Beware of Fairfax newspapers bearing data

I took this photo on Thursday - it's from the Financial Review, and it show CO2 output per capita. Australia is the yellow bar third from the top.

I scratched my head for a few moments and wondered how they produced this result.

Then I looked in the bottom left hand corner of the graph - it says "Source OECD".

Aha - you see, the OECD only has 34 member countries, whereas there are around 215 recognised countries worldwide. By using a limited dataset, they've made Australia's CO2 output look really bad.

If you look at all countries on a per head basis, Australia is 12th.

If you look at all countries on a total output basis, Australia is 16th.

I wonder why Fairfax chose to represent the data in the way they did? Hmmm....

My friend BSOD

Posting has been a bit quiet of late due to our old Microsoft favourite - the Blue Screen of Death. I finally got enough time this morning to pull the computer to bits and put it back together. What fixed it was moving the cable for my primary disk from one SATA port on the motherboard to another - followed by a bit of fiddling with the BIOS. The PC is getting a bit long in the tooth, and the insides are getting a bit dusty, so it's no wonder it's getting dodgy in its old age.

More buggerising around with MySchool numbers

After reading that SMH story yesterday on school results and funding, I thought I'd delve into the numbers to cross-check what the author Bernie Shepherd had to say. I did it the hard way - I went to the MySchool website and extracted the numbers for all secondary schools in the postcodes of 2000 to 2100. I looked at 62 secondary schools in those areas, and then excluded those with no NAPLAN results and the special schools.

I also exluded combined primary and secondary schools, as they don't separate out the per student funding data for them. I created a "NAPLAN index" using the same method as Bernie Shepherd (or so I assume) - I added up the 5 NAPLAN test scores for year 7 in 2010, then divided by 5. ie, something like (631+570+617+667+675)/5 = 632.

The first graph shows the NAPLAN index score for all the schools in this sample plotted against funding per student. Now I know that a lot of teachers and principals in the state school system have a really big problem with how those "funding per student" numbers were calculated - and so do I. But it's all we've got to go on. What this graph tells me is that most secondary schools (state and non-state) are clustered around a certain funding range, with a few expensive outliers - state and non-state. I wasn't aware that there are two state schools in NSW funded to the tune of nearly $25,000 per student - they're selective schools of a certain type. (If you click on any of these graphs, they will embiggen hugely and allow you to see all the data properly).

Here's the same graph with the left axis truncated to a minimum of 400 to give a better view of the data. Notice the little circle of 6 schools in the top left hand corner? They're all state selective schools. Their NAPLAN results are almost off the charts.

The graphs above and below show the state and non-state schools split out. With non-state schools, there appears to be some relationship between funding per head and NAPLAN results - the more funding, the better the results. The r-squared is 0.55.

With non-state schools, there is no relationship between funding and NAPLAN scores. The R-squared is 0.012. Then again, the sample might be too small.

This graph shows the outlying selective schools. They really are a class above the rest.

For this graph, I've removed the selective schools and shown all other schools - state and non-state. I should have removed the two at the bottom, as I have just discovered that those schools cater for kids with drug problems etc. Even then, there's not much relationship in the state system between funding per head and NAPLAN scores.

Here's where you really do get a relationship - when you plot the ICSEA scores against NAPLAN performance. ICSEA is a measure of wealth. The higher the ICSEA score, the higher the NAPLAN scores. The R-squared here is 0.577.

The relationship is slightly weaker with non-state schools, with the R-squared being 0.52.

Here's the two groups of schools plotted together.

And here are both plots with both trend lines - you can see that the slope of both lines is almost exactly the same, and they almost overlap each other.

As far as funding goes, when I removed the two most expensive state schools in this sample, average funding per head was $12,040. When I removed the most expensive non-state school, their average was $13,766 - a different of $1,726. I don't know how Bernie Shepherd calculated that the average income for a state school was $8,200 and the average for non-state was about $19,000. The state school with the lowest funding in this sample received $9,773 last year.

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One might ask how Bernie got his hands on the data for 8200 schools from the MySchools website. Was he given the entire dataset by the government, or has he screen scraped a sample like I have?

One might also wonder how Bernie got an article published in the SMH - so I did a bit of Googling.

Bernie will be speaking at a conference later this month for the Australian College of Educators.

The Hon Catherine Branson QC, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission and Human Rights Commissioner, will speak on "Strengthening human rights in the Australian National Curriculum"

Ok, a complete leftie.

Maxine McKew will host the MySchool and Equity brown bag lunch at 12pm on Friday 15th July with presentations from Dr Brian Croke, Chris Bonner and Bernie Shepherd.

Maxine McKew - ex-ABC and Labor MP. Chris Bonner writes for the Drum occasionally, and is a contributing author for the leftie think tank, the Centre for Policy Development. "Chris is co-author with Jane Caro of The Stupid Country – How Australia is dismantling public education" - I guess that gives you an idea of where he is coming from.

David McRae will host a panel presentation with Dr Amanda Tattersall, James Whelan and Eric Sidoti on "Making Change Happen"

Dr Amanda Tattersall is union connected another leftie.


I'm not sure if this is her or not:


Amanda Tattersall is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her dissertation looks at community unionism—which occurs when trade unions campaign with community organisations and social movements on issues beyond wages and condition—and involves a comparative study of industrial relations and social movement practice in Australia, Canada and the United States.


Amanda Tattersall is also a special projects officer with the Labor Council of New South Wales.

Or if this is her either:


Amanda Tattersall is an elected official at Unions NSW (central Labor council in Sydney) with a background in union and community organising.


She was the president of the National Union of Students (NSW) in 1999 and co-founder of Labor for Refugees in 2001 (a partner in a wider movement for immigration and refugee rights).


She is the chair and co-founder of GetUp.org.au (a sister organisation to MoveOn.org, with 370,000 members) and now the founder and director of the Sydney Alliance, a broad-based coalition of 28 religious organisations, unions and community organisations.

James Whelan - also from the left-leaning Centre for Policy Development and a Director at the Change Agency.

James Whelan lives in Newcastle in the Worimi nation. His commitment to community action for social and environmental justice has drawn him to work in the community sector and in research and higher education. As a community educator and activist, James has worked with non government and grassroots community and environment groups. 

Eric Sidoti is a Director of the Whitlam Institute. I doubt he leans to the left at all...


Director has been actively engaged in public policy development, strategic planning and communications throughout his career. For over a decade, prior to his appointment at the Whitlam Institute, Eric has managed Strategic options, his own small consultancy. This enabled him to develop long-term relationships with a small number of clients, principally the Dusseldorp Skills Forum and the Australian Red Cross in addition to the Enterprise and Careers Education Foundation, Greening Australia and Job Futures. He has been engaged in projects across a broad range of policy fields (education, training and employment; human rights; development; Indigenous land rights and education; humanitarian law and conflict; and welfare issues).
Eric was the Executive Director of the Human Rights Council of Australia (HRCA) 1992 - 1995, Communications Director of Amnesty International Australia 1987 – 1992 and National Secretary of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace 1985-1987.


"Mary Ann O'Loughlin and Jenny Donovan will lead a panel discussion -  Case Study on Smarter Schools National Partnerships - Cooperative federalism for equity in action? What are the learnings for schools, for governments?"


Mary Ann O'Loughlin - Ms Mary Ann O’Loughlin is Executive Councillor and Head of the Secretariat of the COAG Reform Council. She is also currently a member of the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission established by the Prime Minister and Minister for Health and Ageing.


Between 2000 and 2008, Ms O’Loughlin was a Director of the Allen Consulting Group, a leading economics and public policy consulting firm. Before joining Allen Consulting, she was Senior Adviser (Social Policy) to the then Prime Minister, the Hon Paul Keating MP


So she worked for Keating and was a Rudd appointment. 


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So now we know the company that Bernie keeps. Interesting.

All degreasers are not created equal

One bike chore that I loathe is degreasing the running gear. It needs to be done on a regular basis, and I'm happy to admit that I do it on a very irregular basis. I tend to do it when I can no longer see most of the chain due to a thick layer of road grime and dirt. That's not good for the chain, or the gears, or any of the other bits and bobs that help the bike to move forward at any sort of pace. (Egads, there I am saying "moving forward". I've been brainwashed). My rule of thumb is that when I can hear noise from the running gear as I am riding, then it's time for a degrease and wash.

And then I sit on that information for a week or two and ponder the best time to do a degrease. After a few weeks of pondering, I might do a bit of self-analysis whilst I meditate on the problem, and then I might have my left brain consult with the right and produce a report.

Only then do I go into the shed and look around for the degreasing tub, the degreasing brush, the gloves and the bottle of degreaser. If I can't find all of them within 5 seconds, I return to my position on the couch for a bit more meditation on the horribleness of the whole degreasing process.

I don't know why I'm so squeamish about it - I've rebuilt half a dozen engines, and almost every single part of all those engines had to be thoroughly degreased and cleaned. Or worse, decarbonised. I've spent entire weekends with my gloved hands in a tub of degreaser, scraping and scrubbing bits of piston, crankshaft, carburettor and so on.

Anyway, for the bike, I normally buy a litre of citrus degreaser from a bike shop. For what you get, it has always seemed to be horribly expensive. So when my last bottle was on its last legs, I bought a cheap bottle of generic squirt on degreaser. It was about 1/10th the cost.

And I'm never doing that again. I squirted the cheap, gooey degreaser onto the chain, left it there for a while (whilst I meditated on the couch on how easy this cheap degreaser was to use) and then returned to hose it off.

Big mistake.

As soon as water touched the degreaser, it turned into a mass of white goo - like that flour and water paste that we used to make as kids for doing papier mache. It was horrible, and it wouldn't come off. The only way to get rid of it was to pull out the last of the regular, expensive, bike-specific degreaser and scrub away - and then hose everything off. I'm now worried that some of that white crap is stuck in the links of the chain, doing horrible things to the metal as I ride from A to B.

I guess there's a reason why bike shops try and sell you bike specific degreasing products, even if they are expensive. I won't be buying the cheap muck again in a hurry.

How to compare apples with oranges

The Silly is at it again - this time fluffing the results of state schools.

THEY receive more than twice the funding of their public school counterparts but students from independent schools perform no better on literacy and numeracy tests, a new analysis reveals.

A retired high school principal and education consultant, Bernie Shepherd, examined data from the federal government's MySchool website for the NSW Secondary Principals' Council.

He looked at NAPLAN results, financing and students' social background for more than 8200 primary and secondary schools, scrutinising the relationship between funding and results.

I'm glad he got his hands on all the stats, because I sure as hell  haven't been able to get the whole lot in one go.

Here comes the apples and oranges:

Independent schools at the top end of the advantage scale were found to have an average annual income of more than $19,000 per student, compared with an income of about $8200 for each student at a government school.

There are a lot of Independent schools in Australia. There are over 900 in NSW. Only the top 43 charge anything like $19,000 per student (in fact PLC charges $21,492). Notice how he's compared the top independent schools (the top 5%) with the average of all state schools. It would be fairer to compare the most lavishly funded state schools with that top 5%, or all independent schools with all state schools.

Because I've had to extract my numbers laboriously by hand from the MySchool website, my sample is 1/100th the size of Bernie Shepherd's. My sample only has 7 independent schools, but their average fees amount to $12,400. The average of 24 Catholic schools is $9,079. The average of 52 state schools is $9,273.

But when their NAPLAN scores were averaged and converted into a scaled index, government schools on 567 edged out independent schools on 566.

Ha ha - he's done exactly what I did back in March. There are 5 NAPLAN scores - I simply added them together to give a total. His "averaged and scaled index" is simply my total divided by 5.

As I said before, I don't have access to the full range of data, but in my sample of primary schools only, the Micks had an index score of 448 and the state schools 420 - and these are schools from the same geographic areas. I didn't have enough independent schools to give a meaningful result.

The independent schools attracted about $3300 in state and federal government funding, with the bulk of their remaining income provided by fees paid by parents. Ninety per cent of the public schools' funding came from government.

90% of the public schools' funding came from government? Is he looking at the same data as me? A state school that raises more than 5% of its funds from fees, charges and parent contributions is doing pretty well.

The most advantaged Catholic schools received an average annual income of about $13,000 a student - more than $6000 of it from government - and recorded a NAPLAN index of 565.

Again, he's looking at the "most advantaged" and not the average. As I mentioned earlier, the average is down around $9,000 - and it's actually lower than what state schools get on average. It's amazing what results you can get when you cherry pick the data.

The schools in the sample had an Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) range of about 1200.

1200! My sample includes the leafy (and expensive) lower north shore. I have only two schools in my sample with an ICSEA over 1200. In order to get an ICSEA of 1200, you're talking about a very small number of very expensive suburbs. Mosman has an ICSEA of 1206. Cranbrook, one of Australia's most expensive schools is located in Bellevue Hill - it has an ICSEA of 1200. The Scots College is also there - it has an ICSEA of 1188.

''In terms of the cost benefit, if we were looking strictly at educational outcomes as measured by NAPLAN, you would have to think government schools were better value for money,'' he said.

Well, on that note, I'll leave you with this graph showing how much it costs to achieve each point of a NAPLAN score. Schools on the left provide a cost effective education. Schools on the right provide an expensive (and often ineffective) education.

I'll use this matrix again - if Bernie Shepherd is right, then you'd expect to find expensive Independent and Catholic schools over in the right hand quadrants. But funnily enough, you don't. The worst performing schools from both a cost and results perspective (the bottom right hand quadrant) and all state schools.

Frankly, I'd love to get my hands on the full data set for MySchool to see if the results hold true when all the numbers are crunched. I think Bernie's analysis is interesting, but he's engaged in cherry picking and comparing like with not-like.

Sunday photos

I went in a direction I rarely go on Sunday, heading over the Gladesville Bridge just after dawn. I'm not a big fan of going that way - the bike paths are narrow or non-existent, and the traffic can be nasty. I managed to get two quick photos before the camera battery packed it in. Ah well.

The concrete path in the photo above is new - it's over twice as wide as the old one and is nice and smooth. That's marvellous - the old path ran right along the edge of the water - along the top of a sea wall - and I was always paranoid that I'd misjudge things and go into the water whilst passing a dog. Funnily enough, the other end of it mysteriously ends in the middle of a park. One moment you're on concrete, the next you are riding on grass in the middle of a 5 acre paddock.

Gladesville Bridge in the morning mist

If you like cold, misty mornings, then yesterday was a cracker.

Is "faulters" a word? Or is the SMH inventing new words?

SMH front page 3 July 2011

Look at the video new story on Cadel Evans - "Cadel in perfect position in Tour de France as Contador faulters".

I always thought the word was "falters". And looking up "faulters" in an online dictionary returns no hits.

Fairfax. Gotta love 'em.

Saturday photos

The Bay - a usual

Another glorious day - which meant it was time for another meander around the neighbourhood. I didn't take any photos whilst going around The Bay as it was totally packed with pedestrians - with a fair number of them spilling over onto the bike path. That meant riding with one hand off the brakes (and on the camera) was a bad, bad idea.

Some old bloke on a bike

Listing slightly

This is not a photo of my last moments before a crash - this is just me goofing and taking a photo at the wrong moment.

Honky nut highway

The honky nut trees are shedding the last of their nut load at the moment, which means one more hazard to be on the lookout for. It's possibly more hazardous at the moment because there's not enough of them on the ground to be obvious from a distance (which would allow you to take evasive action) but there's enough on the ground for you to hit one and have the tyre go out from under you.

A blurry honky nut

Typical bloody camera - you try to take a photo of a honky nut, and it focuses on the fence behind it.

Honky nut Death Star

You don't want to stand on one of these suckers in bare feet. Or bear feat.

Puffy pirate pants on a bike

I spent a minute or two on the wheel of a trio of cyclists - the last bloke wasn't wearing tight lycra knicks. He was wearing puffy pirate pants. At least that's what they looked like to me from behind. I've finally found something that looks more ridiculous than skin hugging lycra on old guys.

Thursday photos

A dark and blurry Bay

Yeah, yeah I know - it's Friday and I'm putting up photos a day late. It's not like I get paid for doing this, so stick your complaints up your jacksey. I've been leaving for work before the farting of the sparrows, and most of the photos that I've taken have ended up like these ones - mainly blobs of grey with the occasional blob of colour. There's no point in using the flash on a scenic shot, and for it to work on other cyclists, I have to get up close enough to smell their unwashed knicks. No thanks.

A blurry cyclist in the dawn light

I've encountered my fair share of annoying ninja cyclists - idiots riding in the dark without lights or reflectors and dressed from head to foot in sooty black. Just the thing for avoiding being run over by a car first thing in the morning - not. Also, just the thing for avoiding head on collisions with bleary eyed cyclists hammering around The Bay - not.

Taking the dog for a run

Sensible drain grate. A great grate.

One small thing that I noticed this week about Clover's bike lanes is that most of them have been fitted with bike-saving drain grates like the one above. The only reason I noticed this is because I was in another bike lane during the week and narrowly avoided going head over handlebars when I swerved around a front tyre grabbing grate at the last second. It's the little things, like thinking about grates, that makes or breaks a bit of infrastructure.

I was so taken with this bloke's bike that I couldn't stop taking photos of it. It's so different to mine - mud guards, fat saddle, lots of reflectors, panniers, step through frame and a kick stand. Each to their own.

What the hell is this all about?

It's advertising a very strange web site.

How idiots lose hub caps

This bit of footage was shot where I cross Parramatta Road. Check out how badly some of these drivers take the corner in front of me.

They're coming out of a two lane road - one lane goes left, the other right. They're turning into a three lane road, and the lanes are reasonably wide. There is no traffic coming from the right, so they can turn as wide as they like.

Two idiots in this clip nearly ran over my foot as they mounted the kerb when taking the corner. I couldn't believe the horrendously low standard of driving on display. The last car was the worst - a small red hatchback with a young woman at the wheel. She was trying to steer with one hand as she texted with the other. Her back wheel went up and over the kerb with a nasty scratching sound, and didn't miss my foot by much. I hope she stuffed the bead on that tyre and had a flat not long after.

Where'd that pesky bike lane go?

One of my pet hates is disappearing bike lanes. If we're going to have them, let's do it properly. The current half-arsed approach annoys the hell out of me.

The above video was shot on one of the main roads in this area - on Sunday morning, traffic is very light. At any other time, it's covered in cars and is an absolute madhouse - hence the bike lane for most of its length. Even then, I totally avoid riding on it during peak hour - it's just too risky. Too many people driving too fast for the conditions, having left their patience at home that day.

The speed limit is 50 - I'm doing a bit over 30. You go into the corner, pop out the other side and - whoa! where's the bike lane dude? It just ceases for no good reason. The road is wide enough to have a bike lane - in fact it used to be two lanes wide for cars, but one lane was removed not long ago. It would be a piece of cake to continue with the lane marking, but it just stops. Maybe council ran out of money?

Even with a marked lane there, note how the car that passes me cuts the corner - I reckon they were doing well over 60. That's pretty normal on this corner, and I've occasionally seen the cops parked just around the bend, busting speeders. I've had some close calls here where cars have approached the corner way too fast and have tried to cut it in order to get around it, not realising that there's a bike over to the side that they have to get around. It's not pleasant having a car try to shave the hairs off your legs at 60km/h.

Trick cyclist

I was zipping along a path when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a unicyclist on a parallel path - I only saw him for an instant, as a fence got in the way, but as I don't see many unicyclists around, I thought I'd chase him and have a quick look.

That almost ended in disaster - unicycles don't travel that quickly, and I came up behind him pretty quickly. He lost control and came off, and I almost turned him into a bike rack. By that, I mean he was bending over as he fell of, and I nearly rammed my front wheel between his bum cheeks.

Sunday photos - part II

The three women in this photo are a good example of what weekend cyclists tend to look like - normal clothes, comfy bikes, wandering along at a happy pace - not crawling, but not racing either. They're just meandering along a path that ducks and weaves along the river's edge. They're not out of bed before the farting of the sparrows (I almost wrote that as the "sparting of the farrows") and they're not riding 120 miles at peak pace. They're - shock, horror - quietly enjoying themselves on a lovely day!

Deutschland, Deutschland über alles

This bloke was wearing a "Germany" jersey. I must learn how to sing this song one day.

Not quite the Titanic

There's usually a few small rowboats pulled up on the beach - necessary unless you want to swim out to your yacht moored 100 metres out in the bay. You don't see a sunken one that often.

Drinking and driving?

Jeez, I'm really happy with the cropped version of that photo.

Back when Grocerywatch was a headline issue, I started taking photos of sunken shopping trolleys in order to highlight what I thought was the stupidity of running such a website. The rusted, weed infested trolleys were a metaphor for a policy that wasn't going to be of much benefit to anybody. I haven't seen a sunken trolley for a while - but I found one today, so here it is.

Cropping doesn't improve this one much

Sunday photos

RiverCat ferry near Meadowbank

Lovely day again today - another great day for a ride out west. It's been cool enough to require two layers (three if you're riding at dawn), and that makes for a pretty brisk ride. I've clocked up about 100kms this weekend, and here's a selection of photos.

Bayview St, Tennyson Point

Every now and then, I cross one of the bridges going north over the river and ride through suburbs like Ryde and Gladesville. Just for something different. There's a really nice, wide bike path around the water heading east from the Rhodes bridge, but it doesn't go the whole way to Gladesville. I'm used to it stopping at a certain point. When I rode it today, I found that a new section of concrete had been laid, so I followed it on a whim.

It was a nice little bit of fast, winding path, but it finished at the bottom of Bayview Street, and what a bastard of a place that was to stop. You can't tell by this photo, but this short section of street is almost too steep to walk up! It's about as close to vertical as you can make a street - and riding up it required every bit of power my legs could give just to keep moving forward. I have not experienced that in years - I've done a lot of long hills, and a lot of steep hills, but this one took the cake.

Council is going to have fun extending it any further, as from looking at Google maps, the next section of waterfront includes quite a few houses that extend right to the waterline.

Missing link

That bit of bike path wasn't the only missing link on my jaunt - this section was blocked off for "construction" reasons, and as my geographic knowledge of this area is complete rubbish, this was the time to turn around.

Passing shadows?

I was one of about 10,000 cyclists out this morning (or so it seemed) - the buggers were everywhere. Old ones, young ones, kids being pulled around in contraptions by their parents, tandems - you name it. It was that kind of day where, after weeks of miserably awful wet cold weather, lots of people obviously woke up and thought, "time to stretch the legs a bit this morning".

Old railway bridge, Rhodes

I really like this old bridge - about 25 years ago, the old steel railway bridge over the Parramatta River was replaced with a concrete monstrosity right alongside. Instead of tearing down the old one, sheets of perforated something or other were bolted down onto the old rail bed and it became a bike bridge. It rattles beautifully from end to end when you ride over it.

Got the wobbles

Nice weather and lots of cyclists means a certain proportion of complete and utter incompetents. I was stuck behind the woman above for some time as she couldn't maintain a straight line - and by that, I mean she was swerving three feet or so to each side - there was no way to pass without risking a visit to the grassy verge. Some adult bikes need to be equipped with trainer wheels.

This bloke was riding a very nice bit of kit, and he was also decked out in some very nice rider-wear (ie, expensive). He was also quite a rarity - I left home about 0900, which means all the fast-lycra crowd were finishing up and heading  home. Most of the people I saw out today were dressed casually and weren't riding fancy road bikes - they were on all sorts of laid back contraptions, and there was hardly an item of lycra to be seen.

Ammunition crane, The Armory

I love these old cranes - they're very much 1930's industrial architecture.

Hill Road, Wentworth Point

Cav ran a story last week about a cyclist getting clobbered in Gongolia (not sure if he was in Inner Gongolia or Outer Gongolia). As there was a bike path running alongside the road where he was hit, most reasonable people would ask, "What the hell was he doing on the road?" I'll try to answer that today.

Hill Road is strangely named, as it is dead flat. Probably named after a Mr Hill I guess. It runs along the edge of Olympic Park down to a ferry terminal at the end. Last time I rode out this way, the bike lane me and this other bloke were riding in didn't exist. This was car parking. There is a bike lane about 20 feet to our left behind all that shrubbery.

Why were we on the road?

Well, partly out of curiosity, but mainly because the bike path means contending with lots of pedestrians, slow cyclists, blind corners and roads that cross it; whilst the road is just open, straight and utterly without impediments. Whilst you can generally get up to about 30km/h on the bike path, that's on days when you are the only person on it. The rest of the time, 25 is about as fast as you can go without getting into risky territory. Out on the road, you can go as fast as your legs will push you, which for me today, was about 35.

Just remember that the bike lane alongside Hill Road is a good one - nice surface, wide, mostly straight and minimal blind spots. Most paths that I ride on are narrower, bendier, rougher and are littered with collision hazards (dogs, prams, idiots with iPods etc), which makes them frustratingly slow. They're fine if you're Cav's age and just want to amble to and fro - they're a total bloody annoyance when you want to go as hard and fast as you can for as long as you can.

It's like driving on a 3 lane freeway versus driving on a narrow, winding country road. I like taking the scenic route from time to time, and I don't mine getting held up for half an hour by Farmer Brown and his 600 cows and a dog - but if you're trying to get from A to B in the shortest possible time, that sort of thing drives you mad (which is why 99.999% of drivers take the freeway and put their foot down).

Armory Wharf Cafe

 Nice place to stop for a coffee and feed - trouble was, it was packed this morning with bloody cyclists.

Armory Wharf Cafe bike park

Given the number of bikes parked on all four sides of the cafe, I think it's pretty clear how a lot of their customers get there.

Armory Wharf bike hire

If you get your arse to Amory Wharf and want to have a look around, you can even hire a bike. Or you can sit on your arse in the cafe and watch the ferries go past.