There are a couple songs out there that have become victims of my imagination. The lyrics I hear aren’t the same as what are printed in the liner notes. I’m slowly building a collection of mistakes that I think improve the song¹.

Hot Hot Heat – Middle of Nowhere

She said, “Maybe there’s a bit of me waiting for a bit of you, baby.”

becomes

She said, “Maybe there’s a better me waiting for a better you, baby.”

Matthew Good Band – Strange Days

We’re done lying for a living

becomes

When you’re done dying for a living

¹ It’s a stretch to assume that I could actually improve the song, but it’s still a really cool single line.

I’m almost homeless. I have 2 days left on my lease, which is barely enough time to even hope that I might find a place to move into by the weekend. My current state has been a long-ish journey. I’ve been actively searching for a home for over a month with nothing positive to say. It’s a bad time of year to be searching. University has just started back and the students have flooded the city with demand for downtown living-space. I’m a downtown kinda guy, so this directly impinges on my ability to find a decent place to live.

Even though I’m fully panicking about where I’m going to be sleeping this weekend, there are places that I’d walked out of without even thinking of applying for. I’m not a student; I don’t want a student flat. That means that my stove/oven must be in working condition and I don’t want to live with 5–10 other people. I also need a bit of natural light. I actually saw an apartment where sunlight did not directly penetrate. The windows opened into a 10–20cm gap before the next building.

There are good flats in Wellington – I’ve applied for quite a few. Unfortunately, I’ve received just as many rejections. For any place worth paying for, there was a queue of applications, with mine somewhere near the middle. As it turns out, it pays to be half an hour early to any viewing, if it’s a private owner. On the other hand, if it’s a property management company renting the apartment, don’t be a sole tenant applying for a two-bedroom apartment. After talking to a management company, I’ve learned that this is a red flag. I can’t explain why, but my references were never even checked. It’s more important to be two people than a good tenant, apparently.

So, all my stuff gets to live in a storage shed for the next while, and I get to find random places to sleep. This may include my car; this may be couch surfing. I’d love to build a tree-house somewhere, but I’m sure the novelty would wear off quickly when the drunk kids find me the first time. In any case, posting stuff to my house is probably not the best plan. Ideally, I’d have my mail redirected to a post box in town, but NZ Post currently only offers post boxes for yearly intervals, at a minimum of $115/year. Not exactly a useful plan to get me through a couple weeks. I’ll just have to coast for the next while.

The 2008 Fringe Festival continues to gently rampage through the city, and I continue to guess-and-test my way through the program. There will be more of a summary to follow after the festival has run its course, but there are a few highlights worth sharing in the meantime:

• What We Walk By is easily worth the walk to Aro St. It’s a photographic exhibit of illicit art found around the city. I ended up buying a print of one of the images.
• Blinkers is a strange mix of two strange people put together by chance and fall apart by habit.
• Dark Tourists was home to some of the most impressive music I’ve heard in a long while. The whole performance depended on what each member of the audience brought with them – much more subjective than the other shows I’ve seen.

With the International Arts Festival having started, my time will be split between the two festivals for a week. I’ve got tickets for La Vie tonight and then it’s back onto Fringe stuff. But I’ve noticed some public art spots popping up this week that I’ll be investigating, too.

The deadline for submissions to the Ngauranga to Airport Transportation Study have come and gone, although there is a grace period for receiving them¹, so it may not be too late to send submissions in. I’m attempting to catch up on many things, so this posting is a bit late. However, my submission should have already been through the postal system.

Urban Design Issues

Design vs. reaction

Design is about planning. It is an attempt to develop a vision before making changes. The summary report portrays a picture of problems that can be fixed with construction, but lacks any plan around which to develop. When considered with the recent consultation on the Adelaide Road region, a bigger picture emerges along with the realisation of the necessity of urban design and planning. Wellington can grow a high density, high efficiency region, but it won’t happen by accident. The process could be hijacked by groups of people determined to cling to expectations, without putting reason before preconceptions. Reactionary decisions made at this stage can detract from a cohesive plan.

It is worth noting that the technical report, delivered by Opus, considers the transportation issues in terms of prospective growth nodes, but is separated from any of the northern suburbs. This is limiting when considering the light-rail option, which benefits from being scaled to regions outside of the Ngauranga-Airport boundaries.

Living in spaces

Urban design is much more than mobility. While this submission is towards the transport corridor, it necessarily impacts the lives of both commuters and residents. For the city to grow and be liveable, the transport corridor must work within the context of the human environment. Not only must people be able to get to and from destinations, they must also not be excessively hindered by the transport infrastructure. Noise, pollution, congestion, safety and aesthetics are all important factors for people choosing where and how to live.

Communications protocol analogy

Transportation is a network, which provides a useful analogy. Communications networks utilise protocols to move information from one location to another. Each protocol has properties which influence network performance. The same is true with the transport network.

While cars provide point-to-point service, home to parking lot, there is a lot of overhead associated with each trip. Most cars that travel into Wellington have a single occupant. This takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of space and generates a lot of emissions. Buses occupy specific routes, which may not be point-to-point for the user, but overhead drops dramatically as usage goes up. This is also true for light-rail, to a much greater extent.

For short-distance trips, active modes are the most efficient. After that, public transportation modes are low-overhead, but only where density is suitable, which may be mitigated by park-and-ride measures. Car-pooling methods improve the efficiency of private vehicles, but from a congestion point of view, they are the worst option available. Attempting a behavioural shift, a change in protocol, is the best approach for long-term mitigation of congestion.

Infrastructure

All transportation modes require infrastructure. The public is well aware of the construction and maintenance of roads and there is constant media attention about the up-front costs associate with light-rail options. However, very little is mentioned about other infrastructure: foot-paths, cycle lanes and bus shelters, to name a few. Wellington enjoys a high rate of active mode transportation despite the often-inclement weather. This is also in spite of a lack of public bike storage in the CBD, disjointed segments of cycle pathways and pedestrian corridors that are exposed to the elements. Planning for active modes is a smaller-scale project than any other modes of transport and should incur lower costs, both for design and implementation. WCC has acknowledged an aggressive target for active mode trips and any outcomes of this consultation should reflect this.

Infrastructure for the different modes should not be considered in isolation. There are obviously cases where different modes share space – buses and private cars, for instance. When considering the consequences of an action, both the positive and negative effects of co-location must be weighed. Congestion of the road network delays all users. On the other hand, a light rail segment may be used by emergency vehicles to bypass busy roads. Taking this approach from another side, infrastructure for one mode may be a barrier for another. As an example, Cobham Drive does not provide a safe crossing point between the two opposite footpaths for a 2km stretch. This is a barrier to pedestrian access to Rongotai and to the proposed sports complex – an example of abysmal planning in action. In a general sense, the development of wide, high-speed roads will sever any active mode corridor that may cross it.

Environmental Issues

Environmental impact of transportation has been well covered by the media and, much more importantly, by the scientific community, which does not need to be repeated in depth here. The world faces growing emissions and growing demand on finite energy resources. This information must form a basic foundation upon which any decisions are based.

Regardless of any choices made as a result of this study, there are going to be long-term effects on the environment. The process of construction itself takes energy and releases wastes, and may displace houses or animal habitats. For large-scale infrastructure, the costs and consequences are dramatic. After completion, the daily use of Wellington’s transport network will continue to have environmental effects. Having pledged to becoming a “Carbon-Neutral Capital”, Wellington has a responsibility to apply a heavy weighting to the environmental costs of its decisions.

The per-user-per-kilometer energy consumption is highest for private vehicles. Public transportation only becomes energy efficient, especially for light-rail, with medium-to-high density corridors. Choice of bus and train routes is critical to public transportation being efficient. Active modes have near-zero environmental costs outside of infrastructure. Choosing to address congestion by construction of extra roading capacity bears the highest environmental cost by favouring low-efficiency modes at the expense of high-efficiency modes.

Economic Issues

Infrastructure is expensive. The summary report and the technical report both report that the outcomes of this consultation, regardless of option, is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. While there is certainly a valid point to be made in not over-spending, it is also necessary to properly design the anticipated changes, so that the cost of re-fixing problems is minimised. This is a basic engineering principle. In other words, arguments over initial costs of options should be weighted minimally in favour of the longer-term benefits. This is especially true for light-rail, where the running costs per year are much lower than the equivalent carrying capacity of buses.

Position and Summary

First, I don’t believe that the summary report adequately addresses the problems surrounding the Ngauranga to Airport corridor. It speaks only of bottlenecks and how to fix them. It blatantly ignores the other needs of residents and dismisses many options without proper justification. The view is short-sighted and narrowly focused to the point of being dangerous as a long-term plan. The options presented to the public don’t represent a valid set of choices, as had been laid out by the technical report.

There are some base assumptions that need to be challenged. The first page of the summary states that traffic is increasing at 3–4% per year. This magic number is neither supported by documentation nor believable, not to mention being unsustainable were it true. Additionally, the report ignores any chance for changing behaviour of commuters. A 5–10% reduction of trips over all TDM methods is quite pessimistic. Studies in Darlington, Worcester and Peterborough in the UK have shown car trips dropping by over 10% by encouraging walking, cycling and public transport use. Finally, the assumption that congestion points can be easily removed is false. Instead, congestion points are moved, shifted from one region to another. This often leads to large negative side-effects, regardless of intention. The report uses population projections as the rationale for increasing roading capacity. I disagree; I find the projections encouraging from an urbanist point of view. Urban design is about placing population density where it best suited – healthy for the growth of the city.

As a resident of Wellington, I would like to see priority given to funding public transportation and improvements to active mode corridors, with consideration for and integration into the growth nodes being planned for Newtown and Kilbirnie. In the short-term, the focus should be bus-priority measures, integrated ticketing and real-time bus information. Further along, consideration must be given to the Transport2000 proposal for light-rail connecting the northern suburbs to the southern and eastern suburbs through the CBD. By placing priority on expanded roading, development of the growth nodes will only further strain the transport corridor rather than help alleviate the stress. Without adequate mass-transit, users will only be left with low-efficiency options while living in a high-density area.

There is an overall need in Wellington, and in New Zealand, to put less effort into civil engineering and more into social engineering. New Zealanders are very car-oriented, but Wellington is uniquely capable of shifting that mentality. Many of the residential suburbs are within the range of active modes and the further suburbs are lined in discrete channels, which is well suited to a strong public transport system. It is necessary to provide adequate alternatives to driving. To provide a context for this, look to Auckland and the urban form found there. “Spaghetti Junction” is a mess of poorly implemented ideas that have formed a noose around the downtown core. All intentions were good: the plan was to provide rapid access from the outlying regions to the city; the result is a massive concrete head-scratcher.

The outcomes of this study, and resulting actions, must be conducive to Wellington and its inhabitants for the long future. Quick fixes to current problems will be counter-productive to the creation of an urban fabric and will have a life-span much longer than the projected congestion data. Predict-and-provide will only lead Wellington back to the same place: congested and looking for relief.

Further to this written submission, I would be interested in speaking to representatives in person, should there be any clarification required. For contact details, I have included my business card. I look forward to the results of the study.

¹ There are a few people collecting signatures today at the breakfast at Go By Bike Day.

It’s 3:38 in the morning and I’m in the last corner of the bed, looking for sleep. It doesn’t usually take this long. It usually hides in one of the first two corners – never in the middle, even though I always look there first. Sometimes it hides in the closet. I hate that. There are monsters there. Under the bed, too, but even sleep is scared of those monsters. The hardest part is the waiting. You can’t go to sleep. Sleep comes to you. But only when you find the right spot.

I just saw this CBC story on organic car parts and I’m left with one resonating thought: if we replace our oil-based plastics development with crop-based, what happens to the cost of food? Why are we desperately trying to starve ourselves out, just so we can have a new car every few years?

The Ontario government has also bought into the vision, committing nearly $6 million to the BioCar Initiative. At the University of Guelph, that money is helping researchers create industrial strains of crops like wheat, corn and soybeans.

Even if industrial strains of crops are different from those that are edible, the economics behind industry can easily cause food production to drop. All it takes is for the price of industrial crops to exceed that of food. Farmers will go where the money is. Either the price of food crops will jump and poor people will go hungry or the price of food crops won’t jump and everyone will go hungry.

This is really the same problem as before: people refuse to look at the total effects of the stuff they want. Everything comes from somewhere and eventually goes somewhere. Now it just happens to be bio-degradable and not require quite as much oil, but we’re no better off. A better option would be to just consume less junk…

It’s hard not to be cynical in the face of hyper-consumerism.

This weekend saw the coming and going of the Great Lake Relay, which circumnavigates Taupo in a massive effort of teamwork and camaraderie. Myself and 16 co-workers left work Friday afternoon to beat the traffic and get settled before the first of our team was to start running at 2am. My leg, number 12, was anticipated around noon, so I was able to get a decent night’s sleep before heading out as crew for the runners before me.

The knock on the door came early. By the 7th leg, we were an hour ahead of schedule. We’d arrived at the transition point with about a minute to spare before passing the baton from the early-morning team to the mid-morning team. By the time our 5 runners finished, we were nearly 2 hours ahead. I don’t think anyone was slower than their estimate. We’d gone from a predicted finish of 15.5 hours to a recorded time of 12:44:56, placing us #39 of 164 running teams.

Naturally, there was a bit of craziness to suffer. One of the runners forgot to stop and was missing until he’d gotten another 8km further than his transition point, legendarily fast, mind you. We may have been the only team to run 19 of 18 legs with 17 people. Go, us! Next year, we’ll let him start and go for as long as he wants…

It was good to get out with a work team. We’ve all agreed that we’ll have to run another event in the future. Some of us are eyeing up the Harbour Capital half-marathon. It’s been nearly 2 years since my last half-marathon. I’m interested in getting back into good running shape.

I wish I had gotten around to it, but it’s already too late for this year. It’s open for the Canadian time zones, though. Have a go, make a day. I’ll do my best to catch up with this next year.

Call up a friend who works in an office and ask them if there’s someone there who you don’t know¹. Get the person’s name and a location for delivery of flowers. Send the flowers with a card saying something along the lines of:

I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but I thought it would be nice to send flowers to a stranger and try to make your day a bit better. Happy Valentine’s Day.

I could go on a huge rant about what the day means, on money, on expectations and so one. It’s probably not necessary. Love is built on respect and deserves more than a calendar day. But at the same time, it doesn’t take the day off to prove a point.

¹ Make sure it’s someone appropriate. Don’t pick someone with a jealous partner.

This is a day late – I meant to write it last night, but was hijacked by another episode of Minuit, le soir.

As a result of some incorrect information in the printed version of the Fringe program¹, I was left changing plans for my Tuesday night Fringing. A quick scan of the daily listings scored a quick win, with Familiar Strangers coming out on top. The show takes the audience on a tour of Wellington’s Courtenay district, mostly down side-streets and hidden places and introduces a series of characters that highlight the invisible interactions that go on there. Some of the stories are happy, some are sad, and most are just good stories. There is an interactive nature to the play, so each performance depends on the group viewing it. It’s largely scripted, but there’s room for movement and room to play. I’m interested to see it again to see what may change.

¹ There are a few errors in there. So far, I’ve run across an incorrect number to text for Footnote Fused, which should be 2343, incorrect dates for Curious?, which starts on the 18th and goes until the 23rd, and I am pretty sure that any event at Buena Vista Social Club has been moved/cancelled.

It’s hard to Fringe with a busy schedule, but certainly not impossible. After having an hour and a bit of skating after work, I rushed off¹ to BATS to see if I could get a last minute ticket to Tap That II. As luck would be on my side, I was early on the waiting list and was able to get in before the slamming of the doors in the faces of whomever was late. My efforts were certainly rewarded.

The show pulled in a huge crowd when it was run during Dance Your Socks Off 2007. It’s come back with new shiny bits on the bottom of the shoes and a fresh line up of bounce and clack. For a show that is half dance, half aerobics, half comedy and half rock show, it’s fully entertaining².

¹ Unfortunately, given the time constraints, it was necessary to rush off with the car. Otherwise, I would have rushed off on foot or by bus or something.

² At least one of the performers is really cute, too.

This morning, one trolley bus forgot itself and attempted to pass another. Since they ride on the same overhead wires, this is actually impossible to do without at least one of the buses becoming immobilised in the process. Reality being as it is, this caused both buses to become derailed.

I’m baffled as to how something like this happens. First, it’s the job of the bus driver to take these things around the city. They should understand the limitations of the bus they’re operating. Second, with the amount of responsibility required for maneuvering large vehicles, they should be paying attention. Yes, I know that accidents happen, and I don’t want to be too harsh, but this problem isn’t just about buses and little accidents. The lack of attention is systemic. It’s the car backing out of a driveway onto the road before stopping to check what’s there; it’s the person who parks on a footpath because it’s not a big deal; it’s the pedestrian who peeks out from behind one bus to run in front of another, coming from the other direction. Accidents happen because not enough attention is paid. The only reason why these little things are overlooked is that the population density is low, so the collision rate is low. It’s scary to think what downtown Wellington will be like as the city population grows and pushes up the density.

Rant mode: off.

The Wellington Fringe Festival started its 2008 run yesterday, with beautiful weather to make it shine. My goal is to see as many of the outdoor shows as I can. Sure, I’m looking forward to seated theatre as well, but there’s something about an audience that resembles a flash mob.

Footnote Fused came up first on the list, partly because of the genre, a fusion of dance and acrobatics, and partly for not listing a venue. Instead, the audience had to send a text¹ in order to receive further instructions. Our instructions were to go to a store on Willis St at 6pm. From there, we moved on to Waitangi Park and followed a pair of dancers up to the final venue, where an aerial acrobatic rig was waiting for us. It was a brilliant idea and a wonderful show. Congrats to those involved.

¹ Text SECRET to 2343 to get involved with the show on Feb 15th and Feb 22nd.

After spending a lot of time on the outside of cinemas, due to a number of crap films released in the past year, I found myself seeing 3 movies in 3 evenings, and I was happy about it. Each of them came with their own recommendations – from different people and for different reasons. I’ll happily reiterate those sentiments.

Number one was a special screening of The 11th Hour. The Monday night showing was hired out from Penthouse Cinema for use as a fund-raiser to gather support for public transport¹ in the Ngauranga to Airport Transport Study. The film itself wasn’t overly surprising. Those of us who went to see it already knew a lot about the subject matter. It was quite interesting, however, that they kept reminding the viewer that no matter what climate changes occur, the planet will survive without us. A very good point to make, to remind us that we’re not above nature.

Immediately after work on Tuesday, I rushed back into Wellington, to The Paramount, to catch a 5:00 screening of Once. This was recommended to me based on the soundtrack, which we were listening to in the car a couple weeks ago. Folkloric and emotional, the music grabs on and really makes this movie stand out. It’s a nice little romantic story, but it’s so much more because of the soundtrack.

Finally, I’d dragged a friend out to see Juno. I’ve heard a lot about this one from all sorts of directions. People love it; the media loves it. It’s up for a few Oscars, and rightly so. It’s nice to see a good film on the screens for a change.

That’ll probably be all the films I see for a while. There’s a lot more to do in the city over the summer than hang out in dark cinemas. Besides, my box set of Minuit, le soir arrived yesterday. I don’t think I’ll be bored for quite a while.

¹ There is a public meeting Wednesday, 13th February 2008, 6pm at St Johns in the City Church, on the corners of Willis and Dixon St.

Pray to the gods of wind – make a sacrifice if you need to. And if all else fails, plan your journey to include shelter. The wind bows to no one; it knows no master. You don’t have to run from the wind, but it’s easier when you don’t run into it.