Posts by Lucy Stewart
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to richard,
Not just a case of "When I was lad I walked to school, and then walked home again. Uphill. Both ways." (Must admit I am all for David's idea, but hope that it includes supplying residents with hi-tech gloves. Still remember making it to 9 0'clock lectures from Bishop St in July, and not being about to move my fingers to take notes for the first ten minutes)
I only stopped biking to Canty regularly eighteen months ago. I'm fairly sure my memory hasn't suffered that degree of editing....yet.
Any old pair of ski-gloves will solve the finger problem, really. The trick is not losing them.
-
Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to David Haywood,
Oh, I know that wind. As one of my friends said: it’s not just the extra physical exertion, it’s the thought of all that entropy generation and its reminder of the eventual death of the universe.
I was particularly baffled by how wherever you lived in relation to the university, that wind blew the same way in relation to your cycle route. Over four years, I lived south, southwest, and northeast of uni; coming or going, north or south, I was cycling into the wind. Perplexing.
-
I commuted by bike for five of my six years in Christchurch, and I really can't recommend it enough; apart from a few rough patches like that really godawful week of rain last May, it's fast, cheap, pretty easy, and gives you enormous flexibility in terms of not having to have a park/find a park, not being tied down to bus timetables, etc. I commuted straight down Wairakei/Rossall/Carlton Mill Rd into town, and it was significantly faster than taking a bus leaving at the same time, and very significantly faster than all the cars I was flying past.
It's not just the commuting, either; having a bike really does give you options in terms of running errands in the neighbourhood. We were far enough away from a dairy that I'd have taken the car quite often if I hadn't had a bike. With one, there was really no excuse unless I needed something that didn't fit in a backpack.
Your timing estimates are quite accurate, too. I was doing near enough to 5km and at peak traffic it was a tidy twenty minutes from my front door to the bike stand, unless every traffic light went against me. When I was a student and closer to uni, it was more like 10min for a 3km ride, once I optimised my route to back roads without traffic lights. Not sure what it'd be like in the Port Hills, but certainly around most of the city it's very easy. And I'm really not that fit. (Which is another thing - commuting by bike is an amazingly efficient weight-management strategy. Forty minutes of exercise a day, every weekday. I noticed it when I stopped.)
7. maybe some subsidies for certain types of equipment would be in order (lights, rain gear, helmets, etc.)?
I'd agree with this; you do need a surprising amount of subsidiary equipment to make it really pleasant/safe (a decent D-lock, for starters), though a bike/helmet/basic lock will start you off in summertime. I never got proper rain gear because it was always enough above my student budget to put me off, and I suffered for it a time or two. If people are encouraged to get that stuff fairly soon in they won't be put off by a week of bad weather or the end of daylight saving.
All that said, though, it won't replace car ownership. People own cars in Christchurch because it's spread-out, and if they want to socialise or have options while shopping, you need a car. I went without for six months just before I left and it made some things really difficult, and some impossible unless I could cadge a ride. Sure, there are buses most places, but when you need to get from one odd bit of the city to another at a non-standard time, it can take a very long time. I had family in Rangiora and seeing them by bus meant losing a whole day, which is fine if you have the time, but you may not. That's not even looking at the fact that a lot of people have family in other bits of the South Island, and driving is the cheapest/easiest way to do trips with a family. There are a lot of benefits to increasing cycling, but I sincerely doubt it will decrease the number of households that own cars. The number of cars per household, very possibly, but not the fact that they own at least one.
-
Speaker: Bad Aid: How Murray McCully is…, in reply to George Darroch,
You're very right to emphasise that aid is not about what you have to give, it is about what is needed.
And that's probably why it's all gone so terribly downhill; the idea that foreign aid should be done for the benefit of the recipient countries, because we are so much wealthier, because improving their standard of living helps everyone, because it's the right thing to do - that idea is pretty foreign to the National/ACT concept of, well, everything. They probably think of it as some sort of brand-improvement exercise.
Which is odd, because right-wing governments tend to be very big on domestic charity as a replacement for governance - c.f. the "Big Society" the Tory/LibDem coalition are pushing in Britain. You'd think foreign aid would fit into that model, richer countries helping poorer countries Because It's Right, not because some evil overlord-ish world body makes them. But I suppose the other problem is that they mistake GDP for real measures of improvement, which, as you explain so clearly, is not the case.
-
Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to Kiwiiano,
It’s age also means most of the bugs have been beaten out of it plus the Black hats are no longer interested.
Then how about we go back to '95? Or, hey, DOS, while we're at it? By that argument, they must be practically miraculous on "modern gear". Except...oh, wait, '98 doesn't support most modern hardware, because it can't interface with half of it. And if they "beat out all the bugs", why did Microsoft bother switching to the NT architecture for all the following versions of Windows?
I will concede that there may be specific situations where '98 is useful - if you have legacy software that's incompatible with later versions of Windows, fine. But that's what virtualisation is for. A local government body running all its systems using a OS over a decade old is just shoddy, insecure, and says pretty bad things about their foresight.
-
Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to Sacha,
I guess most journos (and their audience) understand dinged cars so it’s just easier, eh.
Honestly? I find IT cost overruns a lot easier to understand than bothering to fix "dings and scratches".
-
Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to stever@cs.waikato.ac.nz,
The Herald, at least, now has a gift of a series of stories to get its teeth into...
I wouldn't hold your breath.
-
Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to Sacha,
I thought it was one of the largest local bodies in the southern hemisphere (though I don’t recall where I read that)?
And isn't it unusually large globally, come to that? I do remember during the debate leading up to it there were a lot of discussions about how almost no cities worldwide were integrated on that sort of scale, and it hadn't been terribly successful where they were.
-
Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to Christopher Dempsey,
For example, apparently the old Papakura DC were operating on old Windows 98 or whatever that version was.
I shudder to think at what they were operating '98 on.
You're otherwise right, though: the fact that this would end up costing massively more than predicted should be totally unsurprising to anyone who works with IT. I suspect there was quite a bit of "but they're just hooking up computers, how hard can it be?" going on.
-
Hard News: Three months after, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Not at all. It was the Catholic Cathedral that really broke me.
I cried when I saw pictues of the main Cathedral, but what really gutted me - and this doesn't make any sense, but there you go - was seeing a picture of Shades Arcade, off Cashel Mall, just gone. I used to nip in to Dumplings every time I was in the CBD for a pork bun or some wontons. I'd mused when I left that the next time I came back, I was definitely dropping by. That...does not seem likely to ever occur again, or not in the same way.
Another Christchurch student who came over at the same time as me made it back for Christmas. She says she was really glad she saw the city when it was a bit munted, before February, to get used to the idea it wasn't going to be the same. I wish I'd been able to.