Joost coming to /etc/services
Posted on April 20, 2007, under general, TheVeniceProject.
It’s not every day you get an IANA assigned port. This is cool;
joost 4166/tcp Joost Peer to Peer Protocol joost 4166/udp Joost Peer to Peer Protocol # Colm MacCarthaighApril 2007
We’ve been super busy lately, and I haven’t found the time to post much. But if you’re interested in what’s keeping me busy, here’s my presentation from UKNOF.
The Britches Full of Stitches
Posted on April 7, 2007, under creative commons, general, music.
The first traditional tune I ever learned was a great polka called “The Britches Full of Stitches”. I learned it when I was 7, on the Fiddle, from a great man called Des Carty, there’s now a school of music named in his honour in Tallaght. It’s a very simple tune, I learned it after Twinkle Twinkle, and it took about 2 weeks of practise.
Because it’s a starter tune, there are very few recordings of it, so I’ve decided to make at least one. I’ve chosen a really simple tune because I want to record something which gets across how important accompaniment is in traditional music. I play the melody pretty straight, with cuts, the occasional roll and slurs being the only forms of ornamentation (I’m no Seamus Egan), and I’ve left a piece without any accompaniment at all, so that you can tell just how primitive my melody playing is under it all.
But the accompaniment itself is where the magic is, and trust me, playing like that is hard. Despite playing the tune 7 times over, the accompaniment is never the same, and for the most part it’s syncopated and the right hand is doing a lot of work. The aim is to lead the beat, to make it easier to dance to, or rather to want to dance to. When I play polkas like this, a lot of people remark that it’s similar to the playing of Steve Cooney or Jim Murray, but personally I don’t it much resembles it (apart from being 2/4 and fast). In parts, it can sound like Donogh Hennessy’s style, but I guess really it’s my own.
What I find most fun about being able to play accompaniment is that you can light up even the simplest or dullest of tunes (or players, being honest!) if you do it really well, you can layer enough interest and dynamism into the harmonics to achieve an awful lot! It’s brilliant fun.
Anyway, both the guitar accompaniment and melody were recorded in the DADGAD tuning, with the capo at the 7th fret to put it in A (the tune is in A major). The Bouzouki is tuned ADAD, with a capo at the 7th fret again. The backing was recorded very first (accompaning nothing) and then the melody played over. I cheated and used a metronome to count out the gap though. Like everything on my blog, it’s CC licenced (Attribution 2.0)
Let me know what you think. It sure is lively!
Midnight on the Water
After finally figuring out how to actually use Garageband, a USB to dual-XLR mixer and my two Mics, I’ve managed to get some basic stuff recorded again. I’ll add them to my music section as I go, but first up is a great Texas fiddle tune called Midnight on the Water.
This is an old Texas fiddle tune that I learned originally about 12 years ago from Liam “Bal” Kennedy. I’ve changed it around a bit, so that the chord progression resolves to a G, and I very very often refer to it mistakenly as “Moonlight on the River”. I’ve recorded it here using Garageband on my Mac. There are better combinations of instrument than guitar on guitar for this sort of thing, but I really like the deceptive simplicity of the tune. It’s actually pretty complex to play right, and I really like playing it. It’s easy to imagine boats sailing calmly in the darkness, gently meandering down-stream.
The backing was recorded first, in regular concert tuning, and the melody is played using the drop-D tuning, though the dropped-D is used only once (bonus points if you can spot where).
FOSDEM07 and the rest of February
Despite being pretty travel-jaded after Toronto, London, Dublin and Limerick I’ve come down to FOSDEM in Brussels, it’s great fun. I’ve already met up with some people I havn’t seen in ages, chief among whom is Dave Neary who I’ve managed to miss more than once a few times before!
It’s about 6 years since the last time I was in Brussels (when I was here to play trad music in a series of very fun gigs), but it’s hardly changed, it’s a surprisingly easy city to navigate. I did get a very dodgy hotel key card though …
More photos in my FOSDEM flickr set. There’s a bunch of us here from Joost and it’s very useful to come and get a perspective on what else is happening in the Mozilla world.
It’s been a very strange, mixed and extremely busy month for me. I’ve squeezed a lot of travel into a very small month, my Dad was in hospital for a bit, Nóirín got engaged, the already hectic pace of work at Joost is now picking up even further (it’s pretty cool that we signed Viacom, but that also boils down to a lot of work to get done!), my mother came to visit me in Leiden, and other things have happened which give me good cause to be happy.
It’s been both my worst and best month since moving to the Netherlands, and until we launch (and go out of beta) and for a good while after that, I think it’s going to be even more of the same. It’s also about the half-way point of my (planned, at least) stay in the Netherlands, and there’s still plenty of places I haven’t managed to see yet, which is making me think!
Still, I’m having a great time, I’m meeting an insane amount of people, getting to see a great variety of places and am spending an awful lot more time out and about than I would be in Ireland, so I’m making sure I’m making the most of it too. Now, I just need a teleportation device.
I got a new body
Having sold my 350D and two lenses I rarely used (Canon 18-55 and 75-300) I’ve now bought a Canon 400D, and so far it’s going well!
First impressions: Large LCD on the back is mega useful for reviewing photographs. iPhoto doesn’t yet support the RAW format. The sensor is giving me different responsivity, some of the dark tones seem more rich. The extra pixels seem to make almost no difference.
Update: Props to Boyd Timothy for pointing me at the Mac OSX RAW update. It works great!
Toronto, London, Limerick
Posted on February 4, 2007, under general, Joost, TheVeniceProject.
So, I’m in Toronto right now, for NANOG39 where I’ll be talking to people about Joost (nee: The Venice Project), learning as much as I can, talking to some of our prospective Transit providers and maybe even taking part in some of the IPv6 stuff that’s going on here. If you’re in Toronto, say hi!
Right now it’s -23°C outside, with a windchill that puts us somewhere down at -30°C, but it’s still surprisingly comfortable to walk around in with many layers and good gloves.
On Tuesday I fly out to go to London, where I’ll be spending a few days in the Joost London office, but am mainly in town to talk about E-voting for the Open Rights Group. The events look like they’ll be great fun and I’m especially looking forward to finally meeting Dr. Rebecca Mercuri. While I’m in town, I also hope to take a trip out to Bletchley park. In all my visits to the UK, I’ve still never managed to make it out there.
And finally, next week I’ll be in Limerick to talk at skycon on the same subject, but with more of an open-source slant. I’m going to try and cover how Open Source and E-voting can interact, is open source e-voting software really useful? But also, how ICTE used open-source principles very successfully when we were organising our lobbying efforts. Should be fun! Now I just have to write the presentation!
Lifting the Venitian blinds
Posted on November 16, 2006, under general, TheVeniceProject.
A few months ago, just before I left Ireland, I promised some more information on my new job. Yesterday, we launched the public website of The Venice Project, where I’ve been working for the past few months, which makes now seem like a good time. You can read Dirk’s post in the company blog for more info on what we’re up to.
As can be seen from the site, we havn’t launched fully just yet, and there’s a lot more to come, but we’re now at a stage where we can be slightly more public with what we’re doing. It’s an incredibly exciting place to work; the depth of talent in the organisation is extroardinary, and the approaches to problem-solving that come from that, even more so. The technical challenges, both in terms of development and of operational scale (which is what I’m mainly working on) are exciting and terrifying – we can be sure of one thing; users will not accept crappy quality of service when it comes to TV!
I could go on a lot about the cool technology, some of the great stuff that goes on behind the scenes, the exciting numbers that are involved, the fun atmosphere, but there’ll be time for all that, and it will all make itself clear when you get to use our product for yourself. But for now, I’ll try and explain why I moved country and joined the project, because in telling that story you’ll probably learn more about the true potential of the project.
Anyone who has visited my place in Dublin will have seen my AV setup, and when I’m sitting in front of it, I have a glorius experience. I can immerse myself in entertainment, I can hear the gorgeous tones of Diana Krall in 5.1 surround sound, I can play music on demand from my little server, I can pop in an SACD and hear that, I can pull out a DVD from the hundreds on my shelf and get near-cinema quality right in my living room, and man does it kick total ass.
But when I switch input to my TV, all that changes, I get an apalling resolution, with an even worse refresh rate, on my 2 metre screen. Most of the channels make me reel in visual pain, I actually wince nearly each time and it takes a concious effort to distract myself from the terribleness of it all. There’s no consistent colour mappings or contrast, I don’t have 5.1 (o.k., I’m too cheap to fork out on digital), certain formats and aspect ratios are frequently cropped or deliberately played at the wrong rate (did you know that most NTSC to PAL conversions involve changing the pitch of the soundtrack?) and outdated teletext is all that’s available in terms of contextual information.
Someone really needs to fix all of that. But that’s not The Venice Project. Rather, the point I’m trying to make here is that I’m an audio and visual nut, not as mad as some people I know, but pretty mad all the same. I’m so mad that it’s nearly physically painful for me to watch TV. And yet, if I had to guess the percentage of time I spend using my shiny expensive equipment to do just that, I’d say it was around 90%.
That tells me a lot. There is something uniquely compelling and appealing about television. I can watch up to the minute news and current affairs, or the latest episode of CSI, or a movie that’s being screened and I can do so easily and lazily. Even for non-news content, there is a real sense or immediacy; in which there is somehow a participation in a shared experience, where I and others get to view the latest (and often greatest) cultural output all at roughly the same time. Sure, it might be just a dumb soap, but we still feel a connectedness to the characters and want to be able to talk about them and their situations the next day. It might be a headline scandal-revealing documentary, and we all need a good opportunity to be outraged, or it might just be a film we’ve seen before, but we’ll still end up talking about it the next day.
Television isn’t just a passive viewing experience, it’s long been part of identity, and part of a social network. People have been defining who they are – in part – by the shows they watch, for over half a century, and people have been talking about those shows with each other the next day for just as long. TV was building and harvesting social networks before anyone ever even bothered to think of those things as concepts, it just never had a truly effective feedback mechanism.
We’re not adding community, that’s already there; it’s over 40 years since the Star Trek cult began, and when that started telephone directories were the pinnacle of information interconnectness. As Dirk says, we’re adding community features, ways of empowering the viewers.
Our product kicks ass, but what made me most excited about the project, and what ultimately made me leave Ireland and move to the Netherlands to work on it is the simultaneous implications all of this has for viewers, advertisers and content creators. When I saw the demos, and the concepts, it really did shift some things I’d previously assumed. That making things better – or more attractive – for advertisers could only ever annoy viewers or that making things more secure for content owners could only ever limit what viewers could do.
I joined this project because I genuinely believe we have a chance to help shape the future of culture. Fundamentally, my own guess is that TV isn’t going to change – its format and content is the result of our inate desires and responses – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be made better still; more social and responsive to viewers and more accessible and rewarding for creators. The Venice Project isn’t a new medium, it’s not like being around when the Gutenburg press was invented, or TV itself. This is more like the unleashing of potential. It’s like being around when film was first developed in colour, the postal system was invented and the first affordable home-movie camera was released, as if they were all happening at the same time.
In the meantime, I’ll be cursing my regular TV even more, now that I’ve seen at least one vision of the future, and it looks a lot better.
E-voting round-up
Just in time for Halloween (maybe we should start producing E-voting machine costumes) there are some more significant developments on the Electronic Voting front.
E-voting abandoned – in part – in the Netherlands
Firstly, in the Netherlands and mirroring what happened in Ireland 2 years ago, E-voting has been abandoned in 35 districts (including Amsterdam) just 3 weeks before the general election administrators are now looking for ballot boxes.
The machines in question this time are SDU machines which are generally considered more modern than the Nedap machines, and are used in about 10% of the Netherlands. Although the Dutch anti e-voting group have still not managed to get their hands on an SDU machine their concerns triggered some additional testing which revealed that the SDU machines are vulnerable to same electronic eavesdropping problems they demonstrated with the Nedap machines.
It remains to be seen whether or not the Nedap machines will be used in 3 weeks time, but already there are negative soundings from the ministry concerned and the Dutch group had previously demonstrated that the Nedap machines can be eavesdropped. I share Rop’s belief that it is only a matter of time.
Joe McCarthy wins FoI appeals, but new concerns raised
A few weeks ago I met Joe on Grafton St. and he relayed the great news that after over 3 years, he has finally suceeded in getting access to some more of the material he requested under the Freedom of Information Act. Previously the Department of the Environment have appealed these requests on the basis that it is commercially sensitive; in order words that it would harm the business of the vendors.
Having seemingly prevailed against that spurious challenge, it now emerges that a new argument is being made; that the release of the material would facilitate the commissioning of an offence. Hacking e-voting machines is an offence in Ireland, and now that the Dutch group have demonstrated that it is possible, the Information Commissioner may take the view that further releases of information could further facilitate offence.
You can read Joe’s mail and the ensuing discussion. One excerpt from the investigators letter which I thought was particularly interesting is;
You may argue that the recent hacking of the voting machines in Holland means that the competitive position of Nedap cannot be further prejudiced through the release of the above records. However, it seems to me that the release of the records would involve the disclosure of information not already in the public domain, which could indeed further prejudice Nedap’s competitive position.
That would seem to be an astonishing revelation; what information could possibly make Nedap’s competitive position even worse?
Joe has also set-up the excellently well-named Fiasco.ie which serves as a source of information Joe has collated in relation to the E-voting and the Poolbeg Incinerator projects. As if all this wasn’t enough, Joe also appeared on Radio 1 yesterday, the stream is here and the relevant discussion is 1 hour in.
Some clarifications
Talking to various journalists over the last week has revealed two common sources of confusion which I thought I would try and lay to rest. Firstly, the exact type of attack which is causing such concern in the Netherlands right now – electronic eavesdropping – does not require physical access to the machines, but is in fact a passive form of attack. The situation is analogous to a glass ballot box which lets you see from a far how someone has voted.
The Irish machines are prone to this exact attack and it is particularly relevant to a Constitutional challenge in Ireland. There are strong precedents for challenges to ballot secrecy in Ireland and the courts have previously found measures which impacted voting-secrecy unconstitutional. Despite the Taoiseach’s rhetoric, no physical access to the voting machine is required for this attack, all that’s needed is a radio receiver, even a short-wave radio will probably do. An aerial is needed, but not a big one, there is no reason all of this could not fit in your pocket.
Although this presents a risk of voter intimidation, that someone might stand in the room and monitor how you vote, that has it’s own risks (the victim may go to the police). There are much more likely and clever forms of attack. During the last general election, I was a spoiled-ballot adjudicator in the Dublin South Central constituency. As we deliberated over various spoiled ballots, it became clear that a disproportionate number of unstamped ballot papers had Sinn Féin as a first preference. Each vote was clearly individually marked, making ballot stuffing an unlikely cause but instead the returning officer suspected that a polling officer had failed to stamp the ballots of likely Sinn Féin voters as they went to vote. An investigation was promised, but I’m not certain if much came of it.
With the Nedap system, a polling officer could similarly monitor the actual preferences of voters, and before the voter had a chance to press the cast vote button the officer could intervene or remove the power from the machine as it is pressed (in which case a vote will not be recorded).
The only realistic way to fix this problem with the Nedap machines would be retrofit a faraday cage (metallic shielding) around all of the components which emit the detectable signals. Not only is this costly, but the the actual buttons that a voter presses may be in this list of components, making it impossible. This is just one of the many reasons it is beyond ludicrous to suggest that these machines will ever be used.
The second item of confusion is surrounding the recommendations of the commission and the costs involved. Following Simon’s post several journalists got in contact with me about these particular things.
The actual recommendations concerning direct hardware modifications are R5, R6, R7, R9 and R10 which are all to be found in part 8 of the Commission on Electronic Voting’s second report. Additionally, part 5.2 (in C10) of that same report asserts that the Nedap system …
is not subject to any meaningful independent audit of its vote recording function. Thus the paper system is superior in this respect.
… which as far as we’re concerned is game over, and implies a change of hardware.
The Register screws the issue, again.
Last week, another bizarre and mis-informed article emerged on E-voting from Thomas C. Greene over at the Register. In that article Thomas linked to his previous articles on the issue but failed to link to one other in that series; Fergal Daly’s rebuttal of nearly every point he made, and Fergal wrote that over 2 years ago. You can read a series of other replies, including mine, in the ICTE thread.
Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis
And lastly, at the end of this week we’ll have the Fianna Fáil party. Between now and the end of the Árd Fheis, a further €16,000 will have been wasted. That the Taoiseach and Minister Roche are behaving irresponsibly on the issue is now clear. As Noel Whelan pointed out in his opinion piece in the Irish Times last Saturday;
Surely if the Taoiseach and his colleagues have learned anything in recent weeks, it is that the public realise that to err is human. The Government should have the decency to admit their error of judgment on electronic voting, apologise for it and trust the voters to be proportionate in their response.
The Árd Fheis is the perfect opportunity for the grass-roots of the party to hold the Taoiseach to account, but I’m betting there won’t be so much as a peep on the issue. As I said to one member of Fianna Fáil;
If the party of which you are member has no mechanism by why which such stark realities can be brought home to policy changes with the minimum of waste, then it’s simply never going to be worth respecting. If a change can’t be effected when you have objective reality on your side, it’s just a no-hoper.
I certainly won’t be holding my breath. I can’t but agree with Noel Whelan’s assessment;
Even though the Cabinet subcommittee has just begun its work, Minister for the Environment Dick Roche was confident on TV3 last weekend that the machines would be used in elections due to be held in 2009. Most voters will see this latest charade for what it is – an attempt to long-ball the ultimate decision to scrap this e-voting proposal well out past the next election in the hope that the current Government won’t be blamed for wasting the money. It won’t work and the Government should cut its political and financial losses now.
The battle against e-voting in Ireland has been won, what this is is about now is finally putting a stop to the senseless waste and beginning to lay some foundations for truly productive electoral reform. What we have right now is stomach-churning politics at its very worst.
Lethal weapon
Almost every time I drive I think of Tony Kelly, a friend, and friend of the family, who was killed when a truck hit him on the N4 at Palmerstown. There was never a suggestion that bad driving or speeding was involved, crossing a dual carriageway at a bend as a pedestrian was the major contributory factor, but the fallout from the accident still gives me pause for thought every time.
Tony worked in the Cara Cheshire home for the disabled in the Phoenix park and was a great source of fun and energy there (for laughs he would phone in to the various late night Dublin radio shows on FM104 and 98FM and play devil’s advocate on some of the most ridiculous topics). Much of his spare time was spent on community work in Ballyfermot, at youth clubs, on trips (I remember great ones to Kilkenny to Kerry) and working on his new house, which he was decorating himself. Left behind after the accident was Tony’s wife and ten year old son.
A memory which will forever remain indelible in my mind is the now current Lord Mayor, Vincent Jackson, distraught in our living room, left wondering why such a thing should happen to so undeserving a person when at a same time there was no shortage of people who would hardly be missed in the area. Every time I drive around a bend, I’m conscious that there could be another Tony on the other side.
if you’re Irish, chances are you too probably know someone who has been affected by a traffic accident and if you drive, you’ll be all the more aware of it. Right now, there’s somewhat of a political and media hysteria about road deaths. It’s a powerful and emotive issue, the carnage is senseless and people genuinely want to see an end to it, but we all know that there is a strong conflict between that desire and personal behavior. Everyone agrees that something should be done, but there isn’t much in the way of a sensible debate about these issues.
The problem with hysterical debates though is that they tend to vastly over-simplify problems, and we lose track of the true complexity of what we are faced with. For nearly every measure and suggestion there are complicated side-effects that do not get as much attention. There’s an increasing possibility that we can’t see the forest for the trees, that we are losing track of the simple and effective, but costly, measures that might make a real difference while getting distracted by outcries, over-complicated inventions and entirely ineffective strategies.
How do we promote a responsible driving culture?
This question does get asked a lot, and it really is key. Safer driving will have the greatest impact on road deaths. Everyone wants driving to be convenient, we want to be able to get in a car and get from A to B efficiently. Standing back from the hysteria, when you think about the number of road journeys that must occur on a daily basis, the complexity of the road network and the unpredictable nature of other drivers, pedestrians and animals it’s actually staggering that we don’t get more road deaths.
We should take stock of that, and acknowledge that the vast majority of drivers are driving safely. So the question I often wonder is how effective can we be at introducing a cultural change in the remainder? Is a boy-racer idiot really open do the kind of societal persuasion we’re talking about? What about the drunk-driving pub-goer? what about the lunatic who overtakes 5 cars just before a bend? I’m afraid I have to share Fergal’s observations on this one. These people are dim.
That’s not to say that promoting a safer driving culture is not a good idea, it certainly is, and will help to reduce road deaths, but we need to be conscious of its limitations; it is not the answer to the in incidents we are most hysterical about. So how do we deal with these people? Well we need to keep them off our roads, or to somehow mitigate the damage they inevitably cause, which is what the rest of my points are about.
Have we thought about the social consequences of enforcement?
Nearly everyone agrees that we need better enforcement. There should be more random breath testing, there should be testing outside pubs, more speeding detection, stiffer penalties for unaccompanied provisional drivers and so on. However, we should also realise the social cost of heavy enforcement on safe drivers.
Safety is hard, it relies on keen personal judgment and vigilance, there really are no simple hard and fast rules to make us all safer. The rules of the road on the other hand are a function of what can be enforced in the everyday world. It’s no safer to drive at 49kph than it is at 51kph. In pure physics terms, if you’re doing 45kph down a 15 degree incline, the stopping distance will be about twice as long as doing 55kph up that same gentle hill. It can also often be safer to speed; if you’re being tailgated in a busy 50kph zone, some times it makes more sense to accelerate and get out of the way. Right now, several kilometers of the M50 have a speed limit of 60kph, to accommodate the widening works, but if you obeyed that speed limit you would cause chaos and havoc across both active lanes.
Of course many drivers exaggerate these logical inconsistencies, they are not all that common, but they do exist. And strict inflexible enforcement generally does little to discourage the lunatics, and a lot to cause bitterness and resentment among safe drivers. There is a real danger that people would begin to see traffic police as just an unjustified nuisance, which can do very real damage to efforts to promote a culture of safer driving.
Effective enforcement should look more like targeted and intelligent policing than it should like mass-surveillance and profiteering. If on an average 2 hour journey around the roads I can spot 4 or 5 instances of criminal driving, that would suggest that some unmarked police cars patrolling with cameras can catch about 20 a day each. That type of policing tends to have a very strong network affect too, because it could be literally anywhere.
A hidden static camera snapping everyone who goes above a certain speed on the other hand does little to target the kind of people we really need off our roads.
Why isn’t reducing the waiting list for driving tests the number one priority?
An extreme example of the danger of resentment towards enforcement is that of provisional drivers. Right now the average waiting times for a driving test are over a full year, that’s just insane. It simply cannot be reasonable to expect people to sit around on their hands for a year waiting for a test. People learn to drive because they want to use a car to get from A to B and we can’t expect them to obey a law which is so incongruous to that desire. If the Gardaí did actually start enforcing the rules with provisional drivers, things would only get worse. For a start, there’d probably be a roaring trade in fraudulent licenses.
The police force is never independent from society, and as much as the text of a law may say one thing, what can be practiced in the real world is another matter. People have an innate sense of fairness, and my sense of it is that until the waiting list is more like 4 weeks, then it’s just not reasonable to “go after” these ordinary people who find themselves in an insane situation.
Last week I listened to the Minister for Transport, Martin Cullen (who incidentally is former chief executive of the Federation of Transport Operators), being interviewed at length about road safety. He suggested that our testing system should involve multiple tests in different conditions, should be more difficult, and that regular re-testing should be considered. Taken together those things could see anywhere from a 4 to 6 fold increase in the number of tests being taken.
Greater enforcement also implies greater numbers of disqualifications, which is yet more tests for the system to cope with, and lets not forget that the population of the country and car-ownership are growing at unprecedented rates. That the driving test waiting time is a core fundamental problem for the whole road-safety issue should be obvious; we can’t have better testing and we can’t really have better enforcement until we get that down. And yet the problem itself is Kafkaesque. The minister has comprehensively failed to get the waiting time down or add any significant number of testers.
What’s more the problem is treated as if it can be solved with the temporary addition of testers. Anyone with a basic understanding of queuing theory can tell you that won’t work, the number of testers needs to be increased on a permanent basis, even more so if the number of tests per person is to increase (as the Minister suggests). Why is every article on road safety not accompanied by the facts on this issue?
Are speed limits an entirely good thing?
Speed limits are a great aid to enforcement, it’s much easier to determine if a car is driving above a certain speed than it is to make an argument about a drivers potentially dangerous behavior. But that’s not to say that they are without their drawbacks, at least as currently implemented. There is one basic and simple fact about speed-limits; checking what speed you are going takes your eyes off of the road.
The more paranoid we make drivers and the more punitive we make the penalties for speeding, the less they will keep their eyes on the road. This has been shown to be a contributory factor to certain types of road deaths, particularly cars hitting pedestrians and cyclists in urban areas.
I’m not for a minute going to argue that we should get rid of speed limits, of course we shouldn’t, but why are we not putting more thought into the practicalities of how they are implemented? Most drivers can tell roughly what speed they are going without looking, but only to within 2 and 5kph. So how do we allow for this kind of tolerance without letting the effective speed limits creep up by 5kph? Has any thought or research been put into speed limits which are based on the duration of time spent at that speed?
Checking your speed every 30 seconds is a lot safer than checking it every 3 seconds, so we could have a law which says that if you breach the speed limit by 5kph or less for more than minute you’re out. This can be enforced with marked and unmarked Garda cars on the roads, and bridge cameras which measure your average speed over a time. It also means you can legally accelerate beyond the limit for a brief period to over-take. And of course if you breach the speed limit by more than 5kph, you’re out straight away.
This is the kind of law that mirrors that innate sense of fairness we all have, it’s a reasonable thing, and it’s the kind of law we tend to respect and feel good about obeying a lot more. It lets us keep control over our own judgment while making us responsible for driving safely and culpable for not doing so.
Right now, speed limits are opaque and frequently arbitrary, at a minimum we need to demonstrate to drivers why a speed limit is a particular number on a particular road, so that at least they can feel cognisant of the danger rather than bewildered by the curiosity.
Is the cost of insurance a positive or a negative influence?
I’ve never thought that the Government were serious about reducing the costs of car insurance, and in sense, maybe they shouldn’t be. The high cost of insurance creates a barrier to entry, it acts as some kind of moderating influence on the growth in driver numbers. Were the cost of the insurance not so high for young male drivers (not that they are as much to blame as would be believed from reading the media) there would be even more of them on the roads. Maybe insurance should cost even more than it does already.
But there is a counterpoint to this argument which is this; as can be seen on RoadDeaths.ie a disproportionate number of accidents occur in rural areas. In fact Dublin is one of the safest regions in Ireland on a per-capita basis. A lot of accidents happen on rural primary or secondary roads, with 80kph and 100kph speed limits. We all know the picture; smashed up cars on a ditch and hedge lined road. Much of the cause is the idiocy of the drivers concerned, but we have to take account that the relatively low population density of rural Ireland, and the appalling lack of public transport service in those areas, makes car ownership a fact of life. It’s not a luxury.
So with that in mind, what effect does the high premiums have there? It may well mean that the higher cost of insurance causes people to spend less money on the car in the first place, which is why – despite the NCT – we still see so many poorly maintained and barely-together cars on our rural roads. I don’t know that this is the case, it may well be that the same people would just pocket the difference if insurance was lower, but I think it’s worth looking at. Getting safer cars onto our roads is a key part of improving the statistics.
Where are the safer cars?
So where are the safer cars? It’s 2006, and although we don’t have jet-packs and personal helicopters, we really should have some improvements in cars. Cars have gotten vastly more collision-safe over the years, and our chances of surviving a collision are remarkably good, but the basic user interface – the part the idiot uses – hasn’t changed in about 70 years.
Why, in a technological sense, do I need to take my eyes off of the road to know what speed I’m going? Why doesn’t every car have an over-head display? Or better yet, why aren’t there some simple buttons for the common speed limits and an audible or visual bell to alert me when I go over it? Why aren’t the lower taxes for safer cars? Is engine size really the only useful measure here? (also, bigger engine size lets you overtake more safely, although they do let you drive more speedily too).
This year we’re told we’re not going to have a giveaway budget; great. So how about it, why not link vehicle tax to car safety? now that would be a good move. Bring back to 10 year scrappage deal too, and make it permanent.
We should be wary of too much technology though, sometimes people can become distracted by complexity and see it as the answer to all of our problems. GPS or GSM based trackers with speed limiters are a good example of this; can you imagine how dangerous it would be to have a device in a car which would allow your maximum speed to be controlled remotely? The implications for security and terrorism are enormous. Generally the simpler a technological solution looks, the more likely it is to succeed. Just like beeping seat-belt warnings.
Static speed-limiters, like the ones you find in buses, are simple, but they are not effective; the top speed limit is 120kph, to enforce that with a limiter is near-pointless. Generally the roads on which you can exceed that are the safest in the country anyway.
Where are the safer roads?
Why is it that we seem to ignore the literal meaning of the words Road Safety. As much as accidents are attributable to poor judgment and human nature, roads should be designed with this in mind. I’m convinced the much better quality of roads in the United Kingdom is the main reason they have so much a better a safety record.
Of course, this can often be used as a get-out, people naturally seek to blame everything but themselves, but it should be clear from the fact that Dublin has a huge volume of traffic and yet a relatively low number of road deaths that this is a real-world effect. The sooner we get modern, well-lit, safer roads built the safer our road network will be.
How do we proceed?
A principle I hold dear is that policy should be evidence based; that laws, police action and state policy should be founded on clear material and cogent argument. Of course this isn’t always possible, there are frequently issues on which we just have to make the best guess, but I think the debate on road deaths has gone too far in the other direction, we’ve lost a sense of proportion. There’s a real danger of us accepting almost any lark because we are so keen to see something done.
Every life is priceless, but unfortunately that’s not how society works. As much was the love and worth my friend Tony generated, which I can assure you was beyond any value, society does place an economic and social worth on fixing these things. Otherwise the speed limit would be 10kph and we’d be driving around with cotton-wool padding. There is a subtle and delicate balance to how our laws work, and we should be very careful to consider the secondary impacts.
We already have illogical rules like provisional drivers being given carte blanche everywhere except the safest roads in the country. Reactionary approaches are just too dangerous for my liking, imagine how much worse it could be.
This post is part of the Road Safety drive started by Damien Blake. Whose 5 suggestions I actually happen to agree with. The photograph is from Flickr user Stevefe and is CC licensed by attribution.
New look, new content
Posted on October 30, 2006, under general, meta, photography.
After languishing with the same theme for a long long time, I’ve finally updated the look and feel of my blog. It still has a way to go yet, but definitely getting there. I started with the Juicy wordpress theme and have been making some usability and style changes along the way.
I’ve also added a new music section, which I’m going to expand over the coming months (hopefully!), reworked the about section and have also finally started to manage links properly.
The aim is to have a more readable website edition, with a more natural look in a browser. 450 pixel wide panels for blog entries just don’t look right at 1920 x 1440 and the text can get hard to read. Also, most of my entries these days tned to be pretty long, so it helps to have more room to spread out the paragraphs.
I’m still using the excellent Askimet and wp-cache wordpress plugins, but now also using FlickrRss for my Flickr bar at the bottom of the blog, and the Audio player plugin for the music page. It’s still a work in progress, so let me know what you think, but so far I like it better.
Business as usual will commence shortly, thank you for your patience.