Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Local journeys on the cusp of…, in reply to Gerrit,
Also cyclist please note that riding across a pedestrian crossing does not mean cars have to stop for you. You have to walk your bike over.
There is of course the overarching law that drivers must avoid accidents where possible.
Essentially this means that even if the cyclist is breaking the law by riding and not walking across the pedestrian crossing the drivers are required by law to avoid running them over.
If a cyclist slows to walking speed and starts their crossing when the car is far enough away from the crossing to appropriately stop (marked by the diamond on the roadway) then there really is no reason to complain. And certainly no reason for a driver to risk the life of a cyclist just to "prove a point".
If there are pedestrians around I'd always dismount and zooming across at bike speed is wrong as well but apart from that being a good citizen on the road would argue that drivers stop for cyclists who are behaving reasonably.
Worth noting that the "solution" for cyclists at Carrington is laughable - can you imagine a similar solution for drivers?
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A little old but still mostly valid for discussions about where the money comes from and goes to
http://cyclingchristchurch.co.nz/2013/02/18/mythbusting-cyclists-dont-pay/when it comes to local roads (where most people cycle) about 50% is paid for by local Council rates (in larger places like Christchurch, the proportion is typically a bit higher).
For Auckland it's probably higher, so it's, to a large degree, ratepayer funded not funded by road user charges, that's especially true of footpaths etc.
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What pisses me off about all of this, the articles, the banks, the real estate agents and of course the governments, is that it is all short term thinking.
Nobody is willing to plan for the long term. Somehow we've come to accept that it's Ok for our governments to abandon the future as someone else's problem. That applies to both Labour and National. It essentially is our fault.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Martin Brown,
I sometimes think National actually would really like to lose the next one and dodge the bullet.
I agree but it looks like Little is doing a much better job at losing the election than National expected.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to BenWilson,
They would simply put into the terms and conditions of the service that it was the responsibility of the cyclist to obey the laws
Yeah I agree, but the reasoning is the inconvenience of carrying a helmet is enough to make folks not use the service at all. So not the liability issue - but just the expectation that the uptake would be so low as to make the business not viable.
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Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to BenWilson,
Do warriors really need to have a culture dedicated to glorification of killing?
No they don't and really we'd hope they don't.
But most humans are really shit at killing humans. So one of the most difficult things about making a soldier is training humans to be willing and able to kill. Modern tech helps distance soldiers from the people they kill but it isn't enough. Essentially, if you want a group of soldiers to be effective then you need to select and then train them to kill. And even then a huge proportion of them suffer major mental health problems as a result.
Because soldiers are really not representative of society we need to make sure they don't make the decisions about when they should be applied to a given problem. That decision must be in the hands of people who can make that decision balancing the values and needs of our society.
Sadly our government seems to have failed us in that latter step.
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Heh wouldn't it be funny if the helmet law got repealed to allow a bike sharing company to start up
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/22/bike-wars-dockless-china-millions-bicycles-hangzhou -
Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to Neil,
We can choose to become involved or not but it's a choice we have to make. Not becoming involved doesn't necessarily absolve us of moral responsibility. And determining just who is "other" might not be straight foward.
For me the issue is not that we become involved but rather that we use our military to become involved.
By it's nature the military will kill people. History tells us that every time we send the military anywhere incidents will occur that we all will be ashamed of. Sometimes the need is so great that we accept that cost.
But at no point should anyone ever say
"gosh I didn't expect soldiers to commit atrocities"
because that's what happens when you people with that training and that mindset into situations like that.It's not something specific to New Zealand or Afghanistan. It is true of every military everywhere and every conflict ever.
That is why the decision to send military forces should be the action of absolute last resort and considered with the utmost caution and in full knowledge that bad things will happen and for some of those our forces will be to blame.
Sadly our MPs did not really understand that.
Note this isn't a criticism of the NZSAS or the soldiers involved. There is simply no way I can at my computer fully empathise with the situation they were in. The problem is at a much higher level.
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Quoting from Danyl Mclauchlan's review of the book
...when the inevitable moral compromises, blunders, pointless atrocities and general horrors of warfare unfold
My father fought in WW2, I know almost nothing of what he experienced because I don't think he was ever capable of really describing it. But I got the very real sense that things happened that were horrific and perhaps that some of those things were his actions, as a soldier and in the resistance.
None of this is new. When you train men (and women) to set aside their natural morality and humanity and teach them how to kill and maim other humans and then you send them to places that are at war - then atrocities are inevitable. It's happened in every war or conflict.
I'm not saying we should yawn and move on. There is no question that if a war crime has been committed we need to know.
But much more important is learning that we should resist at all costs the temptation to send soldiers to fight wars or peacekeep or whatever it is they call it. Sometimes there will be no alternative, and then you have to expect terrible things to happen. Fathers will come home with nightmares and unable to speak about what they experienced, or worse, did.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to Kevin McCready,
The probability that the de Jong model represents reality is about zero according to my back of the envelope calculation.
How the hell would you know - you didn't read the paper