They are on our side -really

 This is where I lived from the age of about 6 to 18. I and my friends used to play football here. And the tarmac strips across the street ( no humps) were the tennis net for a game of tennis.  No chance now - all given over to cars .

I  picked up on a RSS feed the blog posting about traffic engineering from the blog entry Confessions of a Recovering Engineer , on the Strong Towns website. A refreshing read.  That towns should exist for people. The first bit that struck me was :

An engineer designing a street or road prioritizes the world in this way, no matter how they are instructed: 

1. Traffic speed
2. Traffic volume
3. Safety
4. Cost

The rest of the world generally would prioritize things differently, as follows: 

1. Safety
2. Cost
3. Traffic volume
4. Traffic speed

I came across the article in the daily Mail - half of children never play in the street  .

 And then I had a look at Google Maps at the street where i grew up and used to play tennis, football, cricket and ride my bike from the age of about 8.

And the comments thread (now closed) also has some interesting comments
Much is US - inclined and centres around cheap petroleum for vehicles
some random things that struck me from the article and comments

• narrow streets = safe streets
• Mobility is related to economic prosperity ( or is it the other way round) 
• should the street ( public space) be the place were you can expect to leave  you private property  (your car )

Join the Opt Out

The NHS have spent the last 8 years trying to develop a nationwide electronic medical record. Its a long , sorry , tortuous tale. All the usual suspects are present
 - politicians who want short term sound -good sound bites and unrealistic expectations
- large companies seeking to make a lot of money at the publics' expense
- ineptitude from a wide range of people.
-the 'it will be alright on the night' attitude to problems 

Many  of the problems that occurred along the way are highlighted in the NHS-23 wiki.

Many people have had serious concerns about this whole enterprise.
Some of the more general concerns are listed in the website of The Big Optout 

and more specific concerns about privacy on the openrights website. A GP has made a comprehensive catalogue of potential problems

There are frequent breaches of confidentiality relating to data held in government IT systems. And in spite of sincere words in the Care Records Guarantee , one of the fundamental problems in IT security ( the people who use the systems) are unchanged. So this system will be no more or less secure than others .


Ive opted out . You should as well

Bye Bye Vipers, hello the new Warriors ?

Ice Hockey doesn't usually get a lot of column inches  in the local  paper but it got a lot yesterday. 2 pages of linked articles

In 1980 I was in Canada and followed the Calgary Flames on TV and also went a couple of times, getting tickets from a work colleague. When we came back to the UK in 1981, I went along and watched my local team - Whitley Warriors. I could take  the children as well, and it didn't cost the earth, even with programme and junk food included. Whilst the standard of hockey wasn't North  American, it was a good 3 hours of entertainment on a sunday night at a reasonable price.  And I went to the Warriors vs Durham Wasps derby games. Hillheads Rink would be packed out ( even though Whitley usually lost, as I recall).   The other thing is that the kids went to ice skating lessons on a saturday morning. So paying to go to  Whitley Warriors games kept the whole thing afloat.  We were frequent irregular attenders. If the team were awful (happened a few times) , you just shrugged your shoulders and went home. I'd still had a reasonable night out with the kids.
Then along came  the ISL, a regional franchise arrangement with the intention  of modernising hockey and making it an attractive spectator sport in modern arenas. And in the North East Sir john Hall wanted ice hockey as part of the Sporting Club. Durham Wasps were bought and moved to Sunderland. Durham Ice rink subsequently closed (and a local sporting resource for kids and families closed).  In addition the Newcastle Arena was built , and Whitley Warriors senior team moved  there, with all the skating, junior and development teams still back at the Hillheads rink.  I went  to their first match in the Arena. A crowd of about 3000 as I recall . But after a few months, the SJH team , now Newcastle Cobras, replaced them and Whitley went back to Hillheads.
All these shenanigans were a real problem for a minority sport trying to establish itself. Many Whitley supporters didn't/wouldn't put money into SJH's enterprise and removing a core of several hundred supporters from Whitley Warriors meant that setup ran into financial problems as well.
So the hockey team in Newcastle struggled on going from owner to owner, and Whitley Warriors moved down the leagues to find. I've heard it described as  "if you don't pay the players, you don't have to charge the fans". The better players who can hold their own in UK hockey as professionals will move on and the team will be people playing for fun and individuals who need or want to stay in the Northeast.


So if there are no Vipers, some fans may drift back to Whitley, the finances will improve, they can start paying the players a bit more, the team will go back up the leagues and Ice Hockey in the North East may end up back on a sound financial footing ? It would be nice if some of the money also went on upgrading the facilities both for players and for fans.

a bit less treacly

So I went to the cycling forum this evening. Billed to go on from 5.30 -6pm , looking at the plans/maps and then from 6pm to 8pm .In the end it finished at 830pm. Many new faces since the last time I went., although I did recognise someone from the Critical Mass ride on friday .

The longest discussion over agenda items was over the draft Cycling strategy document. Im sure ive looked at it in the past. Ive probably read most of it. Ive got an opinion about some of it. But really, thirtyfive minutes ?

And there is a bit of fuss about a road safety video produced by Newcastle Council, ghoststreet. There is a website with a video trailer . There is also a comment and some more information in the newcastle council cycling website.

The positive bits of the meeting :

• there are plans to redesign the junction at the north end of the Redheugh bridge Looks as good as they can get in the circumstances. And the interesting bit was chatting to the City traffic engineers. For 30 years the philosophy of road planning has been to get as many cars through junctions and on their way as quickly as possible, and now its starting to change and the needs of other road users becomes important. The plans are a start in rebalancing the priorities.  It gives cyclists several options when getting from Scotswood Road to the city centre.  It doesn’t solve the problem of getting bikes across the river on the Redheugh bridge and then into town . There is still the option to 'mix it' with the traffic coming on and off the bridge. I don't think even I am brave enough to do that! 

• They are sorting out the link from the North end of the Tyne Bridge to Pilgrim Street.

• They are going to sort out cycle parking at Central Station, and bring it outside the barriers (good ) . I bet they end up putting it at the far end of the station miles from anywhere (bad), so it wont get used,

Crime-ridden Jesmond ?

like many other people Ive had a look at the local crime statistics for Jesmond. heres a screenshot of the relevant area.

But of course there are lies,damn lies and statistics (much older quote than I thought it was). A couple of things occured to me

• this is reported crime. A lot of the aggravating low-level stuff that goes on isn't reported , because the general public see no point in doing so. 
• other  seems to be such a ragbag of things. What about white-collar crime ?

Simon Jenkins in the Indy had a bit to say about it ( and even agrees with my concerns!). Incidents that are reported for a particular street are indicated in the middle of the street. So for Acorn Road, it appears that the shoe repair shop on te corner is the problem!

Similarly for Osborne Road, its the middle of the street where the problems lie. So that means the Cricket Club should be closed down to make everyones life better. Or does it reflect problems associated with people walking along  Osborne Road

 

Some will read all sorts of things into the figures - so there will be  some rubbish produced about them.

But overall its a good thing : 

• It will encourage people to report crime, so with time the figures will become more accurate and relevant.
• It makes the police a bit more accountable 
• What is needed next is a list of  crimes and  a recorde of the number solved

MKC vs HMG Round 2

Milton Keynes Council  lost the first round of the legal battle over this Governments' decision to reverse the HMO legislation introduced to give Local Council some control over HMOs reported here.

However the battle is not lost.
Permission to apply for Judicial Review has been granted by the High Court. The Judge (Mr Justice Lindblom) ordered that the Defendant must argue its case at a substantive JR hearing which will be before the end of this Court Term (i.e. by 20th April).The Secretary of State’s evidence should be available within the next 28 days.

Someone is going to be writing furiously over the next month.

slow,slow -quick(-ish),slow,slow

We've been complaining for a while to Virgin Media. We are not alone, if you look at the VM fora .  Something is clearly amiss with the internet plumbing system.  We've been using speedtest.net regularly to measure our speeds. The good bit about this site is that it keeps  record of all your results and  you can download them. As part of the download speed problems , I've also changed my router. I did have a Linksys WRT54G , that had fallen over and so, instead of just re-installing the firmware , I installed gargoyle-router , which gave me a bit more opportunity to 'fiddle'. This has worked well for over a year. However  in trying to sort out our speeed issues I tried my spare - a Belkin. Under standard conditions and when the connection is was good, the Belkin gave a touch (~.5 MB) faster speed, so Ive stuck with that. So to get the speedtest results over the last 3 months or so , I will need to put the old router in the network.

But here are the randomly timed speedtest results for the last week.

Hopelessly inconsistent and hopelessly slow.


The other frustrating bit of all this is that whenver you ring up , you just get put through to a call centre and the drone on the other end of the line just reads from the script. So you get no information bout what the problem is, what they ar doing about it, or when it will get fixed.