (PMG), it originally consisted of a single office tower, with curtain walls on three sides, a red brick elevator core on the western face of the building, and a neighbouring building butting up against it from the north. This Wolfgang Sievers photograph shows the William Street frontage of the building soon after completion.

While this photograph from the same set shows the south-west facade, including the elevator core.

At an unknown date a second tower of the same external design was constructed on a site to the west of the first one, with the two towers linked at all levels by a brick skybridge crossing Guests Lane.

With the split of the Postmaster-General’s Department into separate postal and telecommunications departments in 1975, Communications House became the property of the Australian Telecommunications Commission, better known as Telecom Australia, and later Telstra. The telco remained the main tenant of the building until their departure in 1994, having moved to their new 47-storey high office complex on Exhibition and Lonsdale Streets.

Singaporean billionaire Tay Tee Peng purchased the building soon after for $12 million, and then spent $10 million refurbishing it, but with little success in attracting tenants. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s Communications House lay empty, with the next owner being an Asia based investor with the registered company name Memo Corporation, who purchased it at an unknown date.

Of the refurbishment work carried out, the most obvious work was the glass foyer facing William Street, which differs to the sparse plaza seen earlier in the 1960s photographs. As for the rest of the work, it did not appear very successful, with work being left half completed.

Down on the ground floor of the Little Bourke Street tower a tea room was established, only to lie abandoned for a number of years.

Next door to that was a site office, featuring a desk with a crappy old IBM computer, and what looks to be a 2001 calendar on the far wall. I hope they haven’t left their lights on for 10 years.

It took until January 2011 for something to finally happen on the site, when it was sold for $45 million to Hengyi Australia, a local subsidiary of a Chinese property developer. Using existing plans developed by Bruce Henderson Architects, the developer plans to convert the building into more than 530 home offices, each between 40 and 70 square metres in size, some with balconies.

With the development known as “The William”, in September 2011 work started the construction of a display suite and sales office inside the William Street foyer, with the rest of the empty lobbing being covered with full height red curtains.

This is what the developers intend the lobby to look like….

And as for the outside:

The architecture geeks are rather happy with the transformation – Communications House is considered one of the ugliest buildings in the Melbourne CBD, so even a refurbishment is something to cheer for.

Further reading

• Sales brochure for ‘The William’
• $200m plan for derelict city site (Herald Sun, November 2011)
• Melbourne office building sold for $45 million (AFR, January 2011)
• Melbourne Ghost Office Sells to Chinese Investor For $45 Million (March 2011)

Postscript, June 2012

I’ve just had an article in The Age pointed out to me – A ghost springs back to life of luxury – which details what the foyer of the refurbished building will look like.

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Here is the centre a year on, the foyer empty and the security equipment still to be unpacked. So why is everything mothballed?

Once the home of the County Court, the 16 storey building at 223 William Street dates to 1968, when a central County Court was established in Victoria, taking over from local venues around Victoria. It continued in this role until 2002, when the new County Court was opened diagonally across the intersection, with much of the building laying empty. Here is an older photos from Google Street View: they have since updated their images.

It took until May 2009 for the Brumby Labor Government to decide what to do with the building, announcing their plans for a $33 million refurbishment (media release). The works included the refurbishment of five existing courtrooms and the fitting out of a new courtroom on the building’s third level, a new entry foyer and reception, and rooms to be used for mediation and other dispute resolution processes. As for the upper floors, these were intended to house the Judicial College of Victoria, the Sentencing Advisory Council and other justice-related agencies.

Work stared on the refurbishment soon after, with the work being carried out by design firm V Arc and construction contractor Hansen Yuncken. The current images in Google Street View shows the removal of the facade completed.

By April 2010 over 70% of the new services installed, and 40% of the new glass facade was in place – this progress photo is from the V Arc website.

When I first photographed the building in April 2011 I expected the building to be in use, given it was officially “opened” six months previously, but for some reason it was still empty. And if that wasn’t the only stuffup, the original $33 million cost had blown out to $43 million.

For the next few months the centre remained empty, until construction hoardings were erected over the footpaths, and a crane appeared on the roof to help replace the glazing. The hoardings remained there for over the winter months, and were not removed until a week or two ago. I never got a good photo of them, but you can just see the construction scaffolding behind the William Street water main renewal works in this photo from mid September.

So one year late and with a second set of glass panels on the facade, will the William Cooper Justice Centre open any time soon?

Further reading

• Australian National Construction Review: 223 William Street

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The skyscraper in question is the AMP Building, located on the corner of Bourke and William Streets. The ray of sunlight has been hitting the building around 9 am for the past few winter mornings, and takes around 30 minutes to sweep the building from right to left.

The narrow beam is due to the shadows cast by two skyscrapers to the east: BHP House across the road, and the NAB headquarters at 500 Bourke Street. The phenomenon is dependant on the angle of the rising sun each morning, and hence the time of year. For comparison this photo is from back in April, when there were no shadows at all.

With the “sundial” only active for a few months a year, I suggest you find some other way to tell the time!

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As I continued on, this isolated sticker had turned into an orange brick road of sorts.

As I got closer to their gym I found even more of their rubbish littering the street.

By the time I reached the corner of Bourke and William Streets I discovered they had even put stickers on the footpath.

The stickers had all been removed a few days later, but my photos of them are now among the top Google Image Search hits for “South Pacific Health Clubs”.

I wonder how high this page will rank in Google when searching for “South Pacific Health Clubs”?

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