Josephine Roper @jroper@transportation.social

#choralmusic in #Sydney: I'm going to be away for my choir's next performance, but I'm still going to rehearsals because it's one of the best parts of my life... the reasons for living, the ends and not the means.

If you like old, very old music and also very new music, check it out.

https://www.innominata.org/beatusvir/

Personal walking neighbourhoods from some of my survey respondents - WalkSydney followers (blue) and UNSW city planning masters students (pink).

Not a representative sample of Sydney, that's for sure! Got to start somewhere.

Not sure where I'm going with this, just wandering. Maybe a flourishing and diverse micromobility sector actually needs less emphasis on regulating vehicles and more on behaviour, as for cars. Nothing about your vehicle stops you from driving 150km/hr through a pedestrian crossing. Only legal enforcement and social norms, which are currently lagging behind in cities without a cycling history.

Sometimes I feel very out of love with ebikes. That using an #ebike to feel safer in traffic or travel long distances in sprawling suburbs is a necessary but ugly temporary accommodation to poor cycling conditions and car-oriented design.

But hills exist even in a carless state of grace, and are the 'killer app' for ebike-as-bike-but-better, for me. So ebikes really need to be able to handle hills well. And cargo, and cargo on hills.

for example, acceleration limits (with reference to the ground), not power limits. The same power output that can get me up a long steep hill at a moderate speed (like 20km/hr) without sweating, gives acceleration from 0 on the flat that is dangerous in shared spaces with pedestrians. Torque sensing helps with the latter situation but not so much the former (I think, haven't ridden them much).

I change power settings while riding to get the balance I want, but new riders often don't.

Sometimes I go on r/ebikes and get stuck into various #ebike culture wars... Strange as it is to get good ideas on bicycling from the USA, the class system for ebikes makes a lot of sense. Not the specific classes they've chosen (IMO) but understanding that ebikes can have very different characteristics to serve different needs, and they should have different requirements and privileges.

Think we need some technical innovation in controls... (cont)

I’ve got so used to living on a high frequency non-timetabled bus route, it’s great. Today I’m on a normal bus and we’re just sitting here at a stop because it’s running early. Let’s go faster! Let’s go home! But no.

Anyone else get really curious about where each individual car on the road is going? I mean not during peak hour, then you can fit them into the societal narrative of workdays, I mean like 10am on a Friday in a random suburb, 6am on a Sunday, where is everyone going?

Same when I go past a café in a residential area on a weekday that's full of people. What are your stories? What are you all up to?

The world is so complex, and what I know is so limited.

spent two days getting a webscraper working that isn't related to my phd in any way, shape or form. Stupidity, yet eventual elation.

oh and in the name of #openscience I'm trying to put more of my scribbles online, this can be found here:

https://github.com/JosephineRoper/Access-visualisations/blob/master/Wimbo%20Park%20LR%20stop.ipynb

These close stops here and in the CBD would make more sense if the light rail was faster - long dwell times and slow acceleration seem to be the main causes which could potentially be improved.

But I haven't done an end-to-end access analysis which would help really understand how useful or not the stop is.

Petition for another light rail stop in Surry Hills: https://www.teamclover.com.au/wimbolightrail

I've signed mostly because I don't like the argument that stops would be too close together because of a fixed '400m catchment', which is outdated and not representative of mode choice decisions & experience for shorter trips.

Having registered my opposition to catchment analyses... here's a rough one anyway.

copilot trick of the day: providing (good) translations into other languages.

I have a website with a small amount of text, and a series of separate JS files with the text in different languages. If I add text for a new tooltip in the English one, I can go to the Persian one and Copilot suggests the same thing in the same spot, translated.

Ofc chatgpt is a decent translator, but the integration with the structure of my project is just amazing, and saves some tedious work.