Posts by Matthew Poole
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I'm still astounded that nobody died inside Christchurch Cathedral. Not surprised that the USAR guys don't feel like they've finished the job, given the reports of people inside the spire at the time of its collapse.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
safe, low-rise buildings
I'll point you here, How to mend a shattered city from the ground up, which talks to a large number of senior academics and engineers from various NZ organisations about the engineering involved.
My favourite bit, relative to your comment, is: Beca's technical director of earthquake engineering, Dr Richard Sharpe, who was in Christchurch last week, says there is another narrative in the CBD that has gone almost unnoticed - that, almost without exception, modern high rise buildings have performed extremely well."It really is of concern that people are saying they would never go back into any multi-storey building. I would have felt safer in a building like the PricewaterhouseCoopers building than I would be perhaps in the [low-rise] accommodation I was in."
Tall != unsafe. Tall+old==possibly unsafe. PGC and CTV were both pre-1975 in design, and 1975 was when the standards changed. Hotel Grand Chancellor didn't collapse, and nobody died. That's a pass mark in earthquake engineering, especially when the shake exceeded design standards.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
My understanding is that the media here objected to the presence of a sign language interpreter. Shame on us. They didn’t want a signer in the shots. The deaf community went all the way up to the Prime Minister’s office and the directive came down.
If that's true, then I want to know who it was in order to boycott their outlet. That's beyond rude, and beyond shameful. And if it turns out to have been a generally-expressed objection, then a very public "You're disgusting" from the HDC is in order.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to nzlemming,
If there’s a dearth of big roading projects and all you know how to do is build roads, what are you going to do for cashflow? I do wonder if Friedlander and the Road Transport Forum aren’t merely a public decoy for the big infrastructure companies.
Possibly, but there's always road maintenance, there's always general civic construction. I don't think any of the major names in NZ road construction only do road construction, and there's always bus-way extension. NZTA has a plan to extend the Northern Bus-way to Silverdale, which is the thick end of a billion dollars. I'm not thrilled by encouraging yet more sprawl, but if we must then I'd rather the support was focussed on public transport.
Plus, of course, I object to throwing taxpayer money at projects simply because it keeps companies open. Adapt or die, and don't expect society to pick up the tab for your failure to adapt. Pay to re-skill your staff so they can remain employed? Absolutely. Pay so that they don't have to, not so much.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
He suggested that because of the number of central-city buildings under threat of demolition, Christchurch might develop as a city with large satellite business districts.
Which, if it's planned that way right from the outset and has all the transport infrastructure to support such a configuration, is not such a terrible thing. Constructing a spread-out city that has designed satellite BDs that're connected with rapid transit networks is not particularly horrible as a concept, especially given that Christchurch's CBD was already dying before September.
The problem, of course, is that the current managers of the national purse see no value in constructing anything that's not a road. Totally bereft of any kind of long-term vision, as witnessed by Double-Dipton's comments about rising petrol prices making no significant difference to the national driving addiction.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
I forget sometimes what an advantage you get from following transport blogs and having worked with planners.
If "you" means me specifically, I haven't really worked with planners. My brief experience with ATA was ahead of 1 November with a very limited scope around readiness for "day one", and I've not touched the Megatropolis Council since.
I do plead guilty to following transport blogs, however. -
Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
US expat Tracey Barnett writes about what our response to the quake shows us all about being New Zealanders.
You are so yesterday afternoon. I linked to that five posts into page 21 :P
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
The neanderthal attitude toward big-budget public transport projects wasn’t on display by Joyce until after Brown adopted the rail link as a key policy.
It was pretty apparent right after the 2008 election wasn’t it?
Not quite so significantly. We knew that he wasn't a fan, but the revocation of the regional tax was couched in terms of "Funding major transport projects is more properly the job of the Government" so it wasn't patently obvious how much he was in the pocket of Big Trucking.
The CBD rail tunnel didn't really penetrate public consciousness, or the mayoral campaign, until the middle of last year. Nobody knew how National was going to jump when it first started getting significant coverage, and the usual suspects amongst Auckland's public transport commentators were fairly universally surprised at just how anti Joyce turned out to be. His initial position wasn't in any way moderate. -
Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
A palpable lack of enthusiasm for the CBD rail loop from central government didn’t stop Brown from making it a centrepiece of his mayoral campaign.
The neanderthal attitude toward big-budget public transport projects wasn't on display by Joyce until after Brown adopted the rail link as a key policy. By which time it was a little late for him to back down, especially given that Banks went into reverse faster than you can say "National Party lapdog" when Joyce's true colours came out.
Brown should certainly try, but I don't blame him for thinking it'll be a waste of breath that could be spent more productively on trying to get support for something that might have a chance of happening.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
why the hell isn’t it being kept up to date, since I presume any earthquake-proofing would need to go through the consents process at the very least?
Yes, it should be being kept up-to-date. But if it’s not, they’ll be worried about being sued by a specula^Wdeveloper who’s unaware that they bought a lemon and is now staring at a huge financial loss. Or, worse, they name an address and it turns out that the building in question, as Sam [corrected] says, has been bowled.
I don’t think they’re being terribly irresponsible with this one, but they’ll only get about a month’s grace out of me before I’ll want to know when the updated register is being released.