The street causing most grief to Aucklanders
Is there any place in Auckland more likely to make people angry than Quay St? In the last few weeks I've been shouted at by four different people about it. The roadworks are interminable. No one gets told anything. They're just digging holes and filling them in again. Who asked for this anyway? Mostly, it comes down to one thing: why does it now take so long to drive across town? I went down to ask Auckland Transport (AT) about all this, and we did a walk around. The construction work on Quay St itself is an AT project, but the big Commercial Bay retail/office development, a private venture, is also highly disruptive. Ports of Auckland (POAL) is building a new multideck "car-handling facility" at the head of Bledisloe Wharf and the Auckland Design Office, a council agency, has a hand in things too. New hotels and other high-rise buildings are under construction, and the CRL is massively disruptive all down Albert St and especially at the intersection with Customs St. It's a problem, for sure. But it's a good problem. Auckland is booming: growing the economy, fixing infrastructure problems, making itself a better city. And it's not just Auckland. This is the condition of living in any thriving city now: road cones are with us always. Quay St was reduced to two lanes just after Christmas. It was done with a non-notifiable consent, which angered some of the affected parties. But it's hard to blame AT, if you ask me. They needed to get moving, because the America's Cup in early 2021 imposes a real deadline on all construction in the area, the seawall work needed to be done anyway, and any other approach would have caused extensive delays. That's what happens with the city's development projects. Some companies and groups of individuals have genuine fears for their own livelihood or wellbeing, and they lodge objections. That's good. It's what should happen. But others get in on the act too. Some of them simply want to stuff up the work. Others are after leverage: they want something out of it. Perhaps a payoff so they go away. Perhaps a special thing built for them as part of the project. If they're a developer, perhaps they want council support for their own project somewhere else, in return for withdrawing their objection to this one. It's a failure of vision, of courage, of leadership. And the crowds for the America's Cup are coming.
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Poll: Should drivers retake the theory test every 10 years?
Drivers get where they need to go, but sometimes it seems that we are all abiding by different road rules (for example, the varying ways drivers indicate around a roundabout).
Do you think drivers should be required to take a quick driving theory test every 10 years?
Vote in the poll and share any road rules that you've seen bent! 😱
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49.5% Yes
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48.6% No
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1.9% Other - I'll share below
Here's Thursday's thinker!
I am lighter than air, but a hundred people cannot lift me. What am I?
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Why make picking up reserved library books harder? What do you think? Challenge: Write the last stanza for the first poem attached below.
Once books are reserved in Auckland Libraries books, when they are available no longer go alphabetically by customer but instead go into a Holds pickup shelf number based presumably somehow on when each book needs to be picked up by.
I had two books reserved that arrived on two different days in the Blockhouse Bay Library and hence each book has a different shelf number. Hard to find unless you knew the shelf number in the notification email. Even if you knew the shelf number I found myself three books by the same author on the two shelf numbers.
More recently yesterday a book I reserved was on a different shelf number than was specified in my notification email (see image below).
Sadly it is clear from library staff that a numerical system for reserves is here to stay.
I suggest that so that all books for each person has the same shelf number, the shelf number becomes the last digit of a person's library card (0-9).
Within each shelf number a book is found under the day the reserve arrives in the library (01 to 31, hopefully the same date the email is sent).
Since a customer appears to have 10 days to pick up a book, ten days of the month would appear to be required at any time (for each digit 0-9).
Once there are 10 days used the next day's reserves could go back at the beginning of the shelf number after any remaining books not collected (hopefully none) are removed (along with the old day number and the new day number (01 to 31) inserted) after the last day available and future days' books remaining moved forward to make room.
Each day number (01-31) would appear once for each shelf number (0-9) before the first book on that day- perhaps cover an old withdrawn book with paper with each day number on the spine?
When a reserved book arrives in the library the last digit of the library card could be placed on a piece of paper in the book to be removed when it is put on the shelf, to be recycled the next day.
What do you think?
See the image below and page 3 below for a letter appearing in the Western Leader on 9 September:
www.neighbourly.co.nz...
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