I’ve not been paying much attention to politics and so on the last few months. Partially due to being sick and partially ’cause it’s just all so depressing now that both our governments are utter crap.

So I found out today that Simon “Pass me the Bulldozer” Corbell, is still planning on building the “Belconnen Busway”. The Busway will “primarily use a new dedicated bus roadway” between Belconnen and Civic. That is, more concrete, more bulldozing of trees, less “Bush Capital”. But that’s not even really my concern.

According to Corbell, the Busway will “significantly improve travel times” between Belconnen and Civic. Well that would be good.

The current ACTION schedule shows the Civic to Belconnen trip taking 18 minutes in peak times (between 8am and 9am). According to whereis.com.au the total distance is 8.93km, and the estimated driving time is 14 minutes.

Whereis isn’t smart enough to show that the current bus route goes via UC, which might add another kilometer. So the bus is travelling perhaps 10km. So for the bus to take 18 minutes, versus a projected 14 minutes doesn’t seem too bad.

Now with a dedicated Busway we might be able to do it faster, but how much? I don’t think they can really take any significant distance off the route. It’s basically defined by the stops it’s making (which remain the same) and the suburbs around it. So 10km or so. If on the Busway the bus can sustain 100km/hour it’d do 10km in about 6 minutes. That’d be nice, but unfortunately the bus has to stop to pick up those pesky passengers.

The press release mentions four stops along the way, UC, Canberra Stadium, Calvary, and the ANU. The bus might spend 1 minute actually stopped, ie. letting people on and off (and I think that’s generous). And it’s going to lose a bunch of time accelerating and slowing down. I can’t be arsed doing a proper analysis so I’m just going to punt and say it might average 80km/hour over the 10km.

So at 80km/hour on average, plus a minute stopped we’re looking at 8 ½ minutes. That’d be cool.

But at what cost? And is this really the weak link in the Canberra public transport system?

This report ^[1] lists the costs for the Belconnen Busway, at $80 million for Stage 1 and $59 million for Stage 2, total cost about $140 million ^[2].

That’s a lot of dosh. As a comparison, that same money would fund the removal of fares on all buses for the next 9 ¼ years ^[3]. Now that’s perhaps not a fair comparison, but I think it’s worth thinking about. What’s really going to make the difference and get people out on buses? Making the trip from Civic to Belconnen 10 minutes faster, or making all buses free for nearly a decade?

Now I’m not sure if free buses is actually the right answer. I’m just trying to point out that $140 million is a crap load of money. And I’m guessing, but surely we could reduce the Civic to Belconnen trip to maybe 12 minutes just by synchronising traffic lights, giving buses right of way and so on, and for a lot less than $140 million.

On the other hand maybe we should make buses free. I do think they’re currently too expensive, and for no good reason. ACTION currently gets 71% of its funding from the government, why not another $15 million a year? They government’s obviously got cash to throw around.

What ACTION really needs:

• More, smaller buses that run more often.
• A ticketing system that allows people to get on the bus and then pay, without involving the driver. Like Trams in Melbourne. So one slow passenger getting on doesn’t hold up the whole bus.
• Or just no tickets at all would be even simpler.

The speed of the intertown links is not the problem, it’s getting people out of the suburbs and onto the intertown routes that’s the weak link ^[4].

Have a think about it before calling in the Bulldozers this time, huh Simon?

1. Prepared by KBR, ie. Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s mates.

2. If the GDE costings are anything to go on, that price will double.

3. Another way to look at it, every 1 km of Busway would fund about 9 months of free fares.

4. The new “Flexibus” system might address this, but I haven’t really looked into it.

Spent Sunday day hanging out with Scott who was down from Sydney, and squeezed in an hour or so bouldering at the National Library too.

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Headed out to the ANU for the Cat Empire with Jess, Scott, Catherine, James & Rob. Bumped into little Pange there, was good to hang out and share a few double wodkas with her and her girl pals.

But how good are the Cat Empire! Hoping they’ll be at Woodford again this year. If you liked them at the ANU you’ll love them at Woodford where you’ve got an entire field to dance in!

Monday, which felt like Sunday thanks to LCA, was spent at Tilley’s.

Yeah really most of Monday at Tilley’s. We had breakfast then lounged around reading and playing Scrabble. Oh my god how nerdy.

Squeezed in a bit more bouldering though in the afternoon, nice to be getting back into reasonable climbing form.

Popped back again this arvo. I’ve found a nice little spot on the south west corner of the Library, where there’s two ~5 metre stretches of wall with a step in the middle which make it intersting. Plus there’s a door in the wall which makes for an interesting move.

Last week was LCA, wow. That was one serious week of conference. I must remember in future to spend more of the conference taking part in pissing contests, rather than drinking contests. My head …

Overall it was really cool. Highlights were, in no particular order:

• Tridge’s keynote, if I ever write anything 1% as useful and 1% as slick as Samba I’ll retire.
• Andrew’s keynote. It was great to hear his view on things, as ultimately my work goes to him. I think everyone agrees that he’s one of the best things that’s happend to Linux since, well maybe Linus?
• Keith Packard’s wobbly windows were cool although useless. I’d love to have that MacOS X spinning cube effect for changing virtual desktops.
• Martin’s rendition of Yesterday’s Knickers at the dinner, catchy tune that one!
• Andrew Baumann’s talk on dynamic update in K42. I didn’t realise he was hoping to do similar things in Linux, which would be awesome for lots of reasons.
• The “round table” at the very end with most of the main speakers. I’d suggest next year’s organisers think about making that an official event.

Lowlights:

• Having a cold all week.
• Missing Eben Moglen’s keynote, dang!
• The incredible gender inbalance, no really I’m serious. Not that it was suprising, but what’s going wrong? (And how are we ever going to meet chicks! ;D )

.. computers. LCA is in town, and there’s bands of nerds prowling the streets looking for their next innocent victim.

Haven’t seen much so far, been sick with a mild cold courtesy of Finn. Caught Robert Love bashing his head on a table and giving a quick demo of Beagle and F-Spot. Beagle is kinda cool, except the backends are very GNOME specific, which is kinda annoying for non-GNOME users. It also explicitly calls “nautilus” to open files and so on, although I have a patch to call “konqueror” instead.

F-Spot looks ok, although doesn’t seem to be as functional yet as digikam.

Did a bit of work while watching horms’ talk on SSL. I’d never looked into SSL but it looks like it’s actually a fairly well thought out protocol, although he was talking about essentially the fourth revision, so they’ve had time to get it right.

Saw a really interesting talk by Simon Burton (I think), about using these weird gloves to control music programs. Would have liked to have caught his act at Toast, but wasn’t feeling up to a night out.

Interesting shenanigans re BitKeeper today.

Being a non-BK-using kernel coder I’ll be interested in any new tool that emerges.

Although there’s some great tools out there to make life easier, being able to use a real version control system for kernel work would be sweet.

I had the pleasure of downing a few ales last night at the Phoenix while listening to the Bootleg sessions, or whatever they call it. Bascially it’s poor starving musicians playing for almost free, all they get is the tips people give them.

I was a bit late and missed the start of some girl’s set, which was a pity, she was good.

Next up might have been “Changeable Dan” but I didn’t really catch the name. They were really good, somewhat reminiscent at times of Aforafro, a great Canberra band from days of old.

Was good to hear some local musos for a change, check it out sometime!