The Wrong Side of my Car
The blog that wants to go obsolete
Te Hā Noa: it is actually happening
One of the more uplifting bits of news this week is that Te Hā Noa, also known as Victoria Street Linear Park, is actually going to be built.
And well, it is not really a linear park, is it? We should call it what it is, a street upgrade. There is nothing wrong with that. Street upgrades are important and badly needed. So, let’s go.
Who Is To Blame for that cyclist’s death?
Sad news arrived from Cambridgeshire, Great Britain. A cyclist lost balance and fell off the footpath. She then got run over by a car and died. Rest in piece.
Let me sketch a picture of what happened. An elderly cyclist was cycling on the footpath *1. She met a pedestrian coming on foot from the other side. That pedestrian got angry, some shouting and gesticulation ensued, and as the cyclist tried to get out of the way, she lost balance, and fell into the road. There, A car driver found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and hit the cyclist.
The pedestrian got sentenced for three years in prison for this. Case closed? Eh, I think we still have to ask questions.
The consequences of stupid greenwashing
Greenwashing means marketing a product by pretending it is somehow good for the environment.
This amusing example showed up on my Twitter feed.
Sometimes it is amusing. Sometimes it does some damage.
Diesels
In Belgium diesel engines have long been a popular choice for people buying a new car. It was cheaper at the pump, and it is particularly popular for the many company owned cars on Belgian roads (a bit more derisively known as salary cars — long story).
And in 2008 this popularity got turbocharged (pardon the pun) by something called the eco bonus (ecopremie). Cars which emit less than 105 g of CO2 per km would get a 15% cashback from the government. Because climate change. It was announced a bit later that the registration tax would also get cheaper depending on CO2 emissions. If you were buying a small car in 2010 you were strongly incentivised to look for low CO2 emissions, which de facto meant choosing a diesel.
How much do we get out of that 8th lane?
The previous post was about whether or not it is the right time to liberate the lane. One thing that was mentioned was that the average lane on the harbour bridge is used by about 10,000 people.
However not all lanes are created equal. How much capacity do we lose when switching to 7 lanes?
The case for and against Skypath
A prominent missing link for bicycling and walking in Auckland is the bridge over the Waitematā Harbour. About 10 years ago it was expected that Skypath would fill this gap — long story, but now, after another couple of somewhat dumb iterations, it looks like we will be without a cycle crossing for another while.
Some go as far as saying it is the most critical missing link in Auckland. But I think this is an exaggeration, seeing how the rest of the bicycle network on the North Shore basically doesn’t exit.
There are tiers below Painted Bike Lanes
Paint-only bike lanes often cop a lot of flak. Sometimes for good reason, for instance the setup on Glenfield Road or Green Lane is ridiculous.
But still. When cycling in Auckland, most of the time, it is much worse than painted lanes. Are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater here?
So today we explore the abyss that lies below this level of infrastructure.
Car brain
Have you ever heard anyone use the term Car Brain?
Maybe someone is pointing out that you obviously can’t get groceries without a car *1. Or, yeah public transport is all good if you just want to go straight home from work but this will obviously never work if you have to go to other places underway. These assertions often attract scorn, and ‘car brain’ is a term to imply that people saying these things are kind of stupid. It is perhaps a bit of a Liberal thing, and liberals aren’t exactly known to be good at making friends.
In basic terms, it refers to people who no longer know how to survive without driving a car. Or even, whether or not this is possible at all. But can you really blame them? Look around in your city. How do the streets work? Where is everything?