One of my favourite bad habits is suddenly remembering all the important things I need to talk to someone about after a long conversation talking about relatively unimportant things when I'm saying goodbye because I start thinking about future reasons I'll see them.
imo a huge strength with the current train timetable is that (at least during the peak) we run trains as frequently as we can in both directions, as equally spaced apart as we can and they stop at every station. What if that was the goal for the CRL timetable?
Stopping at every station is an interesting one, because most of the time you'd rather your train skipped every station you don't need.
But every train that skips a station cuts freq (and adds to wait time) for passengers at that station for marginal gains for passengers from where it stops.
As frequently as possible I think is obvious - more trains = good. Equally spaced apart is the important second component to this. What matters to the passenger is not "how many trains per hour?" but "how long do I have to wait for my train?".
imo a huge strength with the current train timetable is that (at least during the peak) we run trains as frequently as we can in both directions, as equally spaced apart as we can and they stop at every station. What if that was the goal for the CRL timetable?
And on average it's an improvement in frequency* and the largest gap (12 mins) is no longer that it currently is, but it's hardly the transformative change we're after.
*depending on which station you're at, those extra trains are limited stops in different ways
...gaps between trains are either 3, 6, 9 or 12 minutes depending on where you are in the hour. It gets worse (the colours) but you can read the GA post for that.
The result is a timetable that seemingly makes no sense from a passenger's perspective.
A graph showing the departures from Papakura station between 7am and 8am in the current timetable and the CRL timetable as tested. The curren timetable has 6 trains in the hour spread out quite evenly. It's every 10 minutes but two trains an hour are shifted 2 minutes later to make room for freight trains. The CRL timetable has 8 trains in the hour but the gaps vary wildly, with gaps of 6 minutes, 9 minutes, 3 minutes, and 12 minutes.
The worst example identified is Papakura. The current timetable isn't quite perfect (10 min apart with two trains every hour shifted by 2 mins to make room for freight) but the CRL timetable is all over the place. Deep down there's a regular every 15 mins service, but the trains overlaid mean the...
Every running pattern and this timetable seems like it's been built by filling in gaps until they've used up all the capacity rather working backwards from thinking about how passengers will use the line and what the best timetable might look like.
"This is a classic sign that the timetable has been designed to achieve some modelled average frequency (e.g. we just need to run X number of trains to meet a set level of capacity), and that no thought has been put into meeting the needs of the actual passengers who will be using it."
Today's Greater Auckland post really gets at the core of the problem with every official post-CRL running pattern I've seen.
Full quote in the reply but I think the problem boils down to drawing with crayons on a map rather than understanding how people use trains.
Desiring a single year long timezone and mindful of disagreements about whether permant daylight time or permanent standard time is better, I offer the following compromise: the entire country adopts Chatham Islands standard time (UTC+12:45) year round.
I'll have to check this out, sounds like exactly the sort of thing I'd enjoy watching. And bikes, too!
I quite like my bike but it's coming up on time to replace it and I've been thinking about getting an ebike anyway so I'm looking at buying an ebike along the same lines to do the same things (commuting, shopping, longer rides for fun) with it.
- easy to maintain because it's all normal parts, had it for 10+ years and I've replaced several parts without difficulty
- good range of gears, has way more gears than I need (24) but I do make use of both extremes. Haven't got the faintest idea what's important with gears on an ebike
My bike parked on the side of a foopath with green grass, green trees, blue sea and huge blue sky in the background. It's a hybrid bike with 700c wheels. It has pannier bags on a rack over the rear wheel and a pink drink bottle in a holder on the frame.
Things I like about my current (acoustic) bike:
- looks cool
- being able to lift it easily, it's hardly light (about 15kg unladen) but I can carry it up stairs without much difficulty, ebike obviously heavier but manoeuvrability is a plus
- big, I'm not especially tall but I like a bigger bike
What suggestions do people have for ebikes for commuting? Ideal price circa $3k but I could be talked into spending more if strongly recommended. And not in a hurry to buy anything/don't mind waiting for something to come from overseas.
I think the difference between him and Key is so instructive. There are plenty of differences between the two but Key was given just enough time to pick up some political skills and the fact Luxon didn't get that time has shown every single day of the last 4 years.
I suppose I should really just accept it as autumn weather but I quite like the very late summer towards the end of February and for most of March where we get cold mornings and still hot dry afternoons before it really starts to deteriorate.
I love bonus summer (i.e. most of March)
I figured this one out from context rather than recognising it, but I was still right.
Took until the end of the day but I've just looked at the date. 15 years ago I was sitting outside the bowling club in Sunnybrae waiting for the bus to take us back to school when someone came outside to tell us that there had been another big earthquake in Christchurch.
I wonder if the tendency for them to describe fixed things like height and road distances is a reason why imperial units have clung on for those things while Fahrenheit hasn't, given its most common application is for the weather which changes constantly.
...when I was born in pounds and ounces rather than kg.
Certainly, my parents were both around by that point. I may forget but I might ask my remaining grandparents about it.
I remember pounds and stone still being around when I was a small child and my grandparents may even have had scales without kg. And I think mum would tell me the weight I was...
I'm young-ish, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone in NZ use °F. Perhaps someone in the generation (now long dead) preceding my grandparents maybe once?
The only relic would be oven temperatures, which are common in family recipes that have been handed down.
😈
The side of a moving train and the platform at New Lynn station. The various horizontal lines of the train, platform and canopy above all converge on a point just beyond the right hand edge of the frame.
Found a strange thing while out and about today, anyone know what it's for?
I do enjoy that if we go back to birthplace/childhood we have (with questionable veracity on NZ's part) provided a couple of PMs each to each other.
Seems far more likely that we'd have many more NZ-born PMs whose entire political careers were spent in Aus states than PMs representing NZ seats.
If speeding up election results was the goal and not just the cover story maybe they'd have worked out something with the electoral commission first instead of passing their legislation and getting mad when the electoral commission says "actually that didn't make it any easier for us"
