Cycle track parking

Photo speaks for itself. I'll go round, shall I?

How to get to Stratford

The sign at Barking Station at the top of the stairs down to platform 1 (London Overground) says "change at Gospel Oak for trains to Stratford and Richmond". Its a traditional railway style piece of information, but pretty silly in context as the rail route to Stratford from Barking is West Ham (c2c or Underground) then the Jubilee Line, or possibly B&GO to Wanstead Park, walk to Forest Gate then Stratford on that line. It's extra silly at the moment as the line between Gospel Oak and Stratford is closed.

The Forest Gate and West Ham routes can take as little as 19 minutes - the Gospel Oak route will take an hour longer! The quickest route to Richmond is via West Ham and Waterloo - at least 12 minutes quicker than District line all the way.

Website content guru Gerry McGovern has written about the benefits of technology. Surprisingly close to some of the material used by Peter Joseph - including in his weekly (ish) blog talk radio show on the web (24 March episode), McGovern writes:

"The relentless march of technology-generated evidence is everywhere, from teaching, to medicine, to website management. And what are we learning? That doctors and web managers make much better decisions when they have evidence, data; facts, not opinions. We need to embrace technology and allow it to extend our capabilities. If we resist, and believe in the infallibility of humans, we don’t undermine technology—we undermine ourselves."

McGovern's point of departure is the use of technological aids for football (soccer) referees. He argues that they should not be prevented from benefiting from this technology any more than any other. He scoffs, basically, at the idea that humans should stop extending their capabilities by use of technology - the decision of when to do so must surely be arbitrary.

At the Z-day event in London, one of the speakers recounted how a passenger on the Docklands Light Railway was freaked out by the lack of a driver on the train, such that they had to put someone up front to 'pretend' to drive. This shows the underlying belief that a human is more reliable than a machine - which is patently untrue (perhaps not in every example, but generally overall). We see technological advances in cars from automatic gear boxes, through ABS brakes to SatNav. It is not lack of technology that stops the driverless car appearing, but the mistaken belief that the human must ultimately be in control.

http://newsweaver.ie/gerrymcgovern/e_article001706037.cfm

Resource Based Living

In tune with the Zeitgeist Movement, this blog, in its creator's own words:

"was started to discuss and share the possibilities and solutions to the problems above [see - ahem - below] . It does this in 2 ways:

1. Expose and attack corruption caused by the monetary system.
2. Help to free each and every individual from this corruption by providing solutions based on self sufficiency, sustainability, and technology.

It is therefore quite diverse in its content, but this is for good reason.

As soon as you are dependent on someone else to provide you with shelter, food or energy you leave yourself open to be controlled. This is why this blog contains many resources to help you achieve at least some level of self sufficiency.

The monetary system creates slavery, scarcity, and the devastating consequences of continual consumption. However, technology is finally breaking us free from this corruption.

This blog contains ideas and commentary for bringing about a future of technological abundance and sustainability."

===

Here are the problems referred to as the blog has it:

"Say what you like about global warming, but in the “west” we are consuming at a rate that is completely unsustainable at the expense of the third world. We are squandering resources, filling up landfills and polluting our only planet.

Closer to home, our politicians fail us at every turn. Our trust in them is tested daily while crime rates soar and nothing ever gets any better. Yet we’re never given a better choice.

We find ourselves subject to ever-increasing crippling taxes, inflation and interest that keep us in perpetual debt. Unemployment rises exponentially as more and more jobs are lost to automation. All while a select few horde all the money and live a life of luxury."

Z-day

Z-day is 13 March each year, when all chapters of the Zeitgeist Movement promote the movement and hold meetings for as many as possible to attend. Over 350 people attended the London Event held at the City University.

Here is a link to a zip file of the presentations we saw. Not as good as being there, but informative and thought-provoking all the same.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8068/Zeitgeist/Zday%20Lectures.zip

The Equality Trust

http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/

From the book "The Spirit Level" (Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett): "If correct the theory and evidence set out in this book tells us how to make substantial improvements in the quality of life for the vast majority of the population. Yet unless it is possible to change the way most people see the societies they live in, the theory will be stillborn. Public opinion will only support the necessary political changes if something like the perspective we outline in this book permeates the public mind. We have therefore set up a not-for-profit organisation called The Equality Trust ... to make the kind of evidence set out in the following pages better known and to suggest that there is a way out of the woods for us all."

Zeitgeist movement

The Huffington Post has published an article based on a talk by Jacque Fresco, which succinctly explains this movement dedicated to saving the planet and human society.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/travis-walter-donovan/the-zeitgeist-movement-en_b_501517.html

Teleatlas

This is the firm that produces the baas maps for Google Maps and many sat nav units. You can send corrections to them here:

http://mapinsight.teleatlas.com/mapfeedback/index.php.

The online world is full of unnecessary competition, and maps are no exception. By correcting Teleatlas maps, I'm hoping that all the "mapplications" based on them will work better, but there are still too many organisations layering information on base maps in independent, incompatible ways. If there's going to be no agreed standard, then an industry standard is likely to, or perhaps needs to emerge. Google would seem to be a strong contender, even thought one or other of its offerings it doesn't always seem compatible with others, maybe because they've just bought them up from other developers.

We are missing out on so many of the benefits of technology because of unnecessary competition and the resultant need to get "proprietary lock in" that makes you stick with Acme electronics once you have bought one of their gadgets.

The way out of this is to co-operate to reap the benefits of technology.

Small Local Shops

Some observations.

Several in Barking town centre have very narrow aisles, not only making it difficult to manoeuvre, but very hard to see what's on the shelves. I know they want to make maximum use of their floor space, but they may have scored something of an own goal.

If local shops really want to compete with the major supermarkets, I think they would be better off collaborating more. The ones in Barking town centre that prompted my comment above carry very similar stock lines and the ones near where I live, in a local parade, all compete with each other to sell the same things, too.

If the shops in a local parade collaborated, they could carry more choice between them and compete with the supermarkets better. They could share costs and profits out evenly.

Cycle parking removed at Vicarage Field?

Why have the cycle parking stands that used to be in Ripple Road not been replaced? It would perhaps have been fair enough to remove them while the East London Transit works were going on, but now only informal locking sites are available.

Cycle Friendly Local Shopping Parades?

Page 7 of council newspaper the news says that 5 shopping parades in the borough (Andrew's Corner, Broad St, Chadwell Heath, Martin's Corner and Reede Road) are being upgraded. The article mentions additional [car] parking, but not cycle parking or any other improvements to encourage cycling.

The funding is coming from TfL and B&D council, so should in theory help improve cycle accessibility. Watch this space.

Special pleading at Thames View

The council newspaper, 'the news', has printed a letter from someone apparently complaining that his colleague has been fined for turning into Bastable Avenue at the Renwick Road end between 6am and 10am when it is banned.

The rising bollards that would prevent this are not working and currently the ban is enforced by CCTV followed up by a penalty charge notice. The writer protests that "nobody knew [the CCTV] was operational", but so what? If you do something wrong, protesting you didn't know you'd get caught is no defence. Neither for that matter is blaming the failure of someone or something to physically prevent you from doing the wrong thing.

To crown it all, the writer points out (he estimates) the council will get an income of £9000 a day from 150 infringements at £60 each. Well why not? If you don't want to pay the fine, don't break the rules.

Consultation on Barking station

http://www.lbbd.gov.uk/2-press-release/press-release-menu.cfm?item_code=3660

Consultation sessions at the station with designers Atkins and council staff, from 8.30am to 7.30pm on Thursday & Friday 25 & 26 March.

Bizarre B&GO lateness announcements

I've always been intrigued as to why when we can put the proverbial man on the moon, the railways can't keep track of 3 or 4 trains going up and down between Baking & Gospel Oak, or make sensible announcements.

The lateness shown on the platform indicator rarely ties up with the audio announcements and a couple of times recently the audio announcements have worked up to being 13 minutes late and then reverted to less than half that time. Other announcements have opined that the train is x minutes late, when it's already more than x minutes past the time it should have left.

After a cancelled train, the audio announcement a couple of times has been "The next train to arrive at platform 1 will be the xx.xx from Gospel Oak", giving the departure time from Gospel Oak over half an hour before.

As to the on line information, it's pretty useless. Unless the information is available in time to be used to plan an alternative journey, it is no good. In practice, we finish up going to the station to find out what's going on. It's not impressive.

With a simple route like the B&GO, they should be able to predict problems fairly well. If a train service to Barking is cancelled, they know the return journey will be as well. If a train's running 10 minutes late one way, whilst there is some recovery time at each end, it is a useful prediction of lateness in the other direction.

c2c wifi

Regular users of c2c (London, Tilbury & Southend) Railway will know that the trains (don't know if some or all) now have Wifi hotspots.

The road to nowhere

It's all built, signs in place (no entry except buses, still!), but blocked by big concrete blocks at Jenkins Lane, and the gate approx across the Newham / B&D border, under which is a heap of broken bricks to stop people getting underneath.

Years of waiting will come to an end soon - ?