Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Good news for self-powered travellers, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I did quite like the helmet with the mohawk built in :)
Decorated helmets are great. I want a dinosaur head one. Or a dragon, which I could mount my LED lights in. That would be cool. Hmm.
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Hard News: Good news for self-powered travellers, in reply to JackElder,
t most of the extremely vocal advocates for bare-headed cycling I know are the 'everyday cyclist' types
I have a couple of friends in that category. One has copped two fines in about 10 years and just considers it part of the cost of being ruled by idiots. What I'm doing more at the moment is taking my helmet off on the bike path because 10 kms of no-helmet makes for a noticeably nicer ride. Although it has to be said that much of the extra risk comes from other cyclists. I nearly got collected by someone coming round a not-actually-blind corner on the wrong side of the path on my way home today. Luckily one of us was paying attention to our surroundings....
Which brings me to my usual hobbyhorse: the benefits of low-quality shared paths. I'm told they do work as an incremental approach, because a cheap, crappy facility does two things: a few more people cycle, and it shifts existing cyclists to a more visible place which makes it easier to justify spending more money. Having done some detailed counts (read: expensive) in Sydney I can say confidently that cyclists will use any possible access, so only counting the obvious places will miss anything from 20% to 80% of the total. So building a few local attractors makes counting cheaper... if they work.
In one small area I counted I got almost 80% of cyclists avoiding the clearly marked (but inconvenient and obviously dangerous) bike facility in favour of illegally using a narrow laneway a hundred metres away. The council paying me was surprised, to put it mildly, that their count was out by a factor of 5. I was surprised that so many cyclists used what I considered to be a death trap. Most of the users seemed to be novice cyclists who didn't have enough experience to know better. I suspect a few had nasty scares that could easily put them off cycling.
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Hard News: Good news for self-powered travellers, in reply to TracyMac,
As an occasional cyclist, I can't help but say that my impression of the whole cycle helmet debate is that it's pretty much a red herring. Totally agree with what Kevin is saying.... So yes, emphasise the road safety problem and make reasonable suggestions.
Fortunately there is a huge amount that can be done to make cycling safer without touching the helmet debate, and it's good to see Auckland doing some of that. Where I live we have a lot of stuff going on too, and it's having a real impact on the related areas of cyclist numbers and safety. More people are riding now that we have big, obvious, segregated cycling facilities... at least in the adjacent council area where they have a proper "Manager of Cycling Strategy at City of Sydney" (real job title!).
One problem, however, is that many "reasonable suggestions" turn out not to work in practice. Naive people advocate for good ideas, and when evidence is produced showing that they don't work, some of those people ignore the evidence because the idea just seems so good.
My local council loves on-road bike lanes because they make cycling safer. It just stands to reason, doesn't it? Unfortunately they find it difficult to deal with intersections and bike lanes, so they tend very strongly to stop the bike lanes before intersections and resume them afterwards. There's good evidence that this makes cycling more dangerous than if the lanes were not present, but the council is resilient in the face of inconvenient facts so the random little snippets of bike lane keep going in.
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Hard News: Good news for self-powered travellers, in reply to Kevin McCready,
now I'm all riled up again
I agree with you that for someone who is a committed cyclist mandating all sorts of things won't stop them, it just adds to the cost and inconvenience. But for other people that can be a deciding factor.
This "What If" video from Canturbury University makes the point quite well at about 5 minutes in (sorry, youtube link is to 5 minutes but it's not playing from that point when I click it here):
Link to Roger Geller's "4 types of cyclist" paper
You and me are in the 1%-10% who will cycle anyway, even if it's difficult and to some extent, even if it's quite dangerous - our starting point is "I will ride". As I get older I suspect I've moved from his 1% who will cycle regardless into the 9% who will cycle wherever possible.
But the 60% or so potential cyclists are strongly affected by perceived risk. And the more the powers that be emphasise that cycling is inherently dangerous and requires special safety equipment and training to do, the less likely those people are to cycle at all. Whether they cycle regularly after that is also affected, but more by convenience and cost. Epidemiologically speaking that's obvious too, and that's where the public health advocates like Chris Rissel are arguing.
So no, it's not "does X make a cyclist safer", it's "do fewer people in NZ die if we do X". Hopefully you'll agree that those are different questions and can have different answers.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to TracyMac,
I imagine that I would still have problems getting a tubal ligation now, since I have never given birth. Maybe at age 46, I might be "allowed" to have such a procedure. A younger friend of mine - 28 - has been told in no uncertain terms it's impossible for her to get her tubes tied.
I was told the same thing repeatedly when I wanted a vasectomy from about age 21. That we when the internet was a dwarf of a thing and it was hard to get information, so I basically toured doctors as I had the time and energy. It took some effort, but about age 23 I had a "temporary" one (and at 35-ish a permanent one). So no, it's not just women that have that problem. But I strongly suspect it is worse for them because it's a somewhat more invasive procedure and ... the social reasons.
FWIW I know two women who had ligations but both after complications from giving birth where it was pretty clear that they'd be unlikely to survive another attempt. I've met a number of men public about having vasectomies but no women public about having ligations. I wonder why?
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Lilith __,
These are violent attacks, rather than injury arising from provision of an unsafe rental house. We don't need tenancy law to tell us "neither landlord nor tenant may hit, bind, gag, or shoot each other", do we?
Well spotted! I imagine tenants could kill their landlord if they sufficiently damaged the house that it became unsafe, and the landlord discovered that the hard way.
Tenants who just scrimp on rent and do the bare minimum to maintain the house and grounds are not harming the health of the landlord anywhere near as much as the converse cases.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Russell Brown,
why is it incumbent on Labour to immediately re-assess its own policy because a coalition partner has a different one?
When the only prospect they have of forming government is in a coalition with The Greens it seems like a sensible question to ask. Labour is looking at only being able to pass anything with eithe The Greens or National supporting them, and I can't see a centre-right coalition between Labour and National working too well.
It's at least vaguely plausible for National to say "we'll probably only need a couple of seats to give us a majority and it looks as though we can get from either NZFirst or ACT, so their detailed positions will only matter when it comes to the actual issue. Our policy is X, we'll stay as close to that as we can".
The Greens, on the other hand, are quite clear that they will drag a Labour/Green government towards the green/left corner of the spectrum. It's quite clear that they expect a coalition with Labour and I'm don't think I've seen anyone say they'd reject one. So every single Labour policy comes with the caveat "subject to negotiations with The Greens". Why refuse to even discuss the possibility of those discussions being needed?
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Chris Waugh,
a New Zealand citizen who has been in New Zealand at any point in the past three years
Yes, and I have just got my new passport so I will be spending a weekend in Christchurch shortly, specifically so I can legitimately vote. It's something of a PITA and I'd rather not, but I am quite keen on voting.
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
the landlord didn't set out to hurt his tenant
Well no, he just decided to save money by putting his tenant's life at risk. It's a fine line, like the people who get tickets for bald tyres don't actually intend to kill anyone, but they're given tickets because death is much more likely when they drive with bald tyres. If they actually kill someone the penalty goes up.
... but not as much as you'd think. In that sense 6 months home detention is pretty harsh when 47% of motorists convicted of killing escape with only a fine.
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Horror house, and the landlord gets 6 months home detention.
... and the tenant died.
First, a language issue: why do we have "horror houses" where the landlord is some background figure not worth mentioning, but "horror tenants" who are actual people?
Second, I wonder how many "horror tenants" actually go as far as this landlord and kill the other party? Is that even a thing?