jakecopp

Wrote this up on a just-realised project by the road authority in Sydney to widen an urban arterial road. This stuff does not belong in the 2020s.

Perhaps you may enjoy the citation style if you’re not from Australia!

> [shared lanes] They're awful both for cyclists and pedestrians.

People riding bikes would always prefer a dedicated separated cycleway. Cyclists want to be on the footpath less than people walking want them there - they would only use it because it's safer than the road.

What usually happens here (and I assume is common in the US!) is the state transport department veto's taking away space from cars to build a proper bike lane, forcing people and bikes to fight over the scraps of street space left behind.

A particularly egregious example of exactly this scenario playing out: https://jakecoppinger.com/2024/09/another-broken-westconnex-...

If someone is arguing against shared paths - you should make sure they are arguing for bike lanes too. Otherwise they are not trying to be constructive.

Without excusing the behaviour around illegal electric motorbikes, there has also been absolutely shocking media coverage in Australia on road deaths. Here's a summary of a particularly bad week of coverage: https://jakecoppinger.com/2025/12/why-wont-the-media-report-...

Did you notice this article doesn't have a single mention of safe bike lanes? In Australia we spend ~0.2% of our transport budget on cycling and walking infrastructure - and see very low rates of cycling (and terrible safety outcomes) as a result. See stats on the Australian situation at https://australiancyclewaystats.jakecoppinger.com/

The BBC would have done well to read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_Council_of_Australi... before seeking quotes.

> s/the Media Report/the Australian Media Report/

Yes - apologies. I didn't want to change the title from the original.

I wrote this after disappointing media coverage of the death of a cyclist in Sydney, in the area known as Tech Central - where Atlassian, Block and many other tech companies are located.

I made a Freedom of Information request to learn what happened in Sydney when traffic signal cycle times were made 20 seconds faster.

I've also done some basic analysis and embedded Observable charts. All documents and code is open source! Curious to hear what you think.

> Weathergraph was then ported to Garmin (as Pebble shut down), and then to Apple Watch widget

I don't think I was a particularly early user of Weathergraph - but when I finally had to retire my Pebble Time I only considered platforms that had your watchface.

Thanks very much for the attention to detail!

I wrote this blog post up to detail secret design changes to a separated cycleway intersection in Sydney that have been in the works for at least 7 years.

It's a record of how hard it is to get safe cycling intersections built in Sydney, even when the improvements are required approval conditions of a $4.3 billion portion of a motorway project (yes – Sydney is still building urban motorways this century).

That a “major design feature” or “key consideration of the proposal” could be deleted in secret, 2 years after going through community consultation, 3 years after the Review of Environmental Factors, 7 years after the initial M8 (WestConnex) approval condition B51 concept design, and announced by omission floored everyone in the room.

Came here to say this - looks awfully like OSM data and no attribution.

I'm also not clear on whether Google likes displaying OSM data on their map; it's a strange combination. I can't ever remember seeing "Copyright Google, Copyright OpenStreetMap contributors" in the footer of a page.

Thanks! It does seem to have lots of cycleways but I think it's helped by it's low density and small area (with the airport).

> It could be beneficial to have the ability filter out rural councils, and focus on denser urban areas.

I agree - I think comparisons by area and by density would be really interesting.

> For more retail appeal, you could consider some quick headline numbers at the top as bullet points. For example, the most cycle-friendly council, the worst (excluding rural), the most improved.

I hadn't thought of that but I think that's a great idea, thanks!

I built this open source dashboard to compare how Australian cities compare to others around the world with how many bike paths have been built.

It uses OpenStreetMap data and a lot of Overpass Turbo requests, statically compiled for a simple Typescript React app.

Happy to answer any questions or criticisms!

Seconding this. I was able to just run it with docker compose on a cheap mini PC and it chugs away happily, interfacing with all manner of devices (Phillips/Lifx/IKEA/Airpurifier/Bunnings brands). Only gets tricky to set up devices when you're dealing with some hostile cloud based gadget that doesn't want to play nice.

Unbelievable it can all be controlled offline using Siri on an iPhone, or other voice assistants.

It can even display your electricity consumption by counting the LED pulses on your smart electricity meter that fires every 1000th of a kw/h, only takes a cheap ESP32 and a photodiode: https://github.com/klaasnicolaas/home-assistant-glow

Such a wonderful project.

I wonder if it means photogrammetry can be used (eg. OpenDroneMap) to construct a 3D model of the landscape/buildings...

See https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guideline...

> While the lower right corner is traditional, any corner of the map is acceptable. Alternatively, the attribution may be placed adjacent to the map or on a splash screen or pop-up shown when a user starts the app, device, website, etc.

Please add attribution “© OpenStreetMap contributors” or “© OpenStreetMap” in the bottom right corner. There is a large community of volunteers around the world who contribute to this map.

There's a list of illegal usage at https://github.com/matkoniecz/illegal-use-of-OpenStreetMap#w...

As an OpenStreetMap contributor I really appreciate the proper attribution you have in the bottom right, rather than hiding it behind a button like Mapbox and some others do - thanks!

https://github.com/matkoniecz/illegal-use-of-OpenStreetMap

> I have a Mastodon account, but I don't love it, for the same reasons I didn't like Twitter. In addition, I think that way of consuming content is generally like watching mainstream TV or listening to radio with ads. You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you.

Isn't that the opposite of Mastodon? The _default_ Mastodon home feed is only people you explicitly follow and posts they re-share (and it's easy to hide re-posts if desired). There is no suggested content.

It's basically as close as social media can get to an RSS feed.

I use Colemak on a Kinesis Advantage 2 and decided to keep the same vim keybindings (physical locations change/key letters stay the same).

I think it's less optimal than QWERTY but still really nice and I'm very happy with my choice. Of course I don't know what it's like remapping because I never went down that road.

I imagine it would get very confusing having to write vim commands in qwerty when your keyboard is Colemak. Almost like switching keyboards between insert and normal mode.

I agree with parent post of yours. I'm a much better touch typer on Colemak than QWERTY - partly because I had to learn again, partly QWERTY sucks for touch typing (try hitting the letter C with your middle finger while your first finger hovers on F!)

Interesting - could you explain more about the strange phenomena and lack of documentation?

I've heard there is still present issues with lack of documentation, and more experienced folk having left the development team.

If you "jaywalk" within 20 metres of an intersection you can be fined. This is fairly common if police are doing a blitz - I've seen it happen near universities and high schools.

If you don't already know, you should read about the historical origin of the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking#Origin_of_the_term

> The City of Sydney is going to have to recognise that to increase economic activity in the city there will have to be a reduction of cars to allow more persons access to this important economic space.

The City of Sydney _council_ definitely realises this - however the state transport agency (TfNSW) has historically prioritised vehicle throughput over placemaking, though the Movement and Place Framework is starting to change this (this framework takes a lot of inspiration from Gehl's work).

Also on Mastodon without a possible login wall at https://notnow.dev/notice/AXXN5FibZ01OTCjtnE

Comments won't show on Twitter either.

They do - however it may be multiple minutes before they get a green walk signal unfortunately.

Why do pedestrians in Sydney wait so long at traffic lights? I tried to find out the answer to this simple question and wrote a blog post of my findings - keen to hear your thoughts!

I cover and share previously unpublished maps of signal timings, ODbL crowdsourced data from a open source website I built, how it costs $200 to buy data on a single intersection from the state government, details on signal programming in a proprietary plain text format, comparisons with best practice in Copenhagen and elsewhere, and what's in store for the future of traffic signals in Australia.

Sydney is an important study location as it is the birthplace and development location of the Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System (abbreviated SCATS).

Our government sells the system commercially to 30 countries and 200 cities around the world. We are quite literally exporting our biases. Countries that use Australia's traffic light system include New Zealand, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Amman, Tehran, Dublin, Rzeszów, Gdynia, Central New Jersey, and in part of Metro Atlanta. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Coordinated_Adaptive_Tr...

Canberra, Australia (the capital) also has banned outdoor advertising since the 1930s (except near the airport): https://www.abc.net.au/canberra/programs/breakfast/should-ad...

> RSS isn't dead, it's the backbone of podcasts, but it's such a shame our Twitter feed, our Facebook, or even our Twitch isn't available as RSS.

In case you didn't know - you can append .rss at the end of a Mastodon profile url to get an RSS feed of it!

That's a feature, not a bug.

Moderation in the fediverse (inc. Mastodon & Lemmy) means defederating from "problematic" instances, where problematic is defined in the rules of the server doing the federating server (which appears to be documented at https://beehaw.org/instances)

This means moderation happens at a community & instance level rather than global moderation.

Please correct me if I'm missing something - I'm quite new to Mastodon & the fediverse like I'm sure many are!

Definitely would prefer the map (and associated pages/possibly form in future) to the be main interface.

The Google Form makes it very easy to bootstrap collecting emails (reliably) to prevent any spam that may be submitted, but it's long and confusing to new users (already got that feedback).

Ideally in future you could click on an intersection on the map, use a timer in the page (could optimise the UX), associate an email address with a one time code (on first load/if no cookie) then submit (with the OSM node ID already filled in so I don't have to manually update that).

So that would be the long term roadmap - if it gets enough traction and I have time!

You don't have to set up another instance - this site works for anywhere in Australia (or the world - but maybe their traffic lights are too different.

Currently I just default the view to Sydney but this could be modified to view where a user is (rough IP geolocation), and I've got a work in progress PR for storing the lat/lon/zoom in the URL so you can bookmark/share locations.

I also wrote a blog post on beg buttons in the Sydney CBD: https://jakecoppinger.com/2022/12/sydney-cbd-is-bringing-bac...

(194 comments on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34058004)

You can add data for intersections in Melbourne! The default view is Sydney but it works everywhere.

PRs welcome for setting initial landing coordinates to rough geolocation!