Josephine Roper @jroper@transportation.social

How the sheer size of cars makes them seem more important than they are.

I’m visiting my sister in Adelaide and riding on many quiet streets like this. Often there are also other people on bikes, like that guy up ahead. Take the parked cars out of this streetscape and it’s ‘wow, everyone cycles in Adelaide’. But with them, they dominate the image of the street, even though there’s only 4 of them and 3 of us…

‘Fun’ fact: long distance train travel times haven’t improved in Australia since the 1970s.

Still enjoyed my train to Melbourne, the bus a bit less so, but it would have so much more appeal to more people if, say, Sydney to Adelaide was 12 hours total travelling instead of 21 (+2 hour connection in Melbourne).

Starting the slow trip to Adelaide!

Booked a day train and first class hoping to get some work done, but forgot these trains are too old to have power at the seats… hopefully can find some somewhere.

A classic Sydney ‘shared path’ (legalised footpath) and excessive advertising combo. If it were glass you could at least see if anyone was waiting at the bus shelter or riding the other way, as it is you have to ride at walking speed to negotiate this. (The road is 70km/hr death.)

The problem is not so much that these shared paths exist - I’d rather ride them than nothing - but that they’re counted in our kms of cycling infrastructure.

(2) "From the perspective of bitcreep, attempts at making peace by bending over backwards to improve modularization and try to support multiple ecosystems in parallel are nothing but self-sabotaging folly"

- helping to write a WalkSydney submission on a new motorway project, and this may be an all-too-accurate description of the project's attempts to shoehorn in an 'active transport corrider' and our attempts to improve said ATC - in parallel with 4 extra lanes of road...

Technology Holy Wars are Coordination Problems - https://gwern.net/holy-war

Reread this by chance, noticed a clear analogy can be drawn to battles over transport technologies, not just software. My choice of bicycle and yours of an SUV are not independent choices - one of our ecosystems becoming dominant will make life harder for the other's choice. The conflict for space, and why the stakes are so high, is more obvious in the transport sphere. But gives an interesting new perspective.

Another map of Sydney with another view of the National Art School. This 1879 'Supplement to the Illustrated Sydney News' hangs upstairs in UNSW's Old Main Building. It's almost 2m tall and it needs to be, with the level of detail shown.

(Went on a campus walk with the People & Place cluster, checking out UNSW's oldest buildings - that is to say, from the 1950s - and many pieces of art I'd never stopped to look at before.)

Want to go to Adelaide for the Fringe by public transport. Struggling to decide between:

Day train to Melbourne, night bus to Adelaide - cheaper, fairly flexible, not great sleep

Or night train to Melbourne, day train (Overland) to Adelaide - more comfortable if I get a sleeper but roughly double the price, and the Overland only runs twice a week.

Thoughts?

needless to say flying is cheaper than both and takes 2 hours instead of ~24, but I'm stubborn.

Video on the other side of canal (can't put in the same post)

Rode to Earlwood for some solo climbing yesterday as am testing + but no symptoms. Nice to see the effort put into maintaining the bike path through Sydney Gateway construction. And the new path on the other side of the canal (new to me anyway) is great. Just that bit further from the road.

github copilot works with R way better than expected, for a language that isn't mentioned as supported 😯

Going to enjoy my two months of rapid coding (before getting turned into paperclips or free trial expires, whatever comes first)

Had a dream about how skilifts are a really energy-efficient form of transport because they don't move much more than a person's body and a little metal, so they're more like a bike than a car. Now I'm trying to find out if this is actually true or not...

and wishing if my brain wants to work on sustainable transport overnight, it would pick a more useful topic 😅

Oh yeah, this is what it looks like as a puzzle (used the box picture for clarity before). Now I've got to work out what to do with it.

Google's is very commercial - mostly pubs and cafés apart from the Jewish Museum. (Does Google think I'm very interested in pubs, or is that what people are usually looking for in Surry Hills?) The NAS is a blank gray space, suggesting nothing interesting, until you zoom in closely and it gains a small label.

How much does ubiquitous use of one mapping system influence how we understand the city and what possibilities we see in it?

(Maybe not much for people less into maps than me!)

Darlinghurst mapped: Google vs Public Sydney

Spent a few too many hours since Christmas doing my Public Sydney puzzle the slow way - without looking at the picture or other maps to help!

The complex in the middle here puzzled me - I had no idea what or where it was. Turns out it's the National Art School, in the marvellous historic buildings of one of our oldest prisons: https://nas.edu.au/history/

Anyway, it really brought home the different perceptions of a city via different maps (cont)

@vallery Also I'm really interested in how they will be programmed to treat cyclists, but I imagine it will be respectful: this is another valid road user I will only overtake if it is safe to do so. Could actually lead to feeling much safer cycling in cities like mine, where many drivers seem angry and stressed at the sight of a bicycle.

Christmas presents! My people know me ❤️

Though I did send some of them a link to @philipthalis’s puzzle in advance… gotta drop hints 😁

Bike parking at the pub! ... as long as you get there before this person 🙃

(In their defense, the rack was already bent, and the yellow paint is quite ambiguous as to what is meant to be going on)