Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Sean C,
Actually in this day and age, i don’t consider getting in the car and driving to a sports field much of an issue. I do it all of the time.
Yup. You can also drive to golf. Most people do.
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Sean C,
And not sure how much time you have spent at these parks, but the amount of time i have been tho them and seen them barely used is incredible.
That's certainly true, although even when operating at peak capacity, an 18 hole golf course doesn't have very many people on it. A group every 200m maybe, so about 30 groups all up. That's over a hectare each. It's a really, really space inefficient game, which is why it costs so much to play, unless the course is in the countryside. Which even in Auckland is only a 20 minute drive away. And the amount of times I've ridden past Chamberlain and not seen many people on the course...
Of course the parks are often quite empty, playing fields particularly. But when they're full they're really, really full. There can be thousands of people in Western Springs. They can stage big events there. On a busy day in the park there can be hundreds of people out, whole families enjoying a free activity. Certainly there isn't the continuous use that a busy golf course gets, but part of that is a function of how inefficient they are, that people have to carefully pick the time to play their game, and then they do it in a small group, typically a group of adults. It's always been manufactured exclusivity, that's been a big part of the appeal of the game, just how much of a luxury it really is.
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Legal Beagle: A rather incomplete…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Yes, it really sucks.
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to bmk,
Some has to:
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Howard Edwards,
back in the 60s and 70s you could cycle or walk through the golf course in Hagley Park. I
Was there any kind of guidelines at all about that? Because riding a bike across a fairway where people are teeing off sounds like a recipe for someone to get seriously hurt.
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Steve Curtis,
Snap. It's an excellent facility. 25 meter pool with moving bottom so good for swimming, waterpolo, underwater hockey, water walking etc. Then there's the recreational area with pools of several temperatures, fountains, periodic simulated wave activity, spas, and the sauna and steam rooms. And particularly beloved of my youngest, the hydroslide.
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
A pool, Parnell style but heated for year round use, would be fantastic though.
Also worth noting that there is a very big heated pool complex not far from Chamberlain park already, at Mt Albert Grammar.
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Sacha,
I believe Avondale is ahead in the decades-long queue for that, as is Otahuhu.
I didn't get any sense of optimism from the headmaster at my kids' school that the project to build the pool was going anywhere fast. Seems like council is blocking it more than facilitating it at the moment. Pity - he had the funds to build it when my eldest started there, and now it looks likely that he'll be finished before anything even happens at all. So currently, they travel over to Mt Albert for the few swimming lessons they get every year. Pools seem to be highly political beasts, projects that swell into unmanageable beasts very quickly. A small pool would have made a huge difference to the decile 3 kids there, many of whom never really get to go swimming. But it's either a massive communally available center, or nothing.
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
Chamberlain (and Takapuna) are special in that they bring golf to the masses, anybody with a borrowed set of clubs can just rock up and queue for a Tee off unlike most other courses on the Auckland isthmus.
Let's be specific here. It's unique in that you can play there without a membership of any club anywhere. But most golf clubs do allow non-members to play, so long as they are with a member, and they allow members from other clubs to play too. The barrier to playing golf on most courses is very low.
Furthermore, the advantages of being in the middle of the city were mitigated by the huge queues, to the point where it would often be quicker to drive to a country course than to queue up to play at Chamberlain. Also, as a course to play on, one had to contend with the fact that most of the people on there didn't know how to play, so it could take a really long time to complete a round as the large groups in front searched for the balls, and with the fact that people behind you might be similarly unaware of the rules and quite likely hit the ball through the middle of you from time to time. I remember the welt one guy I played with got when a ball hit him right in the sternum there.
So it wasn't really all that and a bag of chips after all. Good for tourists. Not really quite so good for anyone else.
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Hard News: The twilight state of the…, in reply to ,
I might be wrong, but as far as I know, the legal high industrie wasn’t financially responsible for rehabilitation costs, for people who became addicted to the product.
It was far from perfect. But such changes were at least possible in a framework of legality.
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