Posts by Tom Beard
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Just to bring the two threads together: here's a map that I created just now showing the proportion of people who put "no religion" in the last census, created entirely using open-source GIS tools. Just for Wellington so far, but I can create others.
By the way, the tools were QuantumGIS and PostGIS. Unfortunately, the data itself isn't open source, but that's a whole 'nother can of beef.
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See? There you again Tom Beard - "the more chance we'll have of building sustainable cities." You are (now its my turn to use the phrase du jour) conflating sustainability with what sort of transport options work best for a small city, and what people want.
I've never conflated sustainability and convenience. We all want convenience, but it shouldn't be at the expense of others, or of future generations. That should be more important than "what people want" (such a simple phrase, yet covering up so much complexity about how people come to want what they do), especially when (getting back to the topic) what some people want appears to involve obnoxious and sometimes fatal behaviour.
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Somebody else's problem until then? I had plenty of mates who expected Mr Taxi Man to keep them in their unlicensed bliss, but eventually they wised up.
Amazing assumption you make: the whole point of it was that I didn't need a car to live most of my life, so it wasn't anyone else's problem. If I did need one, there were taxis (proper, paid-for ones, not sponging off mates as you seem to imply, and still cheaper than owning a car).
Being able to get around isn't really a panacea. It's kind of basic.
No it isn't: you only need to "get around" if the things you need are far apart. My needs to get around, apart from within a 1km radius, are pretty minimal, and the few times that I need to leave the CBD, public transport generally suffices. I wish it were better, and the more people get away from the idea that the "love affair with the car" is natural and immutable, the more chance we'll have of building sustainable cities.
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People forget what a life-transforming event getting your own car is when you are 15 or 16, but I don't.
Maybe it would have been, but I didn't bother at that age (and I lived in a part of Christchurch without much public transport - it was just a given that we'd bike everywhere). I do remember at the age of 25 or 26, when I got my driver's license and first car (having been transferred to Auckland against my will) that it certainly was a "life-transforming event": I suddenly had to worry about parking and registration and maintenance and petrol and counting my drinks and peak-hour traffic and keeping my eyes open (I was a shift worker) and insurance, when I'd never had to bother with those before. It hardly felt like a liberation.
its a plain fact humans LOVE cars
And I love champagne too, but I'm not going to demand that society organise itself in such a way to make it as cheap and easy for me to enjoy as possible. A car on its own is not going to be any use to you: you need a whole infrastructure of roads and parking and petrol stations to enable your convenience. And that convenience comes at the expense of others, as the liveability of cities gets sacrificed to make more room for an incredibly space-inefficient form of transport.
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has The Bypass settled down yet? Is it yet possible to cross town in anything near approaching the time it took before the bypass was built?
It seems to be back to pre-bypass levels, at least from casual observation from the sidelines. I'm not sure that there's been any actual significant improvement to justify the 30-odd million dollars, but we'll have to wait for some official stats (the Dom did a test that was laughably flawed), but it appears to be back to normal at least.
I notice that the promised improvements to Ghuznee St are yet to materialise. The traffic levels have indeed dropped, but the Cuba St intersection still has a hugely long phase, and the frustration has led to a lot of jaywalking and near deaths (due to the change to two-way, though I wish people would look). Some of the footpath is being widened (by about 10cm), but other parts are being narrowed so that more people can park their choice cars.
Getting back on topic, the most hardcore of the boy racers would probably be antisocial even if cars never existed, and they'd be out setting fire to the homeless or whatever instead. Raising the driving age would help, and ceasing to build mind-numbingly dull single-use suburbs ("great place to raise kids, bloody awful place to be a kid") would as well. But some people are just idiots, and they'll always find ways to kill themselves or their friends in an effort to show how staunch they are.
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But we are so far from being Europe it's not funny. Both physically, demographically, culturally and in terms of development.
But we don't have to be (apart from physically, of course). Parts of NZ already have half-decent density and half-decent public transport infrastructure, and where that is the case, people can and do use public transport. Demographics are changing, and culture can change too: we just have to stop telling ourselves that we all live like Wal Footrot and look to the future instead.
In NZ it is impractical, and if you really feel imprisoned, perhaps liberating yourself from the car and the country isn't such a bad call.
That reads a little bit like "if you don't like the way things are, you can get the hell out of here", but I'll try not to read it like that. In a sense, maybe I have "liberated myself from the country" by living in central Wellington: the world that the "bored Taranaki teenagers" or boy racers in some godforsaken sprawling suburb of Tauranga inhabit seems like not just a different country, but an entirely different planet sometimes. Except when they invade the city at the weekends, but that can generally be avoided by steering clear of Courtenay Pl (which is good advice in general).
Good luck with transforming NZ into that. See you in 50 years.
Well, it is a long term vision. And we're never going to transform all of NZ into an urban(e) culture, but we can at least stop building suburbs that are impossible to live in without a car.
A friend of mine who is a traffic engineer in Sydney told me that decent public rail systems typically won't develop until commute times reach about 90 mins each way.
But Wellington has a (half) decent rail system on much shorter commutes, and if we made the political decisions to tax petrol adequately, fund PT infrastructure instead of more and more motorways, and stop modelling our town planning after 1950s America, we'd have a decent one.
I feel obliged to point out the the extremely obvious fact that cars are choice.
When I'm waiting to cross a traffic-clogged road, watching an SUV nearly hit someone as it runs a red light, hearing councillors howling at the thought of giving up three carparks to make a park, putting up with inadequate public transport because all the money's gone on roads, or watching a great big trench being driven through one of the oldest and formerly most interesting neighbourhoods of the city, then even if I were inclined to use the word "choice" as an adjective, I would not not agree that cars are "choice".
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To me, freedom is to being allowed.
I'm not quite sure how to parse that. If you mean that freedom is defined as being allowed to do whatever you want, then isn't an environment that forces you to spend thousands of dollars on owning, running, storing and learning to drive a car an imposition on your freedom? I've always found dense cities to be liberating environments, full of possibility; while being stuck in a place like Whitby or Bell Block is like a prison sentence.
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NZ driver laws are predicated on the idea that a 15 year old farm hand need a liscence to be able to drive a tractor down a rural road. That's why our driving age is so low, and over the years no politician has been game to change that
Yep, every time someone suggests raising the driving age, out pops some Cletus Lovejoy: "Won't somebody pleeeease think of the yokels?!" They're letting the stereotypical "bored kids in rural Taranaki" define the rest of the country.
Another problem is that while public transport is underfunded and has to rely on very high fares, petrol is very cheap in NZ. And of course:
The distances most people go to catch up with their lives are much greater so the bus rides will also be much longer.
which is a consequence of building our cities so that they resemble rural Taranaki more than actual cities. Cars become a symbol of freedom only if you live in sprawling, dull dormitory suburbs where you need a car to get anywhere interesting. To me, freedom is being able to live in a city where I can get to want to do without having to get there in a one-tonne lump of metal that has to be parked somewhere, paid for and generally looked after.
Until we can cram 16 million NZers into somewhere the size of Canterbury, the beautiful public transport options of most of Europe aren't going to happen.
The Netherlands has a population density of just under 400 people per square kilometre. That's high for a whole country, but actually about a tenth of a typical NZ suburb, so it's not exactly crammed. We don't need a huge population, but we do need what population we have to be concentrated in a way that makes public transport, walking and cycling viable for more people. I don't ever expect Inglewood or Waitara to get great public transport, but there's no reason (apart from politics) that our major cities shouldn't.
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provided it's still possible to illustrate within four dimensions.
At least five dimensions: latitude, longitude, altitude, time, and plane of existence (where the last dimension varies from "observable reality" via "wild speculation" and "florid paranoia" to "lala land").
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emo = goth - vampires