Australia invests $100m on selfies menace

MELBOURNE. — Selfie-taking “idiots” and graffiti artists who trespass onto an Australian city’s transport loop will no longer shut down the entire underground network, after the state government pledged $100 million to fix the growing issue.

Yesterday, the Victorian government announced its plan to upgrade Melbourne City Loop’s detection systems in response to the rising number of trespassers running loose on the tracks and bringing the innercity train loop to a halt.

The new detection scheme will allow the Loop’s safety monitors to isolate which of Melbourne’s four tunnels the intruder is located within, shutting down that section of rail, instead than the whole city loop.

“It allows us to know if anybody goes off a platform and into a tunnel, which currently we don’t know,” Melbourne Metro Trains chief executive Andrew Lezala told reporters yesterday.

“If an intruder goes into a tunnel, we stop the railway. Now we’ll be able to stop just one little bit of the railway.”

Between 40 to 50 intruders have ventured into the tunnels annually in the past two years, a four-fold increase on 2013 levels.

“That’s just stupid, reckless behaviour,” Victoria’s Public Transport Minister Jacinta Allan told reporters yesterday. Lezala said the bulk of the people walking around the pitch-black network were putting their lives in danger for stupid, vain reasons.” — Xinhua.