mel loop operation

["geoff dawson" <geoffrey.dawson@aph.gov.au>]

In response to the recent threads on this, speaking as a foreigner,  may I
humbly suggest:
1. changing the direction of city loop services at midday is daft.
Consistency and legibility is important, particularly to encourage the off
peak travel of irregular users. Encouraging offpeak travel is most important
for public transport operators since the marginal cost of catering for it is
low (ie no need to build more trains that are only used for one trip per
day)
2. having long layovers at Flinders St is daft [why is this done?]
3. Having no train service whatever from (for example) Parliament to Spencer
St  change for Geelong (pm peak) is daft.

As someone said, if all services ran in one direction all day, then everyone
with city loop destinations would have an average journey time formed of a
slightly better time at one end of the day and a slightly worse time at the
other. I accept that if *most* eastern commuters want to go to/from
Parliament (for example) you would reconsider this. There seems to be
dispute about the facts on this point.

As for the crawl from Richmond to Flinders St - I remember noticing this
with amazement 20 years ago. I thought the idea of building a loop was to
solve it. 'Congestion' is no excuse. There are 5 inward tracks at Richmond
(I hope I am remembering this right)  - in principle, 2 to loop and 3 to Nth
Melbourne. Ie this is not, in the literal sense, a bottleneck - a place
where more lanes have to merge into fewer.
Allow one track from Richmond to Flinders St to be for outward loop to west
trains. This still leaves 2 tracks to accommodate about 15 trains per hour
(9 from Alamein-Laburbum and 6 from Sandringham) ie demand is less than half
capacity.
Obviously train 2 will have to slow down if it catches up with train 1. But
this should not affect train 3. If *all* trains have to slow down in a
certain section, although capacity is ample, there is no  bottleneck - just,
I assume, badly designed infrastructure. [So what is the reason for it?]

If you got rid of the crawl, and the Flinders St layover, the arguments
against a uniform all day pattern have less force.

regards, Geoff (Sydney)