Tiger Bus to Newmarket

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority have recently introduced some Tiger bus services.

Many locals do not know about them, as the advertising for these services is abysmal. (If you look at the CPCA site, the Tiger buses really are well hidden.)

But a couple of them have the advantage of calling at the stop right near my house, so as soon as I could find a gap in my hectic schedule I decided to try out the T4 from Cambridge to Newmarket.

Going out, it was a little late. Having looked at the real-time tracking over a few days this isn't uncommon. The next question was what ticket to buy - the range of available tickets is, um, complex, and while it was easy enough to find a long list of tickets I could possibly buy, which one you should get really isn't covered. But a single each way is far and away the best (assuming you're not going to change or break your journey).

I was the only passenger on the bus for a while. Someone else got on in Great Wilbraham, heading for Burwell - a young lad who given his attire and equipment was off for a game of cricket. Once we got into Burwell we started to pick up quite a few more - the usage is heavily skewed to the Newmarket end of the route, something that was also true on the return journey.

We went out through Fulbourn, and the kept on going (most buses, like the 1, go to Fulbourn centre and turn around).

Then to Great Wilbraham, a village with many attractive Thatched cottages. And a pub, the Carpenters Arms.

Next up is Little Wilbraham, with another good pub, The Hole In The Wall. It's slightly odd here, the bus goes further into the village and just turns round again.

We went past Bottisham Airfield Museum, which we've had to drive to in the past, where a new hut appears to be under construction by a group of willing volunteers.

Into Bottisham village, another possible pub - The Bell. On the way into the village we encountered a pair of number 12 buses, run by Stephensons, which operate a more direct service to Newmarket. The snag with those for me is that I would have to get the bus into Cambridge to get them, so it takes much longer overall and costs twice as much. We were flagged down by someone in the centre of the village, but were rejected when they saw the 12 coming along behind us.

To Swaffham Bulbeck, another country pub The Black Horse Inn. Then Swaffham Prior, which has two churches right next to each other, and another pub - the Red Lion.

In Reach the bus takes a big loop around the Fair Green. The Dyke's End pub is just off the green, but not immediately visible although there was a board advertising it.

Burwell is a decent sized village with a few points of interest. There's a castle (or mound, anyway), a local museum, coffee shops/bakeries, and at least 3 pubs passed by the bus (Five Bells, Anchor, The Fox). We worked our way through the village, but did pick up quite a few passengers. There's also a significant chunk of new housing being built on the eastern edge of the village.

Last village was Exning, which has more new houses being built on the western edge of the village (no obvious bus stop for them, though). Passed The White Horse and The White Swan (not sure if the latter is open, though).

And then straight into Newmarket, to a little (read cramped) bus station at the Guineas shopping centre.

While Newmarket has a decent range of shops, cafes, pubs, and restaurants, there really aren't many attractions. There's the Jockey Club and National Horse Racing Museum, but as a town it's really a one-trick pony (pun intended). The racecourses aren't well served by public transport either, certainly the T4 isn't much use although, to be fair, it's no worse than using the train.

I had a little surprise when I arrived, there seemed to be a royal theme in many shop windows, lots of people carrying union jacks, and the High Street was closed. Unbeknownst to me, I had chosen the same day to visit as the King and Queen, and there was quite a crowd waiting, who seemed to be enjoying themselves. The local brass band was playing YMCA as I walked up, and you could see all the flags doing the actions.

I had a little wander round all the shops. (Must be a bit upmarket, given the high prices in the charity shops.) Then had a proper lunch at Wildwood, taking advantage of the OAP special. (I'm not old enough for a bus pass, so any other discounts are very welcome!)

The return journey isn't quite the reverse of the outward trip. We basically went the same way round Burwell as we had earlier. And there was another odd excursion into Lode just to do a 3-point turn.

Generally, the service is much more heavily used on the Burwell-Newmarket stretch, it's pretty quiet at the Cambridge end. Yet there's so much opportunity here - there are attractive villages with interesting pubs and restaurants placed within reach. Both the bus company and the businesses along the route are missing a trick, getting the word out about what you can get to easily would drive more customers for both the bus and the businesses.

The hierarchy of sustainable travel

Part of transport policy in the UK is the sustainable transport hierarchy. There are lots of versions of this, as it turns out - see for example here and here.

But generally put, the hierarchy has a number of tiers:

• Walking and wheeling
• Cycling
• Public transport
• Taxis and shared vehicles
• Private cars
• Air travel

Generally, modes are more sustainable as you go up the list - lower pollution, lower carbon emissions. The more active travel modes at the top of the list are also much healthier. They're also more efficient as you go up the list - cars in particular are incredibly inefficient users of the precious space in urban environments. And the costs of providing the infrastructure vary quite widely - there are massive external costs associated with motor transport, which are much higher than the direct income from taxation.

With that, policy should prioritise modes further up the hierarchy. You do see a fair amount of talk about this, although action is far less obvious.

One recent change to the Highway Code, for example, prioritises pedestrians and cylists over vehicles turning into side roads.

But generally, the reality is that the default is to prioritise the car, sometimes subtly. Consider Cambridge Railway station. Come by car or taxi, and you arrive close to the front door. Cyclists are a bit further away, and have to navigate steps. Bus users are down the end of the street. Pedestrians have all sorts of obstacles to navigate.

There are lots of other examples. Pedestrian crossings - if they exist at all - are routinely placed and timed for the convenience of motorists. Bus and cycle lanes are configured and only exist where it's convenient for motorists.

To improve matters, one might consider a range of interventions. These have to be done with care - simply concentrating on one level in the hierarchy runs the risk of causing harm at other levels. Although, generally, an intervention at a specific level is more likely to benefit the tiers below it, while running the risk of harming levels above it.

One example here is that ways to encourage cycling can harm pedestrian activity - shared paths are obviously bad, but taking pavement space for cycle parking also make the lives of pedestrians much worse.

One extreme consequence of the above is that if you want to improve the lot of motorists, you should work to improve the tiers above - as people shift to walking, cycling, or using public transport then you reduce congestion, and that's really the best way to benefit motorists.

Conversely, designing for cars makes the levels above less attractive, which pushes more people towards car use, increasing congestion and making life for motorists worse.

Properly connected bus services?

Dirk Gently was a great fan of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Those who are responsible for our public transport? Not so much.

At least where I am and for the journeys I tend to make, joined-up thinking really hasn't permeated into public transport.

It wasn't that much better in the past - consider how many railway stations are set distant from their notional destination. Blame the Victorian NIMBYs for that one.

Bus stops and bus stations tend to be at fairly random locations. At Cambridge Railway station, they're relegated to way down the road. In Cambridge, some go from a random point on the street on Parkside.

Here in Cambridge we have a number of bus services that are operated in some sort of isolation. There's the regular (Citi) buses; the park and ride services; the U; the guided busway; and recently the intriguing Tiger bus routes. There are several different companies involved.

Cross-ticketing really isn't a thing. If your route involves multiple suppliers, pay them separately. If the convoluted route map involves multiple routes, pay extra.

The new T4 and T5 are allegedly timed to interchange, so that you can swap from one to the other depending on your destination. That's good, but that it gets specially called out indicates that it's a rarity. There's even a Hopper ticket, but again that's part of the problem - you should be able to swap buses to complete your route without penalty.

I was at a event last night and asked about a transport survey that had been done. Had they asked where people needed to get to? Nope. Not at all. This sort of basic information is critical to working out what sort of transport provision is required - where to put the cycle ways, where the bus routes run - but we don't have it, it seems the powers that be aren't trying to get it, and we end up with public transport being provided completely at random. And they they wonder why people are unhappy and patronage is low.

Maybe a move to bus franchising will improve matters, as that does give uniformity of control and decisions about route planning. It's difficult to see how it can get any worse.

Cheap single bus tickets considered harmful

Here in the UK, the government placed a £2 cap on single bus fares. Cheaper bus fares is a good thing, surely?

The snag with this limit is that, at least in Cambridge, it makes 2 single tickets cheaper than a return (OK, there isn't a return, there's a day ticket). It's even cheaper that the advance flexi ticket (which is the day ticket on the smartphone app).

(One possibility is that the single prices have distorted the ticket pricing structure, and that Stagecoach have had to increase the prices of the other tickets - the ones that you would expect to be discounted - in order to avoid making a loss.)

What this means is that instead of buying a day ticket, or using the app, people - including myself - buy a separate single for every journey.

The time it takes for everyone to buy a ticket on the bus is significant - yesterday I timed it and it was typically 10s per passenger. You have to let the driver know your destination and what ticket you want, the ticket machine needs to be set for that, you have to tap your smartcard, the machine has to register it, and the ticket has to be printed and collected. That's when it works, as occasionally the ticket machine doesn't read the card first time (it seems even less reliable with payments by phone, perhaps the technology hasn't quite matured enough).

Some time ago I wrote about The effect of passenger boarding on bus services. For the last couple of years, largely due to the extensive use of the app which meant that people just marched onto the bus at full speed waving their phone at the driver, the fraction of time a bus sits waiting for passengers to board had actually declined sharply. The effect of the lower single fares is that now the time spent waiting for passengers to board is even worse than it was when I looked at it 5 to 6 years ago.

Yesterday, with a full bus at peak afternoon times, the impact on my supposedly 30 minute journey into time was an extra 10 minutes at least. There basically isn't any slop in the timetable, so add this to the roads being congested with too many cars and it's hardly surprising that buses become ridiculously late during rush hour.

Another example of unintended consequences.

Smart Meters and electricity use at Tribble Towers

We first got moved over to a smart meter some years ago. It partially worked great for about a day, then stopped.

The whole thing has been a bit of a shambles. It wouldn't take electricity readings, the in-home display (IHD) wouldn't communicate with the meter, our meter wasn't even registered with the supplier, and that sort of thing.

Even now, despite having a smart meter that's capable of reporting usage accurately and frequently, our supplier makes up bills that have at best only a passing familiarity with our actual usage.

Having a smart meter can, in principle, drive savings in two ways.

First, it allows very granular billing. British Gas have a half price tariff between 11 and 4 on Sundays. This sort of variable billing simply isn't possible without a smart meter. Fine, so we do most of our washing in that window, run the dishwasher, cook Sunday dinner, wait until just after 11am for our morning coffee and make sure we boil the kettle for tea in the afternoon just before 4pm.

At one stage they had a variety of short-notice periods of cheap electricity too.

I'm guessing the advantage of this to the suppliers is that they can do a bit of demand management, shifting load from peak times to idle times, although I think it'll have to be rather more dynamic to really do any good. And if we save a bit of money in the process we're not going to complain.

The second saving is if the consumer can use the smart meter to track usage in real time and identify what's actually using all their electricity. That's proved to be a bit trickier.

After far more work that I expected, I now have a much better handle on where all the electricity in Tribble Towers is going. The smart meter itself wasn't much help in providing answers, although it did provoke a lot of questions (I think I've turned *everything* off that I can, why are we still using 200W?) - so having the smart meter was a benefit.

In our house, the heaviest usage comes from the kitchen. That's where the oven, grill, hob, microwave, toaster, and kettle are. They aren't on for that many hours a day, but when they are their usage is huge. There's also the fridge freezer - we've recently replaced ours (because the old one failed over the summer) with something that's actually pretty energy efficient, but it's obviously on 24 hours a day, every day.

The next biggest room is the living room. All that electronics - the TV and friends. What I did learn was that the Sky boxes are incredibly power hungry, and they don't vary that much between on and standby (25W, all year long). So much so that we pulled the plug on the Sky box and TV in the guest room because nobody has watched anything on it for years.

The broadband router is another big contributor. Again, it's power usage is modest, but it's on all the time (and necessarily so).

Another thing I learnt is that lighting pulls a lot of power. We have a mix of lighting types, some very efficient low energy bulbs, a number of specialist bulbs we can't get low energy versions of, and some pretty inefficient bulbs. In particular, the uplighters in the living room pull 80-100W each. Unfortunately they're already a low-energy variant (low here being a relative term). They give very good quality light, and we're not going to sit in the dark. But what we now do is leave a very low energy side light on if we're out, rather than the main light.

I was a little surprised that my office and all the computers in it wasn't consuming all that much power, in relation to some of the items mentioned above. My main monitor draws more power than the computer it's connected to. And while my array of servers pull a lot of power when on, they're not on all that many hours. My entire array of systems and network, which is basically what I use all day, is maybe 15% of our total household usage.

And there's the long tail of things in standby, chargers, and the like. Each consumes very little power, but there can be so many of them, and they tend to on all the time, so that adds quite a bit.

We have managed to identify a few inefficiencies and waste, and have reduced our electricity consumption overall by maybe 10% over the last year or so (we had already largely transitioned to low energy light bulbs, which would have been maybe another 10%). That seems to me to be the sorts of savings one might expect; anything much larger requires more radical change, especially in how we cook.

Can we avoid lockdown?

I considered briefly the magnitude of the response needed to address the COVID-19 pandemic, and concluded that - roughly - a factor of 10 reduction in social activity was required.

The question then becomes - how to achieve that?

Clearly, lockdown works (although the fact that our decline was slower than it should have been indicates that it wasn't working optimally - lacklustre leadership, being two weeks late into lockdown, and a significant selfish minority who clearly thought the restrictions weren't for them, contributed in part.

There are massive negative economic and societal consequences of lockdown, so it would be better to avoid it if you can. Can we?

What are the options?

• Working from home: this dramatically eliminates both the work contact and public transport contact elements. It's a sufficiently large component that if you don't do it, you can't win. So, where possible, people should work from home. There's still going to be a set of people for whom this isn't possible.
• Avoid public transport: yes, this helps a bit, but has negative impacts. Remember, we have a climate disaster looming on the horizon. If the majority work from home, then that reduces the occupancy - and thus the risk - for those that need to travel.
• Eliminate large-scale events: the sheer number of people, and their closeness, surely indicates that live theatre, sport, concerts, and the like, simply can't be contemplated for a while.
• Rethink large-scale events: large scale events have a couple of problems, first you're putting a huge number of people in direct contact at the event, and you're having a lot of mixing on the way in and out (and many will visit other social venues as part of the event, making things even worse). But if you only had isolated boxes - and many venues already have some provision like this, after all - with no way for people in different boxes to mix, then you can get to a point where it's not really any worse then the groups meeting to watch the event on TV in a bar or at home.
  
• Shut down bars and restaurants: there's a massive economic and social hit from this. This is a smaller version of the question about avoiding total lockdown.
  
• Rethink bars and restaurants: how far can you eliminate the risk by having isolated groups (bubbles), table service only, one way routes, and ramping up the restrictions? I think you can actually go a long way from the norm. Having visited a few bars and restaurants, most are doing a pretty good job. The fundamental problem again is those in the selfish subclass who won't obey the restrictions and ruin things for everyone. You're going to have massively reduced occupancy (simply by spacing people out) which reduces the risk. Which also reduces the risk because the reduction in capacity means people won't be able to go out as often.
• Testing: if you test everyone continuously, and just barricade the infected, then you should allow everyone else to get back to normal, right? Not so fast. The point here is that a single negative test doesn't mean anything. Worse, any contact means you need to get retested - over and over. That's the sort of thing you have to do in hospitals, it's simply not feasible to cover the whole population at the required density.
• Early closing: I've seen the suggestion that bars should close early. I'm not at all sure that this will help much, as it just pushes people into packing more densely into the hours that places are opening. If anything, you want to expand opening hours (presumably early opening) to spread customers out as much as possible. The only way I can see this helping is if it discourages people from going out at all.
• Ban pub crawls: this seems to me like a no-brainer, to be honest. Restricting people to a single venue massively reduces the mixing effect. (And it seems likely that there's a strong correlation between pub-crawlers and selfish superspreaders.)
• Track and trace: essential, but only works if you massively reduce your interactions in the first place. If you try and carry on as normal, then everyone ends up potentially coming into contact with an infected person and you have to lock everybody away as a result.
  
• Social distancing: taken as a given, but not enough alone unless you push it well beyond 2 metres. Doesn't matter how far apart you are if you have to share the same door handle, though.
• Face coverings: again, unlikely to be enough on its own. Really, you should be thinking about face coverings, social distancing, and similar precautions as being an extra level of protection if you can't avoid an activity at all (such as shopping for groceries). You shouldn't take face coverings as an excuse to enable you to partake in riskier activities.
• Redefined infrastructure: take the things that we have to do and eliminate risk. Examples include automatic doors (you don't touch anything that someone else has), foot or knee operated taps rather than turning by hand. Individual lifts, and likewise travel compartments rather than massive open carriages.

There's no silver bullet here. Saying "if we all just did X" won't work, no single action is enough. This has to be a concerted attempt, all the options need to be pursued together.

 

I think we could avoid lockdown, but it requires a huge amount of work. You need to go fo the big hitters - working from home as much as conceivably possible, scrapping all large events entirely. Then you need to layer on every single measure and precaution you can. And you need a high level of adherence to make it work.

Sadly, we have a government that hasn't the gumption to do the big things or the eye for detail to do all the little things, and the great british public has far too many gormless prats to expect the measures necessary will be followed.

The accuracy of COVID-19 statistics

Nobody really knows how many people have died in the UK due to COVID-19. There are currently 3 numbers that might give a bit of a clue:

• The daily statistic of those who've died after a positive test
• The number who have had COVID-19 mentioned on the death certificate
• The excess deaths reported compared to a normal year

The last one is more amenable to statistical analysis, but is also subject to a variety of errors: the baseline varies from year to year, and lockdown may increase some types of deaths, while decreasing others (for the latter, consider the reduction in pollution). Still, it's a reasonably well defined number.

The second one is highly tricky, because - absent lots of tests and post-mortems, it's sometimes going to be tricky apportioning the cause of death.

The first one has attracted a lot of attention, and it's the headline number you see in the news. It has the advantage that it's quite well defined (you know, definitively, who has had a test, the outcome, and whether they died). The disadvantage is that it doesn't give you any clue as to whether COVID-19 was actually the cause of death or not - perhaps they got run over by a bus.

Early on, this didn't make much difference. But, over time, the probability that someone would die from another cause obviously increases. So, early in August, the statistic was changed to add a 28-day cut off.

The idea of a cut off is that, very roughly, the number of people who die from COVID-19 after the cut off are offset by those who die of other causes before the cut off. At a nigh level, it makes sense, because otherwise it's going to be wrong, and the error will increase over time.

The question really is whether the correction applied is correct. After all, that 28 days is basically a guess - it's commonly used, so is reasonable for comparison purposes, but it's still a guess.

There are a couple of ways to see if the value for the cut off is reasonable. And for that, we need data. It turns out that we can download the time series from the portal, and have a look at the numbers.

One fortunate thing we have is that the dataset actually includes 3 numbers - raw numbers, with the 28-day cut off, and with a 60-day cut off. As of today, the 28-day cut off removes 6,634 deaths from the starting 44,115, and the 60-day cut off less that half that at 2,695. These are what would come in as deaths from other causes.

First, given the number of positive tests, does that correction look sensible. We know, roughly, that there were ~300,000 positive tests in the first peak. So that's mostly 4-5 months ago. For the 28 day cutoff, that gives a regular remaining life expectancy of 15-19 years to account for the observed deaths. For 60 days, the range is 37-46 years.

The problem with this is that we don't know the demographics of those tested. However (you can look these things up in actuarial tables), for the 28-day number to be accurate, those tested have to be quite old - over 65, whereas the 60 day number would be right for a population of working age - say typically in their 40s. Given that we know that there was little testing in nursing homes, the 28-day life expectancy looks a bit wrong, whereas the 60-day version looks reasonable if you're testing a lot of health workers. It's not definitive, but there's a hint that 28 days is overcorrecting.

Another thing to do is look at the rate of corrected deaths over time. This is what it looks like for 28 days:

and this is for the 60 day data:

There's quite a difference there. Note that our expectation is that the probablity of death from other causes is constant (approximately) over time, so that the overall rate will increase over time (it's constant if there's just a single input at a fixed point in time, but we're testing more people as time goes on so the population is growing - the relatively recent big spike in positive tests hasn't worked its way into the data yet).

From this point of view, the 28-day graph looks a little suspect - it starts to rise 28 days after significant testing, but after day 90 there's a decline. That's plain wrong, indicating that there's a correlation with the time of the test (there are a lot of positive tests in days 30-90 which is when the big first peak was). If they're correlated with the positive test, there's going to be some element of correlation with the cause of the test - namely COVID-19 itself.

By contrast, the 60-day chart has the right shape. The problem is that any large cut off will have the right shape, so it's not telling us anything about the correct number to cut the data at, just that 60 days is beyond it.

The thing is, if you had all the data (inclduing demographics) you could do this properly, and work out what the optimal cut off to minimize errors should be. I just haven't seen that yet. But I'm fairly sure that, while the original quoted numbers overestimated the number of deaths, the new numbers with a 28-day cut off are underestimating the true impact, and they might even be more in error the other way than the original figures were.

What level of response to Covid-19 do we need?

Short version: quite a lot.

The long version below is a rough attempt for me (a former scientist) to understand the problem and the rough nature of possible solutions.

It starts with the R factor - essentially the number of people that an infectious person passes the disease on to. The more people you infect, the faster the disease grows. If you manage to get to a situation where people infect less than 1 person on average, the disease will decline.

I've seen R factors for the UK of round about 3 in the early stages. That's the effective R factor - even then, before our governmenat finally bothered with a form of lockdown, a significant number of individuals and organisations were taking preventive measures. So the intrinsic R factor could be a bit higher, although 6-9 is the highest range I've seen.

As we've seen, the effective R factor depends on reactive measures and behaviour. So what sort of measures are necessary to get R below 1?

Reember, R is the number of people who can pass the disease on to. So you need to reduce that number from anything between 3 and 9 to below 1. Actually, you need to go a decent way beyond that to give yourself a margin of error. So I'm going to say that you need to reduce the likelihood of passing the infection of by a factor of 10, which basically means reducing direct contact by a factor of 10.

And reducing transmission by a number that large is quite a challenge. If you just carried on and tried to use face coverings and social distansing, I don't think you can get there - they might give you a factor of 2 or 3, which isn't enough.

What level of contact do people have with others? I'm going to try and estimate the number of person-hours of contact you generate in a week. Remember, this is before the pandemic.

• Work, you might have 40 hours a week in an office or building with 25 people, giving 1,000 contact-hours
• Commute, You might have 10 hours (1 hour per journey), but cross the paths of 100 people, giving another 1,000 contact-hours
• Play, a restaurant or bar might be 100 people or so for a couple of hours, but you have to get there and back, and might do it several times a week. And I'm ignoring massive events like theatre, gigs, festivals, sports. So that could be another 1,000 contact-hours

That gives 3,000 contact-hours per week, pretty much evenly spread across the 3 categories. And we want to reduce that by a factor of 10 to 300.

Even if you avoid public transport (which has other negative implications for the next major disaster of climate change heading our way) you don't get anywhere near. Carry on as before and drive to work and you only get from 3,000 to 2,000, nowhere near the 300 desired.

As far as I can see, the only way to even get close is to not go in to the workplace, which cuts out the commute part as well. And, in addition, cut down the play component and take all the face-covering and social-distancing precautions when you do.

I see no possible scenario in which widespread full-time return to the office can possibly be entertained as being safe.

Even if we use the idea of only some people going to the office 1 day a week, you're still using up a very significant portion of your contact budget.

Of course, there are those who do need to go to a workplace. There are those who do need to commute. That's even more reason why those who can work from home should do so, to give a bigger allowance to those who really need it.

You can, very roughly, estimate your own exposure. For example, I went out to Ely and had a guided walk with a group of a dozen people or so around the town today. Socially-distanced, including the travel and an outdoor lunch, that was something near 50 contact-hours.

Does Covid-19 matter if people would have died anyway?

One thing that appears commonly in reports of deaths due to coronavirus is that those who died were elderly or had underlying health conditions.

Partially based on this, there seem to be a lot of people making or supporting the argument that Covid-19 doesn't matter because it only kills ill or elderly people, and they would have died anyway.

How true is this?

Not true at all, as it happens.

You can easily see this from the ONS figures of excess deaths. Consider the extreme case, if they had died from Covid-19 1 second earlier than they would otherwise, then the deaths would have been reported as normal and there would have been zero excess deaths.

So, the existence of excess deaths indicates that those who died had their lives cut short. But cut short by how much?

If we take the main peak as being in April, then the fact that we're still seeing a significant excess indicates that most of those who died would still be alive now. So, before Covid-19 came along they clearly had those months at least to look forward to.

The term is displaced mortality. Basically, if people die at one point in time, then their death won't happen at a later time. Because everyone dies eventually, all the deaths in the April peak will result in a reduction in the numbers of deaths at the point when they would have died normally. So that peak will translate into a trough at a later date.

Given that we had roughly 60,000 deaths in the UK, and assuming 50 weeks a year to keep the numbers simple, then if the average remaining life expectancy of those who died was 1 year, then we would now be seeing a reduction in the current death rate of about 1,200 a week.

We're not seeing a trough anywhere near that size. If the average remaining life expectancy of those who died was 10 years, then we would now be seeing a reduction in the current death rate of about 120 a week. That would be plausible, given the current numbers.

About the lowest average remaining life expectancy consistent with the current data is something like 4 years - which would lead to a drop in the current death rate of 300 deaths per week. We're not seeing that, but it's something you could fit into the uncertainties.

In conclusion, those who died as a result of Covid-19 weren't at death's door, they would have had years of life to look forward to.

Early employment

I think I had a paper round in my early teens, but that was only a few weeks. They changed the scheme almost every day, and then decided to get rid of the paper boys and girls entirely.

My first proper job was 5 weeks in the summer of 1980. The company was called William Watts, a small engineering firm selling machine tools. At the time they imported machine tools from East Germany - while not quite as good quality, they were massively cheaper than the competition.

(They went out of business, but I found Millbrook Machine Tools who appear to be the follow on company.)

My job was to be general assistant to the showroom manager. Cleaning, tidying, whatever came along. In my first couple of weeks I - essentially unasked - went through their entire stock of leaflets and brochures, tossed the rubbish, sorted and organised it. I think this was the first time they had employed anyone for the summer holidays, so they were probably expecting some idle yob. I ran out of work in the showroom very quickly. They then set me on tidying up the finance store cupboard, which they had just thrown all the old paperwork in for years and now needed to move everything because that room needed to be used for offices. A couple of days later it was in its new home, neatly sorted by date too, which astonished them.

The union rep complained to management that I was showing everyone else up. Of course, the thing was that they had (without thinking about it) given me tasks for which my ordered and methodical mind was perfectly suited. But there was never any problem - I got on really well with all the staff, and the union rep even made sure I got the holiday allowance I was entitled too. For the remainder of the time I was the extra help in the spares and repair office, covering for the regular people who were on holiday. The thing about the East German machine tools was that getting spares was a nightmare, so we held a stock of what we could get and manufactured anything else ourselves. And the stuff kept breaking down, so we had a stream of calls for replacement parts, so it was just a case of finding the right thing in the warehouse, and packing it up to be sent out.

My next summer job, along with a few classmates from school, was with a small company called Midlands Educational Technology. (They were a branch of TecQuipment.) The company made demonstration engineering models - some of them very simple (I helped make a batch of carburetors mounted on a baseboard), and some very upmarket like the cutaway cars you might have seen in showrooms. Another thing they did was to take engines out of scrapped cars (I think it was mostly Ford Escorts), strip them down and clean them, and then assemble them to be sent out to technical colleges where students would repeatedly strip them down and put them together for practice. This was pretty hands on, and a lot of fun.

There was a bit of bother with an industrial dispute. The union here were a bit more militant, and called a strike one day. Of course, the small group of students couldn't go out on strike, as we weren't members of the union and would have been fired on the spot. There was one poor chap who had forgotten to join the union, so he sat with us as we just twiddled our thumbs and drank sweet tea while the union and management had a pointless argument.

Because TecQuipment were an educational company, some bright spark came up with the idea that they could get us students to test out some new electronics kits they were thinking of becoming a reseller for. This was really cool, instead of a breadboard you simply slotted clear plastic cubes into the right layout on a grid to get a working circuit. It was quite neat because the plastic cubes had the electrical symbols printed on the top so you ended up with something that looked like a proper circuit diagram. The instructions were terrible, and half wrong, so I corrected my copy (remember, I'm a physicist). They were sufficiently impressed that they offered me a proper job.

I worked out at TecQuipment's head office, in the R&D lab, for my year off between school and university. (Actually, 9 months, as the Oxbridge entrance exams and interviews were in early December.)

If you look at the TecQuipment heritage history, under the 80's it mentions the Queen's Award - I remember going to that ceremony - and expanding exports. Specifically, Mexico. The company had managed to win a huge order to supply educational materials, covering pretty much its entire range, to Mexico. In the small print it had something about the equipment being supplied with adequate documentation. Enter me, just having left school, suddenly responsible for getting all the documentation ready.

Well, it didn't work out like that. In many ways, I was ideal for the task they thought they had, of simply finding and checking the instruction manuals before sending them off to be translated. The problem was that much of the documentation had either never been created at all, was for an old version of the product, or had been lost entirely (in some case we ended up finding prior customers and getting the manuals back off them to get a copy). It wasn't just documentation, of course, in some cases they had managed to sell models they hadn't made for years and had lost the plans for. The whole Mexico project turned out to have been hopelessly underestimated - in the end they had a whole department of engineers and a bank of secretaries typing away.

I was taken off Mexico and put to work on other interesting projects. We had a range of robotics and did some open days touring schools. We had the usual cheesy robots, and I remember there was a programmable speech synthesizer called ChatterSphere that was a big hit.

I also ended up being effectively in charge of the Chemistry products. This was really odd because I'm a physicist and mathematician, and hated chemistry at school. But we didn't have anybody else in the company who understood any of the chemistry products anyway - they were designed by a University Professor - so I was as good as anybody else, and using me avoided having to take a real engineer off the Mexico project. One day we got one of the odd requests that make life interesting - one of our enterprising salesmen had agreed to sell a product that was made by one of our competitors for half the price. Could we make some real quick?

This was a simple corrosion tester. Ultimately, you had some jars of water (potentially with salt or other chemicals in), and you simply dangled samples in the jars to see what happens. Add some means of heat (a portable electrical cooker ring) to vary temperature, some means of varying the oxygen content in the water (we went down the road to a pet shop and got an aerator for a fish tank), a digital scale to measure the change in mass of the samples, some pretty framework, and it was a great success. About the only guide I had was a page ripped out of the opposition's catalogue - we had to make it close enough to make the customer happy, but different enough not to make it too obvious it was a knockoff.

Panic buying or inflexible systems?

Early on in the coronavirus pandemic, the shops ran short of supplies.

There was no sanitiser gel to be had for love or money. Of course, there was wall to wall messaging about how important hand washing was, and how you should use sanitiser if you couldn't wash. Shortage of supplies in the shops means that people were paying attention.

Basic food supplies - pasta, flour, and the like - were scarce. Everyone looked at what was likely to happen, decided that the likelihood of needing to feed themselves at home without being allowed out was pretty high, and put an extra item or two in their basket.

I'm not quite sure how much toilet roll people thought they needed, but being stuck at home means you're going to need more.

I think there's fairly widespread understanding that the the term panic buying was completely misleading. This was (and there will always be the odd exception) a simple adjustment to changing circumstances.

Or, rather, a couple of changes.

The first is that being at home more means that you need more of almost everything. More food, more household supplies. Less petrol in the car, at least for most of lockdown.

Of the 100 days or so we've been locked down, we would normally have been on holiday or a trip for something like 7-10 days. And we would probably have gone out to a pub or restaurant for a meal 5-10 times in addition to that. So that's between 10 and 15 days that we wouldn't have been at home - eating or using other materials. (The Cambridge Beer Festival would have added a whole extra week to that, but that's a slightly exceptional event.) Just because of that, our weekly supermarket spend is going to be up 10-15%.

Other people won't necessarily have the same specific changes, but a lot of people eat out, use takeaways, get schools to feed their children one meal a day, or grab food on the go. So the idea that demand on supermarket supplies in general might be up 10-15% seems plausible.

Recently, Tesco have reported about a 10% increase in demand, which aligns with this. Of course, pubs and restaurants are seeing the other side, with a precipitous drop in income. The overall amount of food required doesn't change, it just gets into peoples stomachs via a different supply chain.

And the supermarket business is pretty cutthroat. The supermarkets have spent years optimising their supply chains to stay competitive. None of them have the slack in their systems to cope with a sudden 10% uptick in demand - if they kept that much headroom in normal operation they would get wiped out in short order.

The second change is in when people shop. We always used to shop twice a week. This is good, you get fresher produce and each shopping trip is more manageable. But now, and this seems to be general, we're making fewer - but obviously larger - shops.

The shift from twice a week to once a week means there's going to be an initial surge. That first shop will have half a week's extra stuff in it, and you end up with everyone having half a week's worth of additional supplies. And just the knowledge that you can't (or won't) simply nip in if you run out means that you're obviously going to have to stock up a little earlier. So there's this sudden surge to add 3 or so days worth of food. Once it's stabilised, of course, it goes back to normal.

We haven't gone for online shopping yet, for the main shop anyway. The supermarket is only a few minutes walk away so it's pretty silly for us. What we have used online ordering for is some of the more specialist items that the local supermarket doesn't carry - the luxury of being able to visit multiple stores is one we've avoided for now.

Longer term, I think it's going to continue in the current state for a while. I really can't see a widespread shift back to pre-pandemic behaviour. People will go out, of course - if only because they're a bit stir crazy - but the idea of going out will soon lose its charm. The hospitality sector is probably going to have to reinvent itself entirely.

The changes we've seen didn't result in the overall volume of demand changing, just in where and how it appeared on the demand side. We have the prospect of the ongoing Brexit fiasco disrupting the supply side, stressing the system again.

On being under lockdown

A while ago I wrote about On working from home.

Of course, the recent COVID-19 crisis has meant that a lot more people are working from home. Although we have to be honest and say that this isn't the normal working from home, it's having to try and work in isolation away from the office because of the pandemic.

Even for those of us used to working from home, this isn't normal.

When I decided to work from home, one of the things I had to consciously think about was how to manage the process. Without the need to leave home and interact with other human beings that comes with working in a shared environment, getting out of the house and going to lots of events was key - museums, talks, meetups, and the odd beer festival. Pretty much all of that has gone out the window.

It's unfortunate timing too. As a general rule things are quiet in the winter months, the weather and lack of light don't help. So I was just looking to come out of mini-hibernation when the pandemic comes calling.

I'm fortunate that the actual work part doesn't change much. The at home has been quite different. Mrs T has also been stuck at home, so I don't get the house to myself during the day. I mean, I like her around, but she has been getting underfoot a lot. (Not to mention the occasional call for IT support.)

Far more so than myself, she's gone online to socialize in a big way. We professionals might turn our noses up at Zoom (and expecially its security) but you have to concede that it's ideal for consumer chat. Even better, and unlike pretty much everything else, it works great on my old retired iPad, which has been heavily used. She's done quizzes, wine tastings, cocktail classes, cookery demonstrations, singalongs, dancing(!), afternoon teas, and just general chat.

Shopping has changed. We're fortunate in that we have a big supermarket just round the corner. Rather than the traditional minor shop twice a week, we've switched to a major shop every 8-10 days. Slightly oddly, as there's more in each shop, we now walk there and back (Mrs T does the shop, I walk over later to help carry it). The cars are basically gathering dust.

Where we are on the outskirts of Cambridge is fairly quiet anyway, but is now even quieter. The buses look empty, the roads are quiet. We go out for walks for a bit of fresh air and don't have to worry about keeping clear of crowds of people. (I'm a bit limited in this, hay fever discourages me from going outside too much.)

The Cambridge Beer Festival was cancelled. That's another major social event gone. Not to mention the volunteering time (minor for me, rather major for Mrs T). And the beer, and the food - especially the cheese! The festival organized a number of online events through the week, and we got in a good stock of cheese (I can strongly recommend Shepherds Purse, especially if you're a fan of blue cheese), found some good beers (or cider) online, and raised a glass at home.

Looking to the future, it's going to be a long time before anything approaching normality returns. There are always going to be those who just can't be bothered with the restrictions put in place, but I'm likely to be a hermit for a while yet.

Free buses?

One thing that is absolutely clear in the battle against congestion and pollution is that modal shift away from the private car is essential.

The fundamental issue is space-efficiency. Cars are horrendously inefficient users of the precious limited space available in urban environments. It doesn't really matter what alternative mode is used - whether walking, cycling, bus, tram, or train - changing the mode is always a big win. No, self driving cars don't help, and may make matters worse. Electric cars don't help either, you still have to get the power from somewhere, and they still have significant particulate emissions.

For larger cities, trams or rail are key. There's still work to do to drive the cost down in smaller towns and cities, but things running on rail solve the particulate emissions problem. The problem is that, while efficient, they provide more transport capacity than smaller conurbations can take advantage of. In addition, it takes years to develop a rail network.

Which leaves buses. Not ideal in the long term, but available right now. How do we get people to move onto buses - and drive up ridership on public transport to justify investment in better solutions?

What about making public transport free? After all, Luxembourg has done it. Clearly adds to the attractiveness, but can we afford it?

Consider Cambridge. The city has a population of about 125,000; with the surrounding area we might consider a quarter of a million people are in scope.

Giving that many people free public transport will cost a fortune, and we can't possible afford it. Correct?

Not so fast. The MegaRider ticket is £15 for 7 days travel. Let's round that and say it's £2 per person per day. That's a charge at which the current bus service is profitable.

What's a reasonable estimate of the number of users? Not the whole quarter of a million. Pensioners already have bus passes. Some walk, some cycle, some are already close enough to a railway station. Some, for work purposes or for special needs, will be unable to use public transport. Let's say we're targetting 100,000 people 5 days a week. That's £1million a week, or £50 million a year.

OK, that's a fair amount of money to you or me. But the CAM project (Cambridge Autonomous Metro) is talking about an eye-watering cost that may reach £4billion. Instead of funding CAM, we could fund free bus travel for everyone in Cambridge for 80 years. The Greater Cambridge Partnership was talking about a £1billion investment for the City Deal. The recent A14 "upgrade" was over £1billion.

In those terms - and in terms of many of the other projects being proposed - funding free bus travel is a bargain.

We're not done yet.

Increased ridership means fuller buses, so utilization goes up. So the cost per journey goes down.

Increased ridership justifies a denser mesh with more routes, leading to greater efficiency, driving down unit costs.

Modal shift reduces congestion, cutting journey times, so you don't need as many vehicles or as many drivers to provide the same service, driving down costs even further.

Not charging means a massive reduction in boarding times, which as I've talked about before is a major contributor to delays and inefficiency.

It's not hard, within the city, to see journey times cut in half through this process. And maybe utilization can almost double. Which means that the actual cost goes from £50million a year to £20million a year. The CAM could fund that for 2 centuries.

And that's the fundamental thing. Pretty much every single transport project currently being floated costs more - often many times more - than simply making buses free. There's a downside here - providing free buses may be sufficiently successful in the short term that it could kill off the prospects for the better long term projects. But it gives us the breathing space to develop the better solutions without destroying our cities and the planet in the meantime.

And that's only covered the direct costs, ignoring the indirect benefits such as: reduced journey times and increased productivity; decreased pollution and better health giving savings for the NHS; cleaer street and a better public realm; and so on.

Perhaps we should be asking not whether we can afford to do this, but whether we can afford not to.

The prospect of limiting carbon emissions

I recently went to a meeting hosted by Carbon Neutral Cambridge on developing a Local Transport Plan that would get us towards being carbon neutral.

Quick summary: the measures proposed by local authorities (specifically Cambridge, but I suspect it's not that different elsewhere) won't get us even close to being carbon neutral by 2050, and likely not ever.

Given that, realistically, any hope we have of preventing the worst consequences of climate change means that we need to be carbon neutral by 2030, this is somewhat disappointing.

There was then an analysis of a fairly radical scenario, and even that struggled to just about reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

And, what's worse, both scenarios were pretty optimistic in terms of timescale and takeup of technology. The likelihood is that there will be dithering and delays, pushing it back even further.

(And there's the incorrect assumption that switching to electric vehicles will reduce carbon emissions. On its own, it won't, it requires the world to move far faster to renewables or nuclear than we are right now.)

The other thing that isn't immediately obvious is that, right now, the carbon footprint of moving people about is the same as that for moving goods about. You have to solve both.

We then broke up into focus groups. I hate this (it's just me) - the chances are that either nobody will have anything to say so you spend the time twiddling your thumbs, or there's so much you don't even scratch the surface. On this occasion, we didn't even really get started. It's a huge topic.

But our group (although we did have Peter Dawe sidetrack us with his CitiPod) thought about a couple of priority areas:

• For people: reduce the need to travel, and the use of remote working
• For goods: move long distance traffic to rail, and have local distribution hubs

What is clear, though, is that we need significant modal shift from current transport systems to more energy efficient ones. Yes, this means getting rid of cars in their current form. Difficult, given the rather dire state of public transport and the lack of investment in it (although they can always find a few billion to build roads to induce extra demand and cause more congestion and pollution), but necessary.

The effect of passenger boarding on bus services

We all know the saying "you wait ages for a bus, and them 3 arrive at once". But why is this?

The basic reason is simple: once a bus starts to run late, there are likely to be more passengers waiting at stops, slowing it down. Because it's running late, the bus behind it has fewer passengers waiting when it gets to stops, and catches it up. There's a strong feedback loop that drives well-separated buses further apart, and closely separated buses get pushed together.

As a passenger, I noted the characteristics of a number of journeys I took over the summer. These were during the day, so avoid the rush hour.

Very roughly, what I see is that on a 24 minute journey between home and the centre of Cambridge, we spend typically:

• 12 min actually moving
• 6 minutes boarding
• 5 minutes stopped due to traffic/lights
• 1 minute unboarding

This doesn't account for the unboarding at my destination stop (terminus).

The boarding is much higher than unboarding for the simple reason that you just get off. When you board, you have to pay, show your ticket, or may have queries.

What was also true was that the distribution of boarding times isn't simple. The majority of passengers board quickly in the 10-20s range (there are two peaks, those who've prepaid and are just showing their card or ticket, and a somewhat slower group who have to pay). However, there's a long tail: a small number of passengers have much longer than average boarding times. I've seen some take several minutes - maybe they don't know where they're going, they don't have the right change, they don't understand the system.

The traffic lights are also rather variable. If you get caught by the lights, you can get a wait of several minutes. (The junction at the Catholic church in Cambridge in particular can cause large delays.)

Unlike a train, which pulls into a station, opens its doors for a fixed time, and then goes, a bus stops as long as necessary to let its passengers on or off. This, coupled with the traffic delays, means that wait times are highly variable.

This also means that the predicted arrival times as shown on bus stops by the real time traffic displays simply can't be terribly accurate.




I knocked up a quick model of my bus journey with the observed distribution of boarding and wait times, and (as expected) it comes back with results that aren't dissimilar to the characteristics of actual journeys:

• Just allowing for the fact that the number of passengers on the journey is random gives a variance of +/- 3 minutes
• Allowing for the feedback of delays early in the journey causing longer queues later gives a variance of +/- 4 minutes
• Allowing for the previous bus as well gives a variance of +/- 5 minutes

Given this variability, it's hardly surprising that adherence to the bus timetable is notional at best.

One way to deal with this is to add waits to bring the bus back in line with the timetable. (You have to add waits, you can't remove time unless you have a time machine.) And my 24-minute journey is allowed 30 minutes, so we routinely stop 2 or 3 places along the route. But having to build in this extra wait time is pure waste.

What you can also see is that if the bus were to be full (in other words, taking on 60 people) then it's not entirely unreasonable to require 15 minutes for everyone to board. Those who have stood in a queue in the city centre on a busy evening or a Saturday afternoon will have seen the buses stationary at the stop for this sort of time. Even with the slop in the schedule, it's almost impossible to keep to the timetable if the bus is full. (Especially as those tend to be times when the roads are more congested.)

What if you could reduce boarding time? This gives you a double win: less boarding time makes the journey quicker, but also gives less variability, so you need to build in less slop. It's better for passengers, who get quicker and more reliable journeys, and it's better for the bus operators who make much better utilization of their buses and drivers.

Looking at my journey just to be specific, optimization of loading could almost halve journey times and double efficiency. At busy times on short routes having a second staff member check tickets - rather than forcing the driver to do so - is obviously a win. (This doesn't have to be a conductor, who would check or sell tickets while the bus is moving after everyone has boarded. It could be an inspector at certain stops who validates tickets of those in the queue. When I was living in Toronto some of the busier bus stops were closed interchanges, you paid as you entered the system and didn't need to be checked at the point of boarding at all.)

Eliminating charges entirely would have a similar effect. People just walk on without having to stop. Again, the system is far more efficient as a result.

One of the other minor issues with buses in Cambridge is only having one door. Those wishing to board have to wait for everyone who wants to get off to do so; many other systems have separate doors allowing boarding and unboarding to operate in parallel.

The actual process of issuing tickets has improved, I think. Smart cards and contactless payments are much quicker than the old cash and paper tickets.

But what's interesting here is that improving the efficiency with which passengers board a bus does have the potential to significantly improve journey times, reliability, and the efficiency of the bus system.

Brexit isn't S.M.A.R.T.

If you've been through an annual performance evaluation in a large company, chances are the HR department has introduced you to the notion of setting SMART goals.

For those unfamiliar with this horror, a SMART goal is:

• Specific - you have to avoid meaningless waffle
• Measurable - otherwise how can you prove you've achieved it
• Attainable - there's no point trying to do something impossible
• Relevant - the goal must match a requirement
• Timely - you have to be able to achieve the goal within the reporting period

How does Brexit stack up against the S.M.A.R.T. scheme?

• Specific - Brexit is vague, undefined, or has multiple definition, possibly meaning something different to every Brexit supporter. Characterized by the vacuous slogan 'Brexit means Brexit'.
• Measurable - fails again, largely because you can't measure something that isn't even defined. But on any objective measure, Brexit fails on every single measurable test - it won't bring more sovereignty, it won't bring more trade, it won't make us richer
• Attainable - again, you can't attain something that isn't defined, but looking at most of the individual options for Brexit, most are simply outright impossible - they're simply incompatible with international law, or violate various UK or EU treaties
• Relevant - for most of the individual issues that people claim to be concerned about, Brexit is an irrelevance, it's UK government policy that's the cause of the problem, not EU membership
• Timely - claims that we would have all our trade deals rolled over and ready to go have proven false, the reality has proved that any form of Brexit is neither easy nor quick, and if we go ahead with it it's going to tie up and paralyze UK politics for a decade or more

Of course, apart from being vague and unspecified, Brexit also suffers from the fundamental problem that it shouldn't be considered as an objective in its own right - Brexit isn't something you should aim to achieve, it's rather a process by which other objectives are achieved. And when you look at those other objectives - such as sovereignty, prosperity, trade, immigration - it's clear that Brexit is at best irrelevant and most likely plain incompatible with achieving those goals.

Brexit just isn't the S.M.A.R.T. thing to do.

Left hand Park, right hand Ride

There's been a lot of controversy in Cambridge over the parking charge for our Park and Ride service.

A few years ago, the council introduced a car parking charge. To say it didn't go down well is a bit of an understatement. Locals were outraged, not only by the charge, but the pain and complexity involved in paying for it.

Recently, a plan has come about whereby the charge would be scrapped. Essentially, the Greater Cambridge Partnership would use some of its funds to ensure Cambridgeshire County Council wouldn't take such a financial hit if the charge was removed.

Now, I'm opposed to the charge, but I'm not convinced by the solution.

I regard the charge a a symptom of the dysfunctional transport system we have around Cambridge. For background, consider this Venn diagram from Edward Leigh of Smarter Cambridge Transport:

Let's be clear. That's the abridged version. It doesn't include parish councils, MPs, national government, transport operators, or many other interested parties.

Looking at the structure, is it any surprise that our transport is an inconsistent and disorganized mess? There's no evidence of joined up thinking, and essentially every transport project is a point solution blind to the wider picture.

To my mind, the parking charge is evidence of this disconnect. It shows that rather than running a Park and Ride system, we have some car parks run by the council, and a completely separate bus service run by the bus companies. That the buses actually stop at the car parks is a fortunate coincidence; the whole thing isn't part of a coherent plan.

It gets worse, as the Park and Ride system is distinct from the general bus service. Special buses, special routes, special tickets. Again, an isolated point solution that isn't run as part of a larger plan.

So while I agree that the charge is bad, I also strongly agree with Edward Leigh when he asks whether subsidising parking is the best use of £1.1m? (It's not. You're subsidising cars and a private bus company.)

So what is the answer? Ultimately, you need to get the system sorted out. We need a coherent transport infrastructure rather than everyone pulling in different directions.

To the specifics of the charge, the pain point is paying twice. It's not the direct cost, it's the extra hassle. So pay once. Either have free parking and have the bus ticket cover the cost, or pay to park and make the bus free.

A deeper question is whether the Park and Ride system is actually useful and whether alternatives such as Travel Hubs might work better; or whether it might actually make sense to run bus services to where people live so they don't have to drive at all.

But my bigger concern about the discussion of parking charges is not just that it's leading to bad answers, but that in looking at it in isolation we're ignoring the fact that we're answering the wrong question.

On working from home

I've been working from home for about two and a half years now, and it's been great.

My employer, Haplo, is on the far side of London. It's not that difficult to get to, but it is almost a 3 hour trip (especially once you've allowed for the erratic bus "service" to Cambridge station). Fine for occasional visits, not something I can see being viable for a daily commute, so I go down to see everyone once a month or so.

As a systems administrator, my primary responsibility is to the servers running our products. They're hosted in datacenters, so there's no difference between my being at home (or anywhere else) or in the office - I'm always remote.

I'm also part time, and don't punch a clock. There's huge thanks to Ben for allowing this flexibility, but it benefits us both - I can fit work in around my other needs, but can also take advantage of my free time to do my work outside of normal working hours, minimising any disruption to our customers.

Working from home requires discipline, of course, and isn't for everyone. But it would take a lot to persuade me back to a full-time fixed-hours office job.

I have a routine to get the day off to a flying start. We're up early, just after 6 most days. (This actually started when Hannah was home and was getting up for the early shift at Tesco's, but we've continued with it as it fits in quite well.) Breakfast, check email and go through my iPad games to allow my breakfast to go down, then off to the gym for a swim and shower. It's good for me, and provides a fixed foundation for the rest of the day.

Lunch tends to be pretty early, 12 noon. Partly because breakfast is so early, but we also tend to have an early dinner as well.

I try to eat well (lunch usually involves a bit of meat, salad, pickles), and drink mostly water - left to my own devices I would be permanently drinking coffee, which isn't such a good thing.

I've mentioned a couple of things that are important about working from home already - establishing a routine, and having discipline to avoid bad habits. I'm not slumming around in my pyjamas either - although I do avoid proper shirts, tending to usually wear a T-shirt (I have a large collection, from vendors, trade shows, and conferences).

I'm naturally a solitary person, who would happily sit in front of a computer all day and never talk to anyone. We do keep in touch throughout the day - we're rather old school, IRC being the tool of choice.

One thing I do try and do is get out of the house. Going to the gym is part of it, but there's so much more to do as well. Cambridge has lots of museums, so I'll occasionally be out at places like the Whipple or the Fitzwilliam Museum. The Fitz is great because it's free, which means you can nip in for lots of half an hour sessions and just do one gallery at a time, rather than making a major expedition out of it. There are lots of other departmental museums well worth a visit, and a rotating exhibition at the UL.

Recently, I've also managed to get along to some of the talks that are part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

I try to go to a lot of technical events through Meetup too. This tends to vary a bit, one of the annoying things is that clashes seem to be rife - seemingly far more than you might expect by chance. One of my original plans was to go to the office on the days there was an evening meetup in London (which also included the monthly LOSUG meeting before that folded), but that doesn't seem to be anything like as often as I originally anticipated.

A recent thing is the Cambridge Remote Workers meetup group. It's just an excuse to get out and socialize and network, but it's also important that it's a different set of people from wider backgrounds than is normally present at the rather narrow tech meetups I otherwsie go to.

I've started to be more active in other areas - a bit of campaigning with Smarter Cambridge Transport, looking at getting involved with the Foundation Trust at Addenbrookes. That's when I'm not supping on a tasty porter at a local beer festival, of course.

How far to the nearest bus stop?

One question that occurred to me when I attended the Rebooting the City Deal meeting was how dense the coverage of a public transport system needs to be to make it useful.

I've seen several statements along the lines of x% of Cambridge being within a 7-minute (or whatever) walk to a bus stop. But what is a reasonable walking distance?

I don't know, but I have a little data. OK, 2 data points. Where I live I have a choice of 2 bus stops. One is about 300m away, or 4 minutes. The other is about 500m with a slightly tricky crossing, or about 7 minutes. I would have no issues using the closer stop on a regular basis; the more distant one I'm not terribly happy with.

So, if we want to encourage large-scale use of public transport, I would say we want to aim for something close to the 300m mark. How does this relate to the actual distribution of distances in Cambridge?

I looked at OpenStreetMap. They have all the buildings, and bus stops. And it's open, so I can get at the data.

The good folks at BBBike make a bunch of exports of OSM data available. This includes the city of Cambridge, which is naturally convenient. I grabbed the main osm file.

It's in XML format, which is a little unfortunate. I then used osmfilter to reduce the data to more manageable proportions.

First, I want the locations of all the bus stops. Just the nodes, no relations or ways or dependencies. The bus stops have highway=bus_stop so the following filter command should do it:

./osmfilter Cambridge.osm --keep="highway=bus_stop" --drop-ways --drop-relations --ignore-dependencies

Getting the list of places (where place is somewhere a user may use as a starting point or destination) was a bit trickier. In the end I made the assumption that everywhere of interest would have a postcode. It's not quite true, but I'm just interested in the distribution here so it will do as a first approximation. That gives me a filter command like:

./osmfilter Cambridge.osm --keep="addr:postcode=" --drop-ways --drop-relations --ignore-dependencies

The format of the XML is quite simple, it splits things up nicely onto separate lines. This makes it very easy to use basic Unix tools like grep and awk to pick out the lines that have latitude and longitude on them which gives me lists of coordinates.

I then put together a very cheap and cheerful Java program to read the files of coordinates and calculate the distances between all of them, using a simple equirectangular approximation as described here. The first run of ~10000 places and ~1000 bus stops took less than half a second to print the distance to the nearest bus stop, so I wasn't going to optimize it any further.

The most immediate question can then be answered - what is the distribution of distances to the nearest bus stop? A quick hack using the dist prefab in ploticus and I get the following graph:

That's number of places against distance in meters, 10m bins.

This is really quite interesting. It shows that most places in Cambridge are within a few hundred metres of a bus stop. In fact, almost all are within my acceptable distance.

In reality, it's not quite as good as that. The first thing to correct for is that these are distances as the crow flies. Actual walking distance would be a little further - it's probably reasonable to multiply by 1.4-1.5 to allow for corners, curves, and crossings. Even then the bulk of Cambridge is still inside that 300m range.

The other problem, and it's a much bigger problem, is that this measures the distance to a bus stop, not to a bus service. A significant number of the bus stops in the data are no longer in use. Short of hand-editing those out I'm not sure how to approach this.

Furthermore, of those bus stops that are in service, you have to make allowances for the timetable. If there's only one bus an hour (some bus stops are one or two a day) then you have to make some allowance for that. One simple approach would be to calculate the time to next bus, which would be the walking time plus half the time between buses. (I'm prepared to use the peak frequency here. In reality people would time their setting out to align with the timetable rather than it being random, although the less frequent a service the earlier you aim to arrive to make sure you don't miss a bus. It's complicated.)

It would be nice to show the distances on a map, which would give you a much better visualization of where in Cambridge has good or bad access to a bus service. But that's only really worth doing if you have better data.

At the present time only a couple of dozen bus stops in the OSM dataset are annotated with the necessary information to allow more detailed analysis. It would be nice to get more accurate metadata (and to have the stops in the right places). There's a local Meetup group, but it's not terribly active. Still, the whole point of OpenStreetMap is that it's freely editable by anyone.

Reading the tea leaves

2016 has been a year of surprises, to many.

A UK referendum for Brexit was followed by a recent  victory for Donald Trump in the US Presidential Election.

I'm not a great fan of either result, but don't find either surprising.

In the case of the EU referendum, there was a huge problem with the Remain campaign. Essentially, it failed to give people a good reason why they would want to stay in the EU. Part of this is that the EU has actually lost its way - it really doesn't stand for anything. There isn't a European ideal, a European vision, to enthuse and motivate people. Some of this is that European governments are in fact sovereign and won't relinquish control of the big issues, leaving Europe to poke at little things around the edges, a complete inversion of where responsibilities should lie.

Meanwhile, the Leave campaign was coming out with reason after reason why we should get out. The cost of membership. The unelected bureaucrats. Unfettered immigration. Lack of sovereignty. That these were lies or misleading doesn't matter - the Leave campaign kept on making the points.

So, given a general sense of underwhelming disinterest in the Remain campaign, and general dissatisfaction with the state of the EU, is it surprising that people wanting a change voted to Leave regardless of the consequences? Or that people who wanted to Remain couldn't be bothered?

(I see a similar thread in the US presidential election. People are fed up of their current lot in life, one candidate promises to change everything and the other is a safe pair of hands who's not going to rock the boat.)

I've mentioned before that the madness with Brexit is that it isn't for anything. While technically a vote to leave, it gives us no lead or direction on where we should head to. And a non-binding result at that.

It looks like the current government response is akin to burning the house down because some of the residents don't like the wallpaper, then standing on the street outside working out where we're going to live next.

Invoking Article 50 and planning to leave, without having a single clue on what we're going to do afterwards is madness. Lunacy. Stupidity.

And yet the government is actually refusing to give any details of its future plans, It's even attempting to bypass Parliament.

One cannot see this happening without thinking that the only reason they have for keeping their ideas secret is that they actually don't have a clue. This isn't keeping you cards close to your chest, the Brexit emperor is buck naked so they're making sure nobody gets a look.

What should have happened, then?

First, I believe you have to take the referendum result as meaning that there is a great deal of distrust and resentment towards the EU. You cannot simply brush off the result as a win for stupid, there are genuine issues at play here.

(I know, I'm less than enamoured with the institutions of the EU myself. I'm very much pro-europe, but I'm not convinced that the EC or the ECJ are - rather that they're self-serving to feather their own nests and expand their own petty empires, not that the mandarins in Whitehall are any different.)

Lacking a clear direction for what the alternative state should be, there should have been the immediate establishment of some sort of body, a commission or whatever, to evaluate the options, their strengths and weaknesses, and report back. Shouldn't have taken too long, many newspapers produced summaries, Part of the investigation would have to be an enumeration of the issues raised - whether it be spending, sovereignty, immigration, or petty bureaucracy - and score the effect of different paths forward against those issues. Which would have to include the fact that leaving the EU could actually make the problems we're blaming the EU even worse. For example, the level of compromise involved in a Soft Brexit could be such that it would be better not to leave in the first place.

Then the government - sorry, Parliament - would be able to have an open and honest debate about the desired outcome. Maybe even a second referendum, hopefully one this time which actually had actionable outcomes as the choices.