Southerly: The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth
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I've been a tiny bit active with this stuff... which ties up with the above. Not a substitute for Tuuli attack missile hovercrafts, but maybe not a bad idea?
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merc,
Aha Trams-ers unite! Not since 1937 in Paris, beautiful, let's buy it! I see a tram running all the way round the waterfront from St Heliers to Pt Chev, that's it Captain, make it so.
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Pt Chev. was well serviced by trams and was the last stop (hence the round-about) at Coyle? Park and the tram line fragments at Western Springs. I heard, it being the last stop, many late night trams (10,00pm!) were missed, so requiring a couch-stop, (ahem).
There are legions of dusty old Bring Back The Tram-ers! out there, or there used to be.Well, the Western Springs tram is soon to run all the way from Motat 1 to Motat 2. It's a start ...
But restoring the old tramline through Ponsonby and K Road would be easier. Getting rid of that was a rather poor decision. Imagine a Hero Tram Party this month!
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merc,
Now you're talking crazy talk...you cannot disfugure ze beautiful, smooth, well laid and painted with day glowing accessories tarmac.
Mmmmmm macadam, ez like leather you know.
Seriously, do you think roads are maybe a Council fetish? -
What depresses me is the seeming left-right left-right lurch from one ‘grand plan’ to another every time a new council or mayor gets elected.
A recent example: the Fletcher led council had the plans, support and – I think – most of the funding for a light rail service that connected Queen Street, the hospital, Newmarket (and thus the Western Line) Parnell and Britomart.
Like London’s Central Line I suppose, but slightly askew…
Anyway, enter Banks and co. fulminating about costly white elephants and the whole thing gets trashed in the space of a two hour meeting. And, when he wasn’t taking credit for projects that he had nothing to do with, what did we get in its place? Three years of shouting about a highway that even Transit didn’t think was a priority.
I'm sure there are at least a dozen similar examples; from what I can tell it’s been happening at least since the time of Mayor Robbie.
It’s just so frustrating that the whole subject of improving public transport – which everybody at least *says* should happen – seems to get sabotaged by petty (and sometimes spiteful) politics…
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merc,
I sat in on a closed Council transport meeting, I know, mea culpa, but I was removed shortly thereafter.
There were 20 or so people in the room, roughly divided into,
1. self interested parties (contractor lobbyists)
2. tourists (like me)
3. train people
4. motorway people
5. managers
6. mysterious types looking on
The problem as I saw it was that each group was tribal, it was like Survivor Council Auckland. The various entities and groups were so divided because that's how they were taught to survive.
Simply, it's the funding model. -
Some interesting news from today's meeting of the Auckland City Council's Transport and Urban Linkages Committee. Apparently quite a commotion ensued when the committee were played Michael Tritt's Auckland, City of Cars: Episode 1 and Auckland, City of Cars: Episode 2 documentaries.
Doug Armstrong and Toni Millar from Citizens & Ratepayers Now actually went so far as to leave the room -- and only returned when the documentaries had finished playing. Perhaps they had an urgent and simultaneous urge to micturate, but you'd think they'd be interested to hear what eminent international town-planning experts thought of the job Citizens & Ratepayers have been doing over the past few decades.
I've had a few interesting private messages from Public Address readers RE: this post. One person even went so far as to compare the dubious and far-reaching behaviour of Auckland's road lobby group with that of the NRA in the US.
I suspect that there's a very interesting story to be told here. Anyone know what Nicky Hager is up to these days?
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More details please David - that's such a tease... I thought you were getting into the story-telling business yourself?
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Perhaps they had an urgent and simultaneous urge to micturate
... upon the Citizens and Ratepayers of Auckland from a great height?How come you have a picture but the rest of us got a target practice cut out? Hmm?
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How come you have a picture but the rest of us got a target practice cut out? Hmm?
Glad you asked. We meant to have this capability when we launched System in November, however it's powered by a site called Gravatar.com which ground to a halt under the strain of its own popularity about three days after the launch.
Gravatar has now been rebuilt and is happily serving avatar images once again. It's a simple concept: you sign up (for free) using your email address and then upload an image of your choice. Every forum site that supports Gravatars will then display your image based on the email address you register with (ie, you must register with the same email on each forum, or pay $10 for the privilege of having multiple addresses or multiple Gravatar images).
The site is just coming out of a semi-private beta, and will be fully open to everyone this weekend. For the impatient, you can sign up here today (although you may have to make a blog comment post on the Gravatar blog before it accepts your registration - but only during the beta period).
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Oh yeah... we had Gravatars (that name sounds like Skeletor's bunk buddy) on Geekzone, but as you say, the whole thing ground to a mincing halt.
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