Driving & Traffic

Saw something similar happen first hand last year not too far away from where that incident occurred. Elderly man driving on wrong side of Princes Highway near Dapto. Only reason he didn’t hit me head on was because his wife grabbed the steering wheel and pulled the car into the correct lane. Relived that fear when I watched that clip.

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Melbourne’s Transurban company (operator of CityLink) has announced a number of fee changes that will save drivers money.

  • Start up credit for e-Tag account from $50 to $25
  • Minimum annual payment from $27.50 to $0
  • Tag-holder fee from $3.50 to $0
  • Vehicle matching fee from $0.75 a photo to $0.55 a photo
  • Lost or stolen tags from $55 to $15

Along with the fee changes, ‘CityLink’ accounts will be rebranded as ‘Linkt’ accounts.

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/transurban-toll-charges-overhaul-to-save-motorists-dollars/news-story/37706fcb44049abcd2ec724f8da9ebfa

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Re-branded as Linkd in Brisbane too. Don’t Transurban pretty much run all the toll roads in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne?

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Westfield and other shopping centre owners charge nothing to match the photographic scans of your rego plates when you drive in and out of their carparks. Does it really cost Transurban 55c? I’d say no.

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Especially as the fee is 30 cents on EastLink. I suppose they blame more toll check points or something?

According to the calculator - the last trip I took on CityLink in March would now be 10 cents cheaper, despite a 20 cent reduction in the plate matching fee. So the underlying toll must have gone up as well?

The concept of having a fee for this “service” should have died off at least a decade ago.

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The Linkt product is a much better value product than anything else in the country - I think it even beats out the RMS NSW E-Toll tag (which was traditionally the cheapest tag in the country) because of a lower deposit amount or, if you choose, a lower ongoing account fee.

I can understand the fee for the video matching. It does actually require a certain amount of human intervention (human operators do exist to punch in the number plates if the OCR confidence isn’t high), and the tag is overall a lot less error prone and costly to manage (if there weren’t video matching fees, no one would have tags!).

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Yeah that’s a fair point about the video matching fee. You’re right if it wasn’t there nobody would have tags.

However, according to The Age today, drivers who use Visa or Mastercard to pay tolls will cop a transaction fee for the first time. If you use Visa or Mastercard to pay Eastlink tolls there is no additional fee.

When the then Roam owned by Transurban about four years cancelled my M7 toll account without bothering to tell me, then because I continued to use the M7 for a month without knowing my account was cancelled Roam had State Debt Recovery issue me with multiple fines. I disputed all of them and they wiped all of the added charges so I only paid the actual toll on most of them. They ended up waving about $50 in tolls, which I didn’t have to pay. It was very frustrating, but I won against them.

After that debacle with Transurban I then got an NSW RMS toll tag and have had no problems.

People just can’t except change…

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/manly-daily/how-a-community-stopped-the-bline-extension-plans-to-newport/news-story/12e6491d08e94a0685872ce2d10b1cd2

NIMBYs are a plague

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The B-Line should extend to Newport. There is a six lane road from Mona Vale to Newport so it should be easy to do, and if bus lanes can’t go into the Newport shopping centre strip then just terminate it in the block before. It would be horrendously expensive to extend the B-Line to Avalon so I think it should be extended as far as it can be, which is to Newport.

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The local residents obviously feared the B-Line would take away one lane each side on the six lane road at all times, creating more traffic congestion. It should have been similar to Doncaster Road in Doncaster in Melbourne’s east where the bus lane operates at peak times only.

Nah, they feared that it would stimulate development. They want to keep their sleepy little village for the rich locals only.

Real-time Queensland fuel prices to go live by Christmas

QUEENSLAND motorists will have access to the State Government’s new real time fuel price monitoring scheme before Christmas.

Energy Minister Anthony Lynham revealed today that the two-year trial program would kick off in December, with fuel retailers required to provide updates within 30 minutes of changing their price.

The prices would be published on existing smartphone apps and websites, including Motormouth, Gasbuddy and the RACQ.

A hardtop electric reverse tricycle that looks like a cutdown car.

The way the NSW Fuelcheck system works is that each retailer has access to a NSW Fuelcheck smartphone app or web app which they can punch their fuel prices into. Private apps (Motormouth etc.) can access the data via an API. The NSW Fuelcheck app is actually quite good by itself, so I use it - and surprisingly for a government app, it works absolutely flawlessly. I have never had an issue with it other than one or two petrol stations who did not report the correct price (which I promptly reported to Fair Trading).

It sounds like what’s being proposed by the QLD government is that each retailer will have to update the prices themselves in several different apps (as they stated in their press release that NSW’s centralised system is sucky coz the Liberal Party are bastards), which I reckon is a bit of a shit idea and burdensome to the petrol businesses, especially the independents who probably won’t have corporate systems enabling automatic updating of the prices.

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No airbags? No thanks…

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Given the deadly Takata shrapnel-laden ones still in so many cars around the world, being without an airbag isn’t the worst thing in the world
(and sadly often safer now; look at the big list of models which aren’t due to be fixed for over a year: https://www.productsafety.gov.au/recalls/compulsory-takata-airbag-recall/future-takata-airbag-recalls?utm_source=takata_table).