Posts by Rich Lock
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Field Theory: Four Years Ago, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
We don't have interactive in NZ?
There seems to be a problem with the wireless link. I had my Wii controller on 'Jonny Wilkinson', but I couldn't seem to get it to kick straight - the ball was going all over the shop. Is it something in the settings, or is there a patch I can download?
-
Field Theory: Four Years Ago, in reply to BenWilson,
They shit on buses and trains - you can get up and wander round, get a coffee or a snack, or a beer or wine even (on the way home I hope). The infrastructure needed is not great (and usually is a nice place as well, widely used for other purposes). More!
They are also far more cycle-friendly than buses or trains. There's plenty of space for the bikes, and the ferries come equipped with bike racks or hanging hooks to keep them out of the way. There are no significant issues with loading or unloading bikes, they can just be wheeled on or off and then through the terminals. My anecdata suggests usually about a dozen cyclists or thereabouts on each of the main commuter-times ferries. From the look of them, the ferry journey is a mid-point in what could be quite a reasonably long road trip at one or both ends.
-
Field Theory: Four Years Ago, in reply to BenWilson,
Isn't Devonport a public transport fail by its very nature?
Well, let me think now. Hmm, there's three different bus routes, which connect and mesh smoothly and easily with regular and late-running ferries to three different destinations*.
But apart from that, totally a fail :)
Seriously, heading city-side it isn't an issue: I've used the ferry several times to connect with an airbus from downtown to catch a flight from Jean Batten airport, and it's very smooth.
Heading north is more problematic. Lake road does get clogged. It's not so much that it's a public transport fail as the problem being inherent in relying on one long road for all traffic in and out. It gets slightly overloaded even on a normal weekend, when all the bloody tourists turn up for brunch at our cafes, spending their money and gawping at our wonderful village and whatnot.
The fireworks views were awesome, though. Probably the best seats in the house.
*OK, I'm cheating: two of those destinations are Waiheke and Rangitoto. But ferries FTW. This city needs more of them.
-
Field Theory: Four Years Ago, in reply to BenWilson,
I'd venture also, just like Friday here, that it's something most people will remember for the rest of their lives.
Yeah, I think that although there's a case to answer in relation to a lot of the 'failures', that case needs to be heavily tempered by flagging up the stuff that either went right, or which didn't actively go wrong (no rioting! only a few light injuries!).
Hundreds of thousands of people had a pretty good time. Thousands more all around the city saw a pretty good fireworks display. Millions around the globe saw an awesome opening ceremony.
The last thing I'll mention is that if everyone had hopped in their cars, it would have been gridlock, and...where would they all have parked? Lake road in Devonport didn't clear for around 2-3 hours after the fireworks finished on Friday night - it was mostly a slow-moving carpark up until around 10.30. A mate who came over with his children took an hour to do a journey that normally takes 10 minutes on their way home.
-
Field Theory: Four Years Ago, in reply to Sacha,
people weren’t told that, they were told that the best experience was to be had by getting downtown, by public transport, early. So we did, in HUGE numbers.
This ad appeared in today's print herald. Post-event, admittedly, but indicative of the vibe of the run-up.
If you invite the world for a party, they might actually turn up....
-
Field Theory: Four Years Ago, in reply to BenWilson,
London's public transport is designed to cope with a city of 15 million people. A major sporting event there (and the RWC is not really that major for London) causing only a blip on the transport experience is likely. They have excess capacity for Africa. They have massive ability to reroute.
To make something remotely comparable to what happened here on Friday you are talking about handling a reasonably sudden choice of 2 million people to descend onto a some London central city riverside venue. Even then, that would probably only cause local blockages, because the various ring loops and other lines wouldn't be affected.
It ocurred to me at the weekend that something pretty much like this did occur in London - on New Year's Eve 1999. And the result was actually much the same as it was last Friday, for many of the same reasons.
All you say about nodes and re-routing is true (the excess capacity, not so much), but even with all that, the system(s) struggled to cope. We were in the central city, and it became clear to us at around 7.00PM that our central city riverside venue choice (the south bank - one of many distributed party nodes around the central city) was not a wise choice, and we decamped to a friends place in the 'burbs. Even at that stage in the evening, I personally witnessed several instances of drunken stupidity that were extremely fortunate to turn out ok - people falling off tube platforms onto the rails and so on.
There was a lot in the press over the following few days after the event about how many notable VIP's had been left stranded by tube failures and delays on their way to the star-studded invitation-only event at the dome: That was a complete clusterfuck.
All in all, the evening was generally chaos for anyone wanting to get anywhere, but for those who were there already, it turned out ok.
There's a huge element of luck to these things. As I said, there were people on the rails and someone could easily have been hit by a train, which would have brought whole sections of the network to a halt, more or less (I've been on a tube on a normal workday when there's been a suicide ahead, and it brings the line more or to a stop for an hour or two). People could have fallen off bridges into the Thames and drowned, and it was a pretty raw cold night. And there were a lot of drunken injuries and so on in the casualty wards.
But in terms of the public celebration, the worst that happened was that the much vaunted firework display - the river of light - was completely shit.
It will be interesting to see how London copes with the Olympics. The usual 'oh-my-god-the-infrastructure-cannae-take-it-captain' stories are already being trotted out. Par for the course for any big event in any country, really.
-
Hard News: Just don't call it "Party Central", in reply to recordari,
You might enjoy this. WARNING: requires some Nickleback listening.
-
Hard News: Just don't call it "Party Central", in reply to recordari,
be careful what you wish for.
-
From that link:
"If your going to Going Global Music Summit & Showcase" ...
...then don't forget to take some grammar lessons before you go!
-
Hard News: Everybody's News, in reply to Danielle,
I thought Cheney was pretty much under the radar and Bush was the butt of lots of jokes (remember how he nearly choked to death on a pretzel while watching football? Good times) in that first six months in office. But perhaps I am misremembering. Or misunderestimating, to quote the man himself.
My memory of that period is that the heatedly partisan nature of the election simply carried over through the inauguration and on to 9/11. Republicans were basically saying: "we won, you lost, suck it up, losers'. And the Dems were kicking up a stink about the 'stolen election'. Florida, hanging chads, Diebold, etc. I recall there was a smallish movement determined to reveal the truth about how the votes had been deliberately miscounted. They didn't really gain a lot of traction, but they weren't going away, either.
Bush's limo got egged on it's way to his first day on the job. There were stories about how all the 'W' keys had been removed from the white house keyboards, and so on.
The whole thing was rather neatly summed up by this graphic that was doing the rounds at the time.
As well as being the butt of a lot of jokes, I recall the European press being full of stories pitched with a sort of "OMG do you see what the village idiot and his croneys have done now?". For example, the Hainan Island incident got quite a lot of play, mostly pitched at showing how Bush was an over-aggressive bullying thug with no subtlety, determined to throw America's weight around to show who was boss.
9/11 simply made all that disappear (well, mostly). People like Bill Keller happily wrapped themselves in the flag and followed the drumbeat to war without asking the hard questions.
I don't think it was a conspiracy, but it was a gift-wrapped opportunity that Cheny et al weren't slow about exploiting in order to push the PNAC agenda which they probably knew they couldn't get moving any other way.