The Wrong Side of my Car
A blog about Auckland City, its streets, and culture shock
What's wrong with Aetoa Square?
Aotea Square is often described as barren and wind-swept. A hole in our city. Why is that?
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Aotea Square |
Wsomc’s handy old network to new network translator
And here comes the new public transport network for the North Shore. So, let’s have a look at the improvements around me, in the Kaipātiki area:
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Part of the New Network, by Auckland Transport |
That looks familiar. Really familiar…
Pedestrians (and cyclists) also to gain right of passage across Cook Street
Last week I was wondering what’s up with that lonely pedestrian crossing on Hobson Street, while actually the worst street of them all is Cook Street.
And what do you know? Cook Street is next, and it will get an entire pair of cycleways.
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Proposed crossing, consultation drawing by Auckland Transport |
Pedestrians to gain right of passage across Hobson Street
Remember Hobson Street?
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Yes, that one. |
Not an easy one if you want to go across the street to the dairy.
It will, in theory, become a little bit easier, at least on one block, with AT proposing to install a new mid-block signalised crossing.
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Consultation drawing by Auckland Transport |
The far side of the windshield
Some observations of the far side of the windshield. I can’t read people’s minds, so I filled in some details…
Every day John Doe catches the bus to work on Glenfield Road. As usual in the morning he has to cross the road. He managed to cross to the middle of the street to the pedestrian refuge, but is now stuck with the endless stream of cars going to the city. With that endless steam comes his bus, and it pulls over…
The Lantern Festival: how do you get to huge events in Auckland?
I went to the lantern festival, which happens now every year in the Auckland Domain.
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Promotional image from ATEED. |
Getting to any event of any signficance is a pain in the ass, as it invariably attracts thousands of people trying to drive and park their car in that same spot. With this one, we’re talking about 100,000’s, so forewarned is forearmed. Do not proceed without planning ahead.
(This does not apply if you’re walking in from your apartment nearby. In that case, please spare a thought for those caught in traffic.)
Making the relief map: the base
If you download a DEM it looks roughly like this:
By itself, visualizing relief as a greyscale image has an advantage: the eye is quite sensitive to changes in brightness, making it a good choice if you want to discover fine details in the image. But I wanted to overlay a street map over the relief, and doing this in a clear manner is really hard if the background varies between black and white.
So what I want to do is 2 things:
- Turn the height into a color map,
- add relief shading to emphasize local relief.