wonk v3.0

Freeways aren’t the answer to our gridlock. (The Age / Kenneth Davidson)

I agree with everything in the above article. It’s not often I agree 100% with something in the press, but this is a clear cut case of applying logic to a problem to find a solution. As a traveler on most of the roads mentioned in the article I know first hand that the current traffic levels on those roads are unacceptable. This morning while driving to work on the Monash Freeway I spent most of the time doing a leisurely 20Km/hr, in a 100Km/hr zone. Oddly enough the freeway status indicators classed this as ‘medium’ traffic.

I recently discovered an alternative route for about half the length of my journey which uses a combination of 60Km/hr roads and 50Km/hr residential back streets. I don’t have a lot of data yet, but early indications are it should be quicker than the freeway at least 70% of the time. If I can figure this out other people can too, and its only a matter of time before large numbers of freeway users abandon the gridlock and head for the back streets.

The government really should be doing something to address the problem. As the article points out the Monash Freeway would need to be triplicated to meet the demands of housing growth in the south eastern corridor. There is no way this could happen for a reasonable price and without demolishing large tracks through the suburbs to make room extra lanes. Instead the government should be fixing the public transport problems. Here are a couple on issues specific to myself which are indicators of wider problems:

* There is a bus stop at the end of my street with a route which goes past the nearest train station. The bus service is too infrequent to use to connect with trains making it fairly useless.
* If I make it to the train station the trains are frequently overcrowded due to insufficient services on the line.
* Due to the lack of express train services the travel time to the city is not much different from a car on the congested freeway. Although since with a car you travel directly from point A to point B without having to get to/from the train station closest to A and B at each end of the journey the car works out to be many times quicker.
* If taken into account the fact that I already own a car for journeys other than commuting to work, it actually costs more for a weekly train ticket than it does for petrol to drive the equivalent journey.

So to sum it up commuting on public transport will cost me more, take me longer to reach my destination, and be a far more uncomfortable journey than if I take my car. Multiply that by many commuters and you have the reason for the congestion on the roads.

INTERVIEW:Privatization Plus For Telstra Acquisitions-2- (Yahoo/Dow Jones/Stephen Wright) (No, not the comedian.)

“On the subject of acquisitions in the near term, Stanhope said Telstra has been looking at Comindico, the operator of an Internet Protocol network, which was placed in administration earlier this year.

“We will have a look at their assets and if we are interested we will put our hand up, but there’s no decision made about that,” he said.“

It would be silly of Telstra not to take a look at Comindico, but it would probably give a bad impression to the industry if they did emerge as the buyer. The ACCC may also have a few words to say about it, but it is unlikely they would do anything beyond issuing a press release or two.

Hopefully the buyer will continue to operate the Comindico network in some form and not just cut it up for scrap. Cisco would certainly be unhappy if such a large quantity of second hand routers showed up at auction sites.

Plans to seize hoons’ cars. (The Age / Jason Dowling)

Sounds good to me!

As if it wasn’t bad enough that John Howard was returned to power, we now have a member of the Family First party in the senate. While I think the preference system used in this country is a good because of the way it ensures no vote is wasted, it is very disappointing when back room party preference deals result in a candidate who received just 1.9% of the primary vote gaining a seat. What is even worse if that he may end up holding the balance of power.

Lord help us! </irony>

Fed: Labor vows not to employ Libs ‘arrogant’ phone spam. (ZDNet Australia / AAP)

Our spam loving friends at the Liberal party are at it again, but this time using the phone instead of email. They’re using automated technology to dial numbers within marginal seats and play a recorded message from John Howard or Peter Costello such as:

“Hello, this is John Howard. I’ve taken the unusual step of contacting you with this recorded message to support your local Liberal candidate in Bowman.” quoted from SBS News.

In response to this Mark Arbib of the NSW Labor party said:

“It is arrogant and insensitive to use computers to make thousands of calls delivering recorded messages. Voters who are upset by this use of American-style political campaigning techniques will have the opportunity on Saturday to leave their own message at polling booths for John Howard. Labor’s approach is not to spam voters or to use recorded messages to try and get their votes. People deserve a greater level of respect than that.”

Indeed. Nobody likes like telemarketing calls, especially when they’re a recorded message from John Howard, or even John Howard calling personally.

Backing
up is easy to do. (The Age / Sam Varghese)

Is this a review or an advertisement? I really can’t tell. As a bonus it also
includes the incredibly stupid advice:

“Given the gargantuan size of today’s Windows environment, it
is advisable to store these backups on a hard drive; removable media would
require user intervention to change media.“

Yes, lets all back up from a hard drive in our computer, to another hard
drive in the same computer. Don’t worry about fire, theft, etc. As long
as your data is on two hard drives it will be perfectly safe.

“Earlier versions of Ghost could be used off a floppy; this version is understandably much bigger and hence the use of the CD for the recovery process.“

All hail the bloatware! Nobody would want to boot of a floppy these days anyway. Right? Of course, it is also perfectly understandable that the loss of an important feature wouldn’t draw a negative comment from the ‘reviewer’, since this isn’t really a review anyway.