Archive for January 2010
Last Wednesday’s work saw me travelling to Dannemora, one of those mega-suburbs out in south-east Auckland where the houses go on for miles and miles.
Dannemora is east of Botany Downs.
It’s typical of recent developments in the area where, looking at a map of it, it looks like it was assumed that everybody drives. It’s that spread out with a lot of distance between spine routes.
It’s nowhere near anything remotely resembling “rapid transit”, however I felt like a challenge so I thought I’d try to get there without a vehicle anyway.
Step one was to get to Penrose to pick up some parts from PB Technologies, one of my suppliers.
From there the next stop was Dannemora.
When looking up how to do that, I was surprised to find there is a more-or-less direct bus from Middlemore Station to where I was trying to go – except it was set up a little weird.
From Middlemore there’s a route 575 to Botany. From Botany there’s the Botany Loop (rotues 660 and 661) going around some of the suburbs north and east of Botany – Meadowlands, Howick, Half Moon Bay – with Meadowlands close to where I was heading.
Interestingly, the same buses serve both – they start as a 575 at Middlemore Station, and become a 661 at Botany. In the other direction, the 660 becomes a 575 continuing to Middlemore.
The bus trip took over half an hour but I made use of the time by writing the first half of this blog entry. As I type the bus is turning into the interchange at Botany Town Centre. I’m the only passenger on board, and the driver seemed a little surprised that I wasn’t getting off at Botany.
At this client’s home, we started discussing transport and I got to show them the Free Parking video as well as Josh Arbury’s overlay of land use for Botany Town Centre down the road.
He told me that even with all that parking, it gets full and very difficult to find a park there, and that the bus may well be an option. So we had a look at the timetable.
Sadly weekend services are only hourly so they will continue to drive in to do their weekend shopping.
This seems a little dumb – weekday frequencies are half-hourly and one would think that in a case of the terminus of the route being a shopping centre, potential weekend demand would be higher.
How many other routes’ usefulness is stymied by their low frequencies, I wonder?
11
SSDs make it easier to use a laptop on the bus
2 Comments · Posted by andrew in Uncategorized
I have a few times now mentioned working on the move as the biggest unexpected advantage to using public transport to travel.
That had one major exception – bus travel. It was just too bumpy and the hard disc on my laptop objected fiercely.
Until now. I’ve replaced my laptop hard disc with a “Solid State Disc” meaning the laptop is no longer nearly as vulnerable to bumps as before and I’m now able to work on the bus, or update my blog. I’m posting this from the back of an especially bumpy old bendy bus that’s doing my route home today.
As a bonus the laptop is now even lighter, its battery now lasts longer (five hours!), and it performs quite a bit faster too.
I chose an A-Data 300 series disc coming in at a modest 32GB. My old hard disc is now an external drive carried in my laptop bag for when 32GB is not enough.
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Coming back to New Zealand from holiday, one of the inflight movies was “Surrogates”, a film starring Bruce Willis about a future society where people live out their lives through robotic “surrogates” while not leaving home. These surrogates remove the risk of injury or death by going outside of home.
Without giving too much of the plot away, Willis’ character Tom Greer (or initially Greer’s surrogate robot) is an FBI agent investigating a high-profile murder.
Along the way his surrogate is destroyed and won’t be replaced, so Greer must leave his apartment himself and venture out into the world in person, an action seen as dangerous and unnecessary – why would anyone go out in person anymore?
I couldn’t help drawing a similarity to how many see travelling anywhere – why walk anywhere (or use any other means) when you can drive your car?
During the course of the movie, we got to see some of the characters’ real selves. While the surrogates were all good looking and well shaped, the real people were looking really unhealthy – overweight, pale, and weak from never going outside their homes anymore.
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