One example that particularly struck a chord was when I went along to a local campaign group meeting to discuss some new developments our local highways authority (in this case TfL) were making. On one road the proposal was to remove a 1m wide “cycle gap”, and the 3ft steel bollard that was slap bang in the middle of it, and add a proper contraflow cycle lane instead. The campaign group were going to formally object to the improvement since it the resulting lane wasn’t quite wide enough for their liking – despite it clearly being an improvement over what was there already. I was slightly shocked, but on further discussion realised that their position was more of a battle-hardened “cycle complaining” mentality than anything they could rationally justify about the matter at hand. Which got me thinking.

Cycle campaign groups are at a huge disadvantage when discussing plans with local councils. Even when TfL showed us some sneak peaks of the roadway engineering diagrams it was tough for the campaigners to deal with them effectively – they were just printouts, not the actual files; even if they had been CAD files there was nobody there who would be able to examine them or draw the suggested amendments. Ideally a campaign group could respond by saying “here are the places where the proposal doesn’t meet standard X, AND here are our suggestions for improvements we’d like to see”.

This works on a wider scale too. If a council approaches a cycle group to ask where they would like more bike parking installed, the cycle group are unlikely to be able to help much more than just saying “roughly here” (even supposing they maintain a list of sites), rather than “here, have some CAD files for our top ten sites prioritised using density analysis of existing locations” . If a cycle group want to approach a council to convert one-way roads into two-way, they are unlikely to have the traffic simulations to show the five most useful changes. There’s just a huge gulf in tools and technologies available to each side, so when the only way things work is for one side to suggest and the other to accept/refuse, it’s easier to see where so much reactionary complaining comes from.

Enter the guys behind CycleStreets, with their “Helping campaigners campaign” proposal. You can read it for yourself, but in summary is a web-based tool to track, manage and develop solutions to infrastructure problems facing cyclists. While it’s not a panacea for everything I’ve discussed, I think it’s a hugely important step forward for all cycle campaigning groups. Their proposal has been short-listed for the GeoVation awards finals in two weeks’ time and I wish them the best of luck, the funding from that would really kick things off. If you want to show your support then go for it, through your blogs, twitter or however you see fit. Even if they don’t manage the grand prize I hope to see their proposals come to fruition in the near future, especially given their track record of getting things done. I hope to get the opportunity to help their ideas see the light of day – it will be an excellent tool to help turn cycle complaining into the results we want to see.

The ambulance crew were responding to one such high-priority call, to respond to house 54 on a street of which I can’t remember the name. They had been told it had a brown door, and when they found house 53 with the other half of the semi having a brown door, they jumped out and started pounding on it. A few seconds later a neighbour helpfully pointed out that it was an unmarked “53a”, so they jumped in the ambulance, and set off again. Finding house 54 further down the street, they again jumped out, but the wrong colour on the door gave the first indication they were now on the wrong street, so jumping back in the ambulance and taking the other fork in the road got them to the correct house 54, with a brown door, and when they finally got to the patient, he was dead.

Now admittedly the patient in question had been dead for a few days, so 3 minutes of faffing around didn’t cause him any significant ill effects, but when the first scene of the program was a man quite literally bleeding out, it shows such things can make all the difference. And I was surprised that the crew didn’t have some massively overcomplicated, Accenture-procured multi-million pound GPS system that had house numbers built in. Actually, now I think about it, it’s probably best they didn’t – having been involved in the periphery of a few NHS IT projects, I can say they are the best way yet conceived of turning gob-smackingly large amounts of taxpayers money into things that simply just don’t work. So these paramedics are probably better off with a consumer device that other consumers have willingly chosen to pay for with their own hard-earned cash, rather than involving bureaucrats, even though it can’t help them find particular houses in a timely manner. I’ve seen similar issues on other emergency-services documentaries – police getting stuck in housing estates due to barriers simply not on their commercial GPSes.

So the OpenStreetMap tie-in comes from having spent the last few weeks starting to look into what comes next for OpenStreetMap after we’ve mapped every road, pub and cycle route in the country (hey, what seemed wildly ambitious just two years ago is becoming increasing routinely anticipated), and what’s technically known as “Addressing” is part of that. It involves taking things one step further than just knowing where each road is, and getting to the point where we know where each house on each road is. Now that’s a whole lot of work, but in bits and pieces across Europe OSM volunteers are starting to try things out. Dave has made a start around our area – see his sketch above – which is made up of fiendishly complex blocks of flats and Matt has done some stuff near our office. Frederik and Jochen from GeoFabrik have even made a tool for helping spot mistakes in the data. There’s a lot of potential here, but a lot of hard work, but with everything in OSM it’s a case of when, not if.

So here’s hoping that in the next year or two we’ll see consumer devices working from the world’s best global community-generated open-source mapping-cum-routing-come-addressing-cum-everything-else dataset, helping ambulance drivers (and pizza delivery guys, for that matter) from here to, well, everywhere. And maybe it’ll be only a few years between us saying “OpenStreetMap is pretty accurate, but I wouldn’t use it for routing ambulances” to saying “OpenStreetMap is pretty accurate, especially for routing ambulances”. It’ll be awesome.

He’s probably unlucky that this happened to me a few months ago in a quiet part of East Putney – a guy shouted across the road to me, and started waving keys and talking about petrol. It’s a bit hard, since if the story was legit, the only option you would have is to approach strangers and rely on their generosity. But in both cases, it’s word for word exactly how a short con would play out, so I walked away both that time, and last night.

Most times when I get approached by people looking for change to get the tube home, I say no (although my plan for next time is to offer to top up their few coins if they are actually willing to put them into a ticket machine!).

I think I’ve fallen for a short con once when I was drunk and walking home through Chelsea many years ago – a well dressed drunk guy on a Friday night had lost his wallet and asked for directions to Victoria Mainline, and needed some cash. He seemed perfectly legitimate, but again, it would happen exactly the same way if he had been a con artist, so he probably was. Nowadays I’m much more sceptical – I’ll hear people out, up until they ask for cash. If they can come up with some way of me helping that doesn’t involve them getting cash – say, asking me to buy the petrol and put it in their car, or asking me to buy them a ticket, they would be slightly more likely to get my help.

I’ve noticed over the last year that I’ve been working at Charing Cross Hospital, and hence using the station, that there is someone there who takes their customer services seriously – and use the whiteboard to express themselves. There’s often a “thought of the day” for people to peruse, but today was much better – a list of common oyster card error codes, with what they mean. And importantly, it was phrased as what it means for the customer, not the system – so 94 meain “Step back and try again” instead of Card Communications Failed, or “The person in front got through on your card” rather than “Double entry attempted”. Like I say, it’s little things like this which show the customer service focus. I wonder who it is that writes all these things (and whether they ever get hassle from management for showing creativity!)

Last night I called it a “Nash Economics” thing, which sounds better than Ed’s “game theory” label, is certainly more pretenious, and almost definitely wide of the mark. But it reminds me of the theory bit in “A Beautiful Mind”, so as far as I’m concerned, it is “Nash Economics”. Accuracy be damned.

Panic buying can be rationally justified as the following:

1. If there’s no more petrol left, I’ll be screwed
2. If there’s going to be no more petrol, I need to make sure I have plenty
3. There’ll be no more petrol if everyone else panic buys
4. Everyone is going to panic buy
5. I’d better get some petrol, quick

Of course, if there’s no supply interruptions, 3 doesn’t hold. And you can argue that this whole thing is caused by the media, since they have almost certainly caused 4. But I do find it a beautiful scenario, since every individual acting rationally actually causes the problem they’re all trying to avoid.

But now ’security’ is prevailing once more, and the bins have been removed. I hope they reconsider, and the fact that so the metal wall-mounted frames remain is a good sign. But it’s once more quite annoying to cart rubbish around the network – I used to nip off of trains to leave my orange peel behind; now I need to clutch it till I get outside.

At East Putney this morning, I was heartily cheered to see that someone had tied a supermarket bag to the empty frame, and there was a bin once more, full of coffee cups and such. I think if the people were to speak, we would say ‘we’d rather have the bins back, thank you’.

Steve is making me feel guilty about my lack of fitness. I’ve got a long term plan to run the marathon, but that’s probably long-term as in never. We’ll see.

He then sponged some money off me, but that’s beside the point.

Is this the next big transport idea? Pah. Is it ever going to make money? Doubt it. Maybe if they sink lots of money into it, there’ll be enough locations to make it worth while. The company involved has got the co-operation of the council, so maybe if they can get financial co-operation, they’ll be sorted. Sponge off the state, it’s the only way to go.

You’ll need to wait for Mr Tucker to do his write-up, or for me to get a net connection at home, cause I’m not going to attempt to write it up while I’m at work. I will, however, leave some words here as reminders for me and others in the years to come.

Stilton. Fire hydrant. Champagne. Deaf girls. Handstands. Dropping your trousers. Both of those together. The rain. Bus south of the river. Jude’s prepay Oystercard. The longest escalator on the underground. Sooooo many half-pints.