There are some spaces where the mixing of pedestrians and wheeled devices travelling at speed just doesn’t work.
To help our Software Development team explore different ways we could approach design and development, Stacy Rendall and I recently went to the UX New Zealand conference held in Wellington. UX (User Experience) New Zealand is in its fourth year and is Aotearoa's biggest dedicated user experience conference.
Think about this for a second: globally, men die six years earlier than women. To make it worse, the reasons are largely preventable. One in eight men across the world will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. Testicular cancer is the most common cancer among young men. Three quarters of suicides globally are men.
Last week I took a step outside my comfortable world of spatial and attended the annual Trafinz conference in Hamilton with my transport colleagues from Abley. The theme of this year's conference was ‘Smart, safe and accessible places’ and was attended by 250+ transport planners and engineers from across the country. I was keen to attend because I wanted to identify opportunities where spatial analysis could be used to help solve transportation-related challenges and add more value to solutions.
Many serious and fatal crashes in urban areas occur at traffic signals. Despite this, traffic signals are usually the preferred control type at major intersections on arterial roads when there are a mix of road users. Often, exclusive right turn phases are added, or left turn slip lanes are removed to improve safety. This may improve safety for some users. However, research shows that improving safety for one road user may make an intersection less safe for other road users.
This whole GIS/Geospatial/Location/Spatial Analysis thing can be quite confusing. Just when you think you understand it, something else comes along and what you thought you knew is now out-of-date, or called something else, or has been replaced by something new. This makes it pretty difficult to explain what exactly it is that you do. Recognising this, the leading global GIS provider Esri, also our partner, has recently undertaken a world first and have launched an advertisement on television across the United States. At first glance this isn’t much of a story, but dig a little deeper and actually it’s very exciting, especially if you work in the spatial industry or indeed understand very little about it.
Congratulations to our Abley team members who have recently been promoted as follows:
This year’s social club weekend expedition was to Kaikoura, around 150km north of Christchurch. Kaikoura was devastated by the 7.8 magnitude earthquake on 14 November 2016, which killed two people, lifted the seabed and caused several massive slips, closing road and rail links for over a year. Today Kaikoura seems to be getting back to its old self, with just the odd closed bar and an earthquake exhibit in the town’s museum hinting that the wildly successful tourist town was virtually shut down due to a lack of tourist trade. A lot of hard work has got the town back on its feet. This included dredging the harbour, the floor of which was raised by the earthquake until it was so shallow the whalewatch boats could no longer berth. In addition, several major construction projects to re-open the road and rail links to the town which were closed after massive slips are still underway.
Congratulations to Becky Tuke who was awarded Highly Commended for the Rising Star Award at the annual Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport NZ (CILT) awards on Friday 18th October 2019.
The Spatial Glitterati were out in force at the 2019 New Zealand Spatial Excellence Awards (NZSEA) held at Te Papa in Wellington on Thursday 17 October. The annual awards, now in their 6th season, were attended by Hon Eugenie Sage, Minister for Land Information, Conservation and the Environment and Andy Foster, the newly elected Mayor of Wellington, for whom this was his first official engagement.
