The laws against selling at less than (absorbed) cost
The checkout chicks sitting down!
The weighing your own vegies
The amazing feeling of driving 20 minutes to a furniture shop during your lunchbreak just in time to find the furniture shop’s staff on strike.

But I liked it all the same, it just didn’t make sense to try and raise kids there, and even less to subject them to a state-run ideologically warped education system.

(*) One odd exception is cream. A container of cream that might cost 99c in Australia is nearly $3 here, and worse, it’s barely cream at all – just slightly less runny milk.

Interesting idea. Is there any evidence for this – or is it just an assertion. Of course light traffic is preferable to heavy traffic, but the tradeoff here is light traffic on several streets or no traffic on one and slightly heavier traffic on the others.

Knowing Brighton well enough to know the layout – but not the street names, I think the only road that would get much more traffic would be the yellow shaded one diagonally at the bottom and that’s a busy(ish) street you’d always look fairly carefully left and right before crossing already. Don’t think it would add much traffic though. Middle crescent at that point is pretty deserted a lot of the time.

It still is Patrick! I think part of the problem is that French checkout chicks (and the rest of the people you need) are not only inefficient and expensive (where else do you get to pack your own groceries?), but you need more of them because people still insist on using cheque books and other such retro paraphernalia from 70s, which slows everything down even more than would be otherwise. On the upside, it keeps all the little food stores open, because you actually have to consider the oppurtunity cost in time wasted going to the big stores.

Last year when the proposal to extend daylight savings was being discussed on the radio many people called in complaining about the prospect of not being able to go for a dog-walk at 5:30 and so on. On the other hand, even though potential winners must have out-numbered potential losers one hundred to one, no one called in complaining about the prospect of not being able to play Frisbee with their kid after work if the proposal didn’t go ahead. Votes follow on from complaints and thus, most ideas, even where benefits far outweigh costs don’t proceed.

Personally, I’d like to see all opportunity costs accounted for by governments and indeed all organisations. It would show up some interesting numbers, for example the massive subsidies provided to golfers, the huge cost of roads or the massive imbalance between funding for girls and boys sport. It would also promote much better land use as authorities had to continually justify and consider ways to reduce such costs.

For example, at Brighton Beach Station, there is a large car park. Without the cost of foregoing development and using the land for free parking, the PT authorities could probably just about fund a new train line!

The ever rising cost of land should even make it profitable to deck some roads and build apartments on top (Nepean Hwy in Brighton?).

On the proposal you mention, closing or blocking streets is often not a good idea, as it can create traffic sewers. By closing Middle Crescent, traffic on Outer Crescent would increase, making it more dangerous (and therefore less likely), for children to cycle or walk to the two schools. Generally, many streets with light traffic is preferable to few with heavy traffic.

Even though I very rarely go shopping at 10 pm, I do appreciate the possibility of being able to if I feel like it (or even occasionally need to). If there wasn’t enough demand to make it worthwhile, the shops and cafes wouldn’t stay open that late – indeed many choose not to. Patrick’s point is also important. These days there are a hell of a lot of workers who rely on 24/7 trading for their employment – what would your more liveable world have to offer them?

As a woman who works full-time, I’m continually gobsmacked by the people (usually, but not exclusively, male) who think life would just be so much better if we got rid of weekend shopping. For whom exactly, I would like to know? I’m just glad I live in Melbourne and not Perth, I can tell you.

On that vein one of my friends self-funded extensive travel to five continents by working midnight-8am at Coles. His pay (IIRC) varied from $28 to, on public holidays, about $45 an hour. For a student, that was a decent deal. I believe that is about the actual hourly earnings of someone on $70,000 a year.

I remember seeing some worthy document about HR trying to not ask people to work late at the Bailieu Library at Melbourne Uni. Now I ask you, how silly is that. Hundreds of students trying to learn up late at night and they can’t do it because a few people (who would want to do it at the wages – otherwise they wouldn’t agree to do it) would have to be paid to keep the place open.

however did we manage previously?

Easily, our wives went. Unfortunately, at the time I was one of them my wife was working as well in the same area, leading to my next comment:

I think the needs of poor shiftworking sorts to get to the shops in odd hours are grossly overstated

Just try it. At the relevant time I was in France, and doing the shopping was an incredible pain the proverbial, when at three am or on Sunday it would have been extremely convenient for me.

Even now that I have a professional services job in Australia I regret my local supermarket’s decision to stop 24hr trading, and dearly wish that the bakery could open before 630am.

And I can’t possibly see how it reduces your experience of ‘liveability’?

While the meeting was in full swing, the wreckers moved in and flattened the house.

My own hobbyhorse is the impossibility of kids riding their bikes to school in most areas

Another liveability matter Id like to hear some economists views on is making public transport free.

I think they are genuine liveability matters. I disagree with NG about liveability. My french wife and I moved specifically from aesthetically nicer France to Australia because Melbourne was more ‘liveable’, as in, it was an easier place to live.

I’d rather not have a queue in an ugly city than have lots of pretty things to look at whilst in my queue.

So in response to one of wilful’s later points (having agreed with the first one), 24/7 shopping is a godsend to liveability – please note that the majority of people with ‘unconventional’ hours are in lower income bands. Shopping centres are also very convenient, of course they are car-dependent, how else do you carry stuff home??

Liveability should be about living first, and aesthetics second. That said aesthetics are great, but they are the cart.

And mega-malls versus strip shopping. At least out west, highpoint (aka knifepoint, aka lowpoint) has destroyed Footscray CAD, and it is entirely car dependent.

Something perhaps too expensive to contemplate would be undergrounding richmond train station – just the worst blight on the Hoddle Swan street intersection.

Undergrounding all of the train lines between Flinders and Richmond would also be great. Combination tunnelling and roofing. Wonderful linear park and pedestrian area from city to sports precinct and around.

Another liveability matter I’d like to hear some economists views on is making public transport free. Of course the main problem with PT at the moment is that it’s already oversubscribed, so more patrons wont help anything, but I wonder how the finances stack up when we’re in the midst of paying $1BN for an unfriendly new ticketing system, there are hundreds of ticket inspectors, so much security devoted not to safety but to ticketing integrity, development within and around stations is stalled for this reason, and the entire operation is already massively subsidised anyway (just like road transport is), so would there be that big a financial hit? What about so-called ‘moral hazard’ – sounds like ideology to me.

Councils close unused/little used streets and lanes and sell them off all the time.

But, Firbank is a ‘private’ school. Any mooted closure/disposal of Middle Crescent to the benefit of this school for silver-spooners would likely bring objectors out in droves — for that very reason, though all would no doubt dress up their prejudices in fine phrases about ‘public assets’, ‘public interest’, ‘environmental impact’ and such like while completely missing the point.

Would be an interesting bun-fight to watch.