Petition Calls Made To Scrap Blackwall And Silvertown Tolls
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
This is the sub-heading.
A petition containing more than 37,000 signatures calling for proposed tolls on the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels to be scrapped has been presented at City Hall.
These four paragraphs give more details.
Toll charges of up to £4 per journey through the soon-to-open Silvertown Tunnel and the neighbouring Blackwall Tunnel were announced by Transport for London (TfL) on 26 November.
The Silvertown Tunnel will open next spring and will provide a new road crossing under the Thames between Silvertown and the Greenwich Peninsula.
The charges are “designed to manage levels of traffic using the tunnels”, TfL has said.
A TfL spokesperson added that without the tolls, “traffic would increase in both tunnels causing delays and congestion, which contribute to poorer air quality”.
Note.
- 37,000 is a large petition.
- If Transport for London wanted to reduce pollution, they could encourage greater use of hydrogen.
I have done some simple modeling using Excel.
- There are six vehicle crossings; Dartford Bridge, Dartford Crossing, Woolwich Ferry, Silvertown Tunnel, Blackwall Tunnel and Rotherhithe Tunnel.
- Matters are complicated by each crossing being a different size.
- There are several reliable rail crossings and a number of foot crossings, which offer alternatives, for those travellers on foot.
- Currently the worst disruption occurs, when more than one route is out of action at the same time.
It is a very complex river crossing,
I feel strongly that we aren’t going to get a true picture of traffic flow through the two new tunnels, until we see serious disruption on the Dartford Crossing.
But what worries me most, is that in the last few years, TfL have made decisions, where they must have done extensive mathematical modelling and they seem to have come up with answers, that are wide of the mark.
Congestion Prediction
I believe that we now have enough data, that by the use of modern computing, advanced vehicle detection techniques and a liberal dollop of artificial intelligence we should be able to accurately predict the traffic flow over the Thames between Dartford and Silvertown, better than we have done in the past.
But will this just mean, that everybody just takes the least-congested route?
Phone Call Cuts Hospital Readmissions
The title of this post is the same as that of an article on page 18 of today’s copy of The Times.
This is the first paragraph.
A single phone call to an older patient who has been discharged from hospital can almost halve the odds of readmission, research suggests.
I have mined health-care data in the past several times and often something simple drops out from a simple analysis.
Some analyses produce the obvious like you gets lots of leg injuries on Saturday afternoons, due to football being played.
I also believe that analysis of health data in an area could pick up more sinister links.
This could be picked up by artificial intelligence scanning the various databases, but until such systems are fully developed, a lot can be picked up by analysts using simple tools. Even Excel can find a lot of problems, if used properly.
Why Can’t I Sort My On-Line Bank Statement?
Often at the end of the month, when my current account has too much money in it, I transfer the excess I won’t need to Zopa.
This morning, I wanted to check, that I had put all of these payments into my Excel spreadsheet, that tracks my Zopa lending and calculates the rate I get.
So I logged into my bank account and looked at the on-line statement. I could of course look at it on a page-by-page basis, but where was the feature to sort all of my bank statement entries to bring direct debits to Zopa together?
No-where that I could see! There isn’t a select either to just bring up the debits to Zopa.
It is just not good enough, in this day and age, where a good proportion of the general population is familiar with handling sets of dat in programs like Excel.
I remember in probably about 1990, I was talking to a senior programmer, at one of the big banks. They had made a proposal to senior management to enable customers to get their bank statements on floppy discs. It was technically feasible and they felt it would have been taken up by customers and professionals, who needed to get the data into their personal computers.
These days, it should be second nature for a bank to offer a simple download of your bank statement in an Excel format.
Why doesn’t my bank offer this facility to everybody?
My Zopa Spreadsheet
I have a spreadsheet written in Excel, that documents all of my Zopa investment.
What I find about Excel is that it is so illogical and nothing is intuitive. When I wrote a PC-based version of Artemis, that was a project management, spreadsheet and a graphics program, it was way in advance of Excel today for ease-of-use. But then it didn’t have all the features.
Am I being arrogant?
No! At my age and state of health I have that luxury.
On a more important theme, is the spreadsheet telling me what I should do with Zopa?
I think so and I’ll be making changes to my lending philosophy in the next few days.
Infuriating Excel
I plot all of my Zopa investments in Excel. This gives me a good hold on how they are performing.
But about a week or so ago, the date axis on the chart disappeared. Strange because on my other computer the chart still works in the same way.
No matter what I do, I can’t seem to get them back. I get no message to say what is wrong either.
I hope I don’t write software like that!
I’ve done a bit of investigation and I’ve found that on the machine where the chart works, the version is Excel 2007 SP1 (12.0.6331.5000) and on the other machine that doesn’t it is Excel 2007 SP2 (12.0.6504.5001). I’ve since found that Windows updated my Office and probably Excel on the 27th of October.
What MX73 is About
Years ago I wrote a lot of Project Management Software. Now at the age of nearly 62, I’m at it again, with a system called MX73, that stores all of the data in Excel workbooks and worksheets.
Here’s are some examples of the bar charts that can be created.
Bar Chart with Float
Note that you have complete control over headings, colours, scales and what data is shown in the bar chart.
Bar Chart with Star
In this chart one of the many symbols abailable is used to show the float. But suppose you used a star tom show that you had been paid for the work you had carried out.
If you’d like to open the Excel Workbook, you can download it from here.
Note that the file is in Excel 2003 format, so that more people can read it. But don’t use this format for a serious amount of graphics in Excel, as the file tends to grow like “Topsy”. Excel 2007 does not have the problem.
The Anonymous Widower 