Field Theory: Four Years Ago
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Rich Lock, in reply to
Those black jerseys were pathetic, and in the end bothered me greatly
You're not talking about the black jersey worn by Mr Sonny Delight himself, I take it? That wardrobe failure seemed to get a lot of people rather hot and bothered. Around 50% of the population, by the sounds of it...
Given his talent for self-promotion, it wouldn't surprise me if someone in his camp had been at the seams pre-match with a pair of nail scissors. Look at the footage of the way the jersey rips, people! Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left.
We're through the looking glass.
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recordari, in reply to
You're not talking about the black jersey worn by Mr Sonny Delight himself, I take it?
No, I was talking about the English underarm re-oderant shirt. It stinks. The numbers were even falling off in protest.
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Sacha, in reply to
Perhaps one potentially useful thing to come out Len’s inquiry will be some clear statements of simple physical and resource limitations in play.
Ex regional transport committee chair Joel Cayford explains in some detail why to him it's a matter of safety.
Decades of neglect and under-funding are the fundamental reason for the fragility of Auckland's commuter rail system. Central and Regional Government each share some of the responsibility for the delicacy of Auckland Rail which comes under strain at peak time - like any network system.
But it's not that simple. We should be able to do better with what we have. The public should be able to rely on the institutions that are responsible for governing and operating Auckland commuter rail to provide services that are safe - irrespective of the delicacy or robustness of the network. It should not be up to the public to carry out a risk assessment everytime they give up their cars and follow advice to take public transport.
Auckland Rail is an accident waiting to happen in peak times.
...Auckland Council must now prioritise passenger safety, and the funding of projects that increase public safety and service reliability - especially at peak travel times because that is when the risk is greatest.
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I went and saw England play Fiji at Twickenham (82000 seats) in the 1998 RWC.
Public transport was the standard scheduled commuter services - I don't think they even had special trains. Needless to say, the trains were crammed, but they got us to and from Waterloo ok (we even picked up a stray commuter along the way who bought our spare ticket and wagged off work),
I'd take from that that if you have an adequate public transport system that's used by a majority on a normal basis, than it'll cope with special events without too much strain.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
Well, that was rather more useful than Mike Lee in Te Herald this morning:
Auckland Council transport chairman Mike Lee said Veolia had to take a large share of the blame.
"Everything we have worked for in the last five years ... we were let down - it was a disgrace."
Tomorrow, Mayor Brown is to receive a review of the rail problems from Auckland Transport chairman Mark Ford and chief executive David Warburton.
Mr Lee has called a special meeting today to discuss Friday's events.
A council source told the Herald that "Veolia hasn't stepped up to the mark as well as it could have done", saying the train operator had previous performance issues, including at U2's concert last November when a passenger pushed a stop button and stranded several trains near Ellerslie station.
Mr Lee said it was time Veolia started earning its management fee of about $35 million within total annual rail funding of $85 million.
For pretty obvious reasons, nobody at Veolia is going to say this on the record, but there are plenty of transport operators in Auckland who feel exactly the same about Auckland Transport. As someone said to me, (not my Dave, BTW) Auckland Transport would be much easier to deal with if there fewer political hacks and more people who have a reality-based understanding of how a public transport network operates, and what can actually be done with current resources.
I get the politics - no politician is ever going to lose support (or column inches) crapping on the evil multinational corporation. But I think Mike Lee and Mark Ford have some questions of their own to answer.
Hell, I think various AT staff clearing their fraking voicemail and replying to e-mails in a timely manner would be a start.
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Sacha, in reply to
Some discussion on other thread too.
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Has anyone else noted a change in the "voting" system in rugby over the last 20-25 years???? In the "old days" I thought the touch judges were there to "vote" on whether the ball went over. That is, each TJ decided if the ball went between the posts and they then put their flag up - and here is the punch - without comparing notes. The referee then had the deciding vote as to whether it was a McCarthey "It's a Goal" or not. Now you see them talk to each other, compare notes and mutually agree or disagree. Then usually the referee signals. My experience in this kind of mutually assured shinannigans (another sport but where two people have to decide) is that a less experienced TJ could be influenced by their more experienced colleague.
Just had a chat to an old referee mate who concurs that that was how it was and as far as he knows it hasn't changed. Checking the laws of Rugby Law 6 says that the referee may refer to a match official if required. Couldn't find anything about "voting" but there is no doubt the indication is that the referee could overrule both TJs if he felt inclined to disagree with their decision.
I certainly recall games where TJs indicated opposites and the referee needing to make the final decision.
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Still writing my post from last night's game, but as for the "the kick", as it seems to be known now, from my seat at corporate box level it looked like it missed.
Though it should be noted that when Wayne Barnes was announced as referee there was a brief, but noticeable, rumbling of discontent through the crowd.
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From my seat (up quite high, midway) it looked like it went over... but I don't think I'd put money on it.
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BenWilson, in reply to
It is only round one of the RWC, but looking at the performance of the teams from the Heineken cup countries, I couldn't help wondering to myself if the same baleful influence of to much money and greedy clubs isn't impacting team performances in the rugby world cup also.
If so, that's all part of the beauty of a World Cup, which injects a periodic dose of reality into their scene, as it does for English Soccer.
On professionalism, one thing I do notice is that it browns the sport a lot, because it becomes all about whether you're any good at the sport, rather than if you can afford to take the time out of your real job for it. Teams are still, on the whole, formed from nationals, but their top notch immigrants get a look in, and their society as a whole becomes well represented.
But I'm not convinced that the spirit of sport is well represented by commercial interests. For instance, the USA is unable to find a group of people who would dwarf every other team? Only because American Football and the big bucks floating there drain it all away. Consequently, all those athletes never experience international competition.
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BenWilson, in reply to
I'd take from that that if you have an adequate public transport system that's used by a majority on a normal basis, than it'll cope with special events without too much strain.
I think that good public transport will always help, but you're not comparing apples with apples - 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. We just don't have anything like that here.
Scapegoating the train operators is ridiculous. It's decades of decisions not to expand our rail network at fault here, and even then, those choices were dictated by the comparatively small population of Auckland, and its extremely hilly and harbour-divided geography.
Furthermore, there was a lot of advice the day before to travel early. They knew the capacity was not there. I knew it was not there, and I don't even use public transport - my trip on the bus on Friday was the first (outside of Waiheke) in 20 years (and was a very pleasant surprise). Common sense tells you that if you quadruple the number of travelers, you will grind it to a halt. In the city of the automobile, which moves most of the working population in and out of the city every day using automobiles and buses, the capacity of THAT to cope was clearly there. If I'd got to a train platform and found 500 people waiting, and had a ticket to the ceremony in my pocket, I wouldn't have boarded the train in the first place, would have just got my car, driven as close to the stadium as possible, and then caught a cab or walked the difference. Possibly offering a lift to 3 other people if I felt public spirited. Or ridden my bike, or hitched.
I know sometimes these things creep up on you and feel compassion for those who missed out on the opening ceremony. But scapegoating doesn't really help anything. We've never had anything near the scale of the RWC happening here before, and Kiwis need to take a long look at the attitude of dourly underestimating their interest in things, then suddenly changing their minds at the last minute, and then complaining that plans weren't made for that. It's an unattractive part of the national spirit to me.
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Carol Stewart, in reply to
Well said Ben.
There were no problems with Welly's public transport last night that I could see -- we just hopped on a regular bus at the end of our street and got to the stadium with at least an hour to spare. I got the impression that a substantial proportion of the crowd were from overseas actually (or maybe Kiwis are just too shy and retiring to make a big impression like the Welsh did..). It was very, very slow getting out of the stadium afterwards, was the only downside of the event. -
Sofie Bribiesca, in reply to
Yep. +1 . People we know who attended the game did exactly as you said. Got close by their own transport and walked the rest. Close being, other side of the Bond St overbridge. Parking was absurdly easy.
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Sacha, in reply to
those choices were dictated by the comparatively small population of Auckland, and its extremely hilly and harbour-divided geography
The choices over the last 7 decades were political, not geographical. Joshua Arbury's blog has extensive detail (and cool old maps).
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I am also in total agreement with Joshua's assessment of Friday's debacle:
I’m reasonably confident that the transport system could have coped with either getting 60,000 people to and from Kingsland or getting 200,000 people to and from the city centre.
In the Bledisloe Cup game a couple of months back a combination of buses and trains carried over half the audience without too many problems (just a few delays after the game, but that was somewhat to be expected). Similarly, the transport system to and from downtown copes with the daily rush hour and also copes with big events in the city like Santa Parades, Christmas in the Park and so forth.
Coping with either of the two events would have stretched the system, coping with both at the same time in the same place fundamentally was just too much.
The opening night events were probably over-hyped quite a lot: the music on Queens Wharf was pretty useless to around 90% of people in town because they couldn’t get on the wharf. The waka arrival in the Viaduct Harbour was pretty cool, but once again because the crowds were so big it was impossible to see the mass haka or anything else.
The fireworks were also probably best seen from high points or coastal points around the Waitemata Harbour – but 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.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
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.
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Rudman also nails it.
For months, Prime Minister John Key and his Rugby World Cup party planner Murray McCully have been tweeting the world, inviting all and sundry to cruise down to Party Central on September 9 and have a ball.
They promised the biggest fireworks display ever seen, local bands, a fleet of waka and all for free. Tickets? No worries bro, just bowl up at the gates and say Muzza invited me. It'll be sweet.
Now, like teenagers cleaning up the mess at their parents' house after that gathering for a few mates went feral, Muzza doesn't want to know. The minister who's been driving every one involved batty with his micro-managing of the project, says he was out of the room at the time. It's everyone else's fault. Auckland Transport (AT), he says, dropped the ball.
In fact, there's so much finger-pointing, that if the digits were loaded guns, there'd be bodies littering the corridors of power.
...As far as the over-crowding along the waterfront was concerned, it is, in hindsight, weird the experts didn't expect the sort of crowd they got, and planned accordingly.
After all they'd hyped the show up, even encouraging CBD bosses to send workers home early to make way for the expected crowds. They'd widely promoted the extravaganza as free, which always appeals, and told everyone to leave their cars at home because of the zillions expected. Finally, the weather was unseasonably perfect.
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BenWilson, in reply to
His suggestion that announcements be made at platforms for people to follow "Plan B", is a good one. For those who, unlike me, aren't capable of making a Plan B for themselves.
My only thought about why people might have opted not to goes to my own reasons for using PT in the first place. It wasn't because I anticipated any difficulties getting into the city - in a car, this is pimps, that's why everyone uses them. It's because I anticipated drinking.
Which I actually didn't manage to do, in the end. It wasn't just PT that was overloaded. But I was able to go to a nice, cheap private party after the parts of the ceremony that I actually wanted to see were done with. This was Plan B for me, and there was a Plan C and D which didn't get exercised. From their back garden I was able to see the whole city lit up with fireworks from one end to the other, with a glass of wine and a slice of pizza in hand, a smoke on the table, a big screen TV to watch, good friends to chat to, and a fire to put my feet up in front of before the main event started. The only thing that really jeopardized any of that was the overloading of the cellphone networks.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
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....
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You know what, why don't we just build a bridge and get over it?. Preferably with light rail and cycle tracks attached.
Just trying to be helpful, honest.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Interesting, Rich. I'd venture also, just like Friday here, that it's something most people will remember for the rest of their lives. For me, it was incredibly special to be in that Quay St press, after months of thinking NZers really didn't give a shit about the World Cup, and could end up showing the world that. You don't get big occasions like this very often, and I was damned if I was going to spend New Year's eve 1999 at work, as my bosses wanted, no matter how much overtime they were paying. If the company's systems went down and the whole place went flat broke, I'd have got another job. But I'd never in a thousand years get another millenium party.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
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.
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Yeah, I think that although there's a case to answer in relation to a lot of the 'failures'
Indeed. People did miss out, and that sucked.
Isn't Devonport a public transport fail by its very nature? Isn't that what you love about it? Where else can you get the closest panorama of the city, coupled with the accessibility of Orewa? I presume you got the kickyarsiest views of the fireworks, though?
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Rich Lock, in reply to
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.
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BenWilson, in reply to
But ferries FTW. This city needs more of them.
Word up, son.
ETA: I was kidding btw, I think there's something awesome about catching a ferry to work. 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!
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