Posts by James Green
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Quigley suggested a tram/light rail link from UC to the sea at New Brighton
Personally, I'm a big fan of this idea. I was in Dijon for a while last year, a city of similar size to Christchuch both in terms of population and land. It also has a slightly smaller area a little like the CBD (but in their case, originally bounded by the city walls, which are now 4 boulevards, cf. avenues) They are building a tram that runs from their big box retail precinct to the CBD via the university and hospital (in Dijon's case, these are both located on the edge of the city, having outgrown their more central locations). This intersects with another tram that serves different poles of the city.
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Would be interesting to see where Auckland would sit if you add it to this chart. And of course, if they relax the MUL, then those sort of figures are only going to get worse.
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Speaker: It's called "planning" for a reason, in reply to richard goldie,
The fact is Auckland’s density (lack) is real, using the same metrics LA is measured as one of the most dense cities in the world- can you believe it?
Some parts of LA really are more dense, but depending on where you draw your LA line, large tracts have very similar density to Auckland. And they are (re)building trains.
However, what I would suggest is more important is the planning. Auckland certainly isn't as dense as Santa Monica, for example, which still retains a largely surburban feel. However, Auckland should be planning for increased density around new and existing links. I'd guess Auckland's density is going to increase, and that needs to not happen in an ad-hoc fashion.
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the tunnel as corporate welfare for the fat cats of Queen Street
This argument would have more credibility if the CBD wasn't the transport hub. Is there any public transport from the shore to the airport, that doesn't require entering the CBD?
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Rail. Is. The. Answer.
Period.
I've just driven 150km this afternoon through Santa Monica, Downtown LA, Orange County, Newport Beach, Long Beach, and back to SaMo past LAX.
More roads=more traffic.
Carpool lanes, even carpool lanes that have their own dedicated additional fricking flyover that goes from the centre lane over the plebs who are one to a car (ie everybody) are still not enough.
Why not buses? Because dedicated busways, like dedicated carpool lanes with their own flyovers have to end eventually, and then the backed up cars choke up the buses, and they're still screwed.
Trains/light rail/trams win because they avoid road traffic. What we need is to allow intensification near the train stations. Now I love gardening, but I've been really pleasantly surprised that a combination of low rise apartments, no carparking, excellent public greenspaces, and shops within 3 minutes walk of the front door are actually more potentially awesome than having a garden. And the poeple with families who live in these same buildings seem to find the same.
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Just a comment on urban density, terraced, housing, and parking. I've been living in Santa Monica (car-less) for the last 4 weeks, and been really surprised at the urban density here, but that there is still room for pools, gardens, and barbequing. What really f***s LA, and its liveability, is that the these nice strips of high density dwellings are fronted by a very wide street (and every third street is 4-6 lanes), and in between every street is a secondary street encumbered with acres of car parking, garages and skips. If they could only halve the amount of spaces devoted to parking and roading, they'd discover they didn't really need all the extra cars, car parks, and road lanes, and it would be fricking idyllic.
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<em>I'm still kind of annoyed I didn't go to Otago, where they get fluffy bits on their hoods.</em>
They're just flat out made of velvet. The only real fun you can have is pulling them askant, either beret-style, or straight backward. Mostly just stupid.
Also, I'm with Kyle. I think they're a humbling thing. I mean burgundy. Honestly. Although I can exclusively reveal that they look stunning with limegreen jeans. -
Mike -- on word counts and the relationship to the cost of the book. I confess I'm an extremely occasional book reader, but it seems to be that there is enormous variation in the typesetting of books, in terms of line spacing, margin size, and of course print size. As the grossest example, some, I don't know the name for it, but it strikes me that popular, considere non-literary fiction (the kind of thing that libraries charge for because it is considered to have no public good) is extremely uneconomical in terms of words per page. Or is this an extreme case because you are dealing with monster print runs. Or alternatively, are there different expectations for typesetting by genre, such that if you're reading something that is intended to be dense and literary, small margins and very dense small text is considered acceptable.
I'm just curious. I only write dull professional stuff, and wordcounts are strictly enforced.
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Ok. That makes some sense. It does produce some artefacts though; Richard Thomson appears to have no friends, but this because you include all iterations between exclusions, so when Thomson receives more votes than he needs (which might quality him for friending), the redistribution of his surplus makes him look unfriended. On the other hand, if you look at it in terms of helping him get elected, then nobody helps him get elected because he was elected at Iteration 1.
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That's an interesting graph David. Just trying to reconcile what I think I know about the results with your output... are the helped/hindered scaled as a function of the proportion a candidate received in the first preference round (so that initially popular candidates would have to helped A LOT to show up as being helped)?