My current posting schedule is as follows:

• Two posts a week here (104 posts/year)
• Once a fortnight about European railways at www.eurogunzel.com (26 posts/year)
• Once a month on Hong Kong at www.checkerboardhill.com (12 posts/year)

As to how I managed to churn out so many blog posts, I don’t actually sit down at the same time every weekend and type out the posts for the next week. Instead, my workflow is as flows:

Step 1:

Add an entry to my ever increasing list of prospective blog post topics. Normally they are just links to newspaper articles, interesting reports in PDF format, or a collection of photos I’m intending to write more about.

Step 2:

Dig through my list of draft entries until I find something that grabs my interest, then start writing and further research.

Step 3:

Hit a roadblock and procrastinate. Writers block, a dead end on the research front, or a lack of photos are common causes.

Step 4 (optional):

Realise I have bitten off more than I can chew for one blog post, and spin off part of it into a future post. A variant of this is when I find other interesting bits and pieces while researching one subject, resulting in a new entry being added to my list of prospective topics.

Step 5:

Decide the post is finished, and put it into my pending articles pile.

Step 6:

Dig through my pending articles pile, and add them to my list of scheduled posts.

Step 7:

You eventually see the article online.

Footnote

So how long does my workflow take?

My recent ‘Fairness in PTV fare evasion penalties?‘ post started as a draft back in December 2014, and required three separate editing sessions to polish up.

My ‘Where does Geelong’s sewage go?‘ was a much bigger job, being almost two years in the making – I started it way back in August 2013, spent some time on it in December 2014, then polished it off in July 2015.

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• When a fire hose crosses the railway track *
• Telling a racist where to go *
• What is the cheapest tollway account for Melbourne?
• Vision impaired and the green button *
• Dandenong line upgrade and probity concerns *
• Replacing the power jack of a Samsung NP305 laptop
• Melbourne Metro rail tunnel: how about some actual detail?
• Abandoned hospitals of Melbourne
• The company formerly known as National Mutual
• Melbourne’s abandoned skyscraper
• Comparing Melbourne’s two IMAX theatres
• ‘Jaywalking’ in the Melbourne CBD
• Melbourne’s freeway ‘ghost ramps’ *
• New speed cameras on the Monash Freeway
• Dodgy doors on Melbourne’s Comeng trains *
• The saga of Caroline Springs railway station
• Daylight savings time and your camera clock
• Melbourne’s abandoned airfield
• Still more shops at Southern Cross Station *
• Ardeer and the kink in the Western Ring Road *

My top post was one I published early in the year, digging into the story behind a viral image of a fire hose crossing railway tracks – the post seems to be getting a lot of traffic even today. Next up was my 15 minutes of fame when my story about confronting a racist guy on the tram ended up in the news.

Heading further down the list we find a number of railway themed entries, some older posts about abandoned buildings in Melbourne, and three old faithfuls – fixing the power jack of a Samsung laptop, the history of National Mutual, and a how-to for fixing digital camera timestamps after daylight savings time changes.

With only eight of my top 20 posts having been written this year, it goes to show the value that writing a “timeless” blog post can give.

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• What is the cheapest tollway account for Melbourne?
• New speed cameras on the Monash Freeway *
• Melbourne Metro rail tunnel: how about some actual detail?
• Melbourne’s abandoned skyscraper
• Revisiting Melbourne’s clogged intersections *
• The wardriving tram and ‘hacking’ Myki machines *
• Melbourne’s plague of advertising covered bikes *
• The company formerly known as National Mutual
• Abandoned hospitals of Melbourne
• Melbourne’s abandoned airfield

Among the posts not published this year, I sense a pattern in my top 10 – lots of people are interested in abandoned buildings in Melbourne!

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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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