Think Big, Think Radical

Incremental thinking is a problem at a time like this. A bit more of this, a bit more of that. I think a radical change of thinking is sometimes needed. That’s why I disagree with Daragh O’Brien’s assessment of Your Country Your Call. There are many problems with YCYC and you would have to wonder what evaluation of the plan was done before the government decided to throw 300,000 euros into the pot. It is just not easy to get that sort of support from government, even during a boom. But as a small, open economy, we cannot county-enterprise-board our way out of our situation. We need to come up with radical plans, and pretty big plans to boot.

(This incidentally, also applies to the government. It cannot hope to win back support through a series of small local campaigns, supported by politically driven local projects, or by intensive local campaigning and handing out Cabinet posts or Seanad seats. This worked before, but it will not work now. The govnernment has to put forward coherent, radical, large scale, national level change to make a difference to people’s situations and people’s perceptions. (And it has to start with the cabinet reshuffle.)

What’s the Big Idea at Your Country Your Call?

Your Country Your Call looks like a good idea, and it is, and a lot of effort is going into it. However, there are also clearly some big, serious problems with it. Read the rest of this entry »

Creative Commons – draft Ireland specific licence for public comment

Check the draft licence and leave any comments you have.

Read more about the Creative Commons licences.

From the FAQ:

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Irish Times article about public transport in Dublin

Margaret O’Mahony has an interesting article in the Irish Times about Dublin Bus and the cuts there. It’s interesting, and mostly right, but it is wrong about some things.

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The future of personal transport

Transport is a big problem, at the personal (how will I get to work?), economic (How much is it costing to move all these people around) and environmental levels (What damage is all this movement causing?). A few interesting links:

New suburbanism is a new way of solving the environmental crisis, an alternative to ‘new urbanism’ (which basically means creating more dense urban areas). The problem with the concept is that the underlying principles (which are really assumptions) are mainly wrong. You cannot support a global population of ten billion people on this planet if they are all spread all over the place, have an attachment to their living places, are not subsistence farmers and have to travel to congregate at work or school on a regular basis. Read the rest of this entry »

In the land of the euros, the one eyed man is king.

Simon McGarr writes about adventures in the world of the European Movement. I do not think it is quite factual to say that Margot Wallstrom, the VP of the Commission (whom everyone in Ireland insisted in calling ‘Margo’ in honour of the Queen of Country) spent the evening speaking to bloggers, although a considerable amount of time was spent.

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Dublin Bus loses 4 percent of passengers

According to a report in the Tribune, Dublin Bus has 4 percent fewer trips this year compared to last year. This amounts to tens of thousands fewer trips per day, and a great deal of lost revenue. This reduction in numbers is despite the fact that petrol prices have never been higher in the last year, and despite the fact that parking charges in the city centre are growing ever higher.

The most likely explanation is that Dublin Bus is feeling the effect of migrant workers leaving Ireland. The increase in bus passenger numbers in recent years was the result of immigrants, not the result of people leaving their cars behind.

The Department of Transport, which pays a large subsidy to Dublin Bus now has to accept that despite extensive marketing efforts, Dublin Bus management largely failed to entice drivers out of their cars. The problem is that the service DB provides just isn’t suited to the modern city and the modern commuter.

It’s not a capacity problem anymore. There is now overcapacity on Dublin’s Buses. Throwing more vehicles at the problem won’t solve anything. The whole public transport system of Dublin, in particular of the bus service that forms the core, needs to be completely redesigned to meet twenty-first century needs.

Solving intercity transport in Ireland

Read this plan for an intercity coach system based on Motorways, conceived for the UK, but very applicable to Ireland.

GPSIreland Postcode ideas

I’ve written loads about postcodes before. GPS Ireland have published a concept for a postcode system, and Garmin have implemented it in a limited way on their devices. Good for them for publishing their idea.
However, there are a number of big issues with implementing such a system.

- The problem is that it is not much help in and of itself to actually deliver anything, except maybe by helicopter. You need to cross-reference the code against a map database to have any idea of how to effect the delivery or to estimate how long the delivery might take. This means that you are in a proprietary situation right away. There is no free road map database of Ireland.
- Packets and parcels with the code (and packets and parcels will represent 80 percent of delivery items within 20 years) would be practically impossible to sort by hand. You have to key ‘em or scan ‘em to have any idea which bag to put them in. Manual sorting of letters by unskilled workers is still a reality of the Irish postal system at the busiest times. Many other items (like registered letters and packages) are also manually sorted.

- You can have very ambiguous codes. For example, if you have a short back garden, you could end up with a code the same as the guy in the house backing on to you. In some cases, it could be a one-mile drive to the other property.

- The resolution of the system is just not that high for central areas. It’s only 5m. A significant number of houses in Ireland are smaller than 5m on one or other dimension.

- You really need a centralized database of addresses to do most useful tasks with the code (for example, verifying an address as valid). Sorting out this national address database is the big challenge for any postcode implementation. To do the surveys required from scratch for this system would cost at least EUR 15m, and maybe more.

- Google maps is just not an accurate way of determining longitude and lattitude. It is often many inaccurate by tens or even hundreds of metres, because of the way the projections work.

- letters in codes are not a good idea. They make it more likely that the code will be misremembered, misheard or misread. Letters that look alike, or like numbers, such as  ‘S’, ‘Z’ and letters that sound alike, such as ‘N’ and ‘M’ in particular are going to cause confusion and errors.

My own suggestion, which I have worked on with Michael Everson, is to use an all-numbers 5+4 code and base the code on existing administrative divisions, subdividing to road/street and individual delivery point level as necessary, and to number the codes geographically, i.e, the district in the top left of a county is numbered 101 and the district in the bottom right is number 909.

This has the following advantages:
- keeps the implementation costs to a minimum at the outset

- allows items to be be easily sorted manually or by machine

- can be implemented in a basic way without any proprietary databases (although it can conveniently link to proprietary databases)
- integrates well with existing databases (like census, rates office, electoral register and geodirectory)
- does not absolutely require a single address database at the outset (although one may have to be constructed over time on the basis of existing databases)

- allows the system to be extended where necessary (subdivision to provide a unique address for each home is not a big issue in Dublin City for example, but it is a big issue in some rural areas and is more likely to be cost-effective there).
- can cope with certain areas of the country becoming much higher density over time

- makes it obvious for a non-specialist withough special equipment as to where in the country a particular address is located.

This scheme isn’t perfect either of course, but after talking to a lot of people and considering a lot of options, it seems like the best way to do it. We also have a plan for giving the postcode legal backing, without requiring an Act of the Oireachtas.

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David Allen on  Getting Things Done (via Damien Mulley)