June 2016

Better or worse

Posted on 2016-06-26 09:58 by rv

A few days ago, as the London Overground was delayed yet again, I looked up at one of those '9x% of our trains ran on time in the last 3 months' posters, and thought to myself: "there's no way the overground has improved during the time that I've been in the UK. Or anything else in this country for that matter". But it's easy to complain about things being crap without actually checking them. So I did some research to find out if the things in this country that relate directly to my life have gotten better or worse during the last five years. It'll also be a good summary post to compare with five years from now, when the effects of the brexit will have come into full force.

Public transport

To get to work I take the London Overground from Watford Junction to Euston. TFL has nice little yearly reports on the performance of the Overground [1], which they define as (iirc) 'percentage of trains that ran within 5 minutes of their scheduled time'. According to their yearly reports, the Overground as a whole, which includes a lot more lines than the one I take, had a performance of 94.8% in 2011, and 95.2% in 2015. The only data I could find pertaining specifically to my line date back to 2013, when the Watford-Euston line's performance was 96.64%. Last month it was 96.96%.

Things are not getting worse, apparently. The cost of taking public transport is increasing, but that's roughly in line with inflation. What (seriously) worries me is that TFL is constantly claiming that they're pouring all their profits right back into improving the network, yet they can barely manage even a 1% improvement over 5 years, and there's still signal failures and train issues almost every day. Worrisome.

Lastly, TFL reporting absolutely sucks. It's happened to me many times that a train was delayed 5 or more minutes, yet the online status report showed that there were no delays. I'm not sure if this is only happening for the Overground, but the tube lines do seem to get faster updates when something goes wrong there. It's easy to tell because the Bakerloo line shares its tracks with the Watford-Euston overground, and the status on the website updates much quicker for the Bakerloo than for the Overground when something goes wrong. I don't think this has improved much over the years, but don't have enough data to prove it.

Tech salaries

Another area that obviously interests me is what kind of salary I can earn working in IT in London. I found it quite hard to get data on this as well. There's plenty of numbers floating around, but difficult to compare them because there's so many different job titles and qualifications out there. Speaking from anecdotal evidence, the numbers I found for average/higher-end Java developers in 2016 are higher than the Java job that I held for a while in 2010, but not significantly higher.

Lacking any other solid basis for comparison, the closest I could find to useful numbers was the average and median salary of someone working at Google. In 2011 the median salary of a Googler was £86.800, and in 2016 the average Googler salary is £160.000. I can't really use that to decide whether things got better or worse, since median is very different from average, but it's still interesting data points nonetheless.

House prices

It's amazing how quickly your opinion on house/apartment prices sways once you've bought something yourself. In the year that we were looking for a house or apartment the prices increased insanely quickly. When we started looking we were (barely) able to afford a small house in zone 7, but by the time we found an apartment all houses and bungalows were out of our price range.

Rightmove has some good data to confirm this [2]. In 2011 the average price of a house sold in my area was between £260k and £320k. In 2016 it's between £390k and £430k. If I was still looking I'd feel pretty crap about this, but I guess we managed to move onto the quickly departing train just before it got away. Let's see how the brexit affects this, though..

I compared central London prices as well, just for shits and giggles, even though I'll never be able to afford anything there [3]. In 2011 house prices were around £850k near where I work. In 2016 they're around £1M. That shit cray.

Crime rates

Ever since we signed for the neighborhood watch mailing list we're getting the occasional email about break-ins, theft, vandalism and so on. Since we've only lived here for less than a year we don't know how things were like 5 years ago in this area, but there's plenty of data available to compare. Additionally, we chose our area not in the least based on the low (relative) crime rate, which I'll get into later.

In 2011 my area had on average around 200 crimes reported per month [4]. in 2016 that's 130. That's a pretty decent improvement. I compared my work area in Central London as well, which went down from 230 reports per month to 180 reports. Note that areas are not the same size and not the same number of inhabitants, so you can't cross-compare. I had always assumed that Ealing, the area I previously lived in, would have much higher crime rates, because it always seemed a lot more dodgier to me than where I live now. But I looked it up and it went down from ~150 reports in 2011 to ~130 reports in 2016. It improved less than my current area, but that's about all I can say about that.

Road incidents and accidents

Getting out of Greater London by car is a huge pain, even when you're in zone 7. I see a lot of bad drivers on the road, and it pisses me off every time. Apparently, and I still can't quite believe this, the UK is safer than the Netherlands when it comes to traffic related deaths [5]. The statistics prove me wrong, but based on what I've seen people in the Netherlands drive way, way safer than anyone in Greater London. But them's the stats, so there you go. I'd rant here about the terrible quality of the road infrastructure in the UK which I think hasn't improved either, but I've no hard numbers on them, so I'll leave it at that.

In my local area there were around 110 serious or fatal incidents reported in 2011 [6]. This number went up to ~120 in 2015. A mild increase, but hardly statistically significant. If you take a larger area of north-west Greater London, there were ~1400 incidents in 2011, which went down to about 1200 in 2015. I'm not sure if that increase is on par with the increase in car ownership [7].

Deprivation

One of the best sources of information when selecting a place to live is the deprivation index, which combines a bunch of useful indexes like income, crime rate, employment etc., and gives each area a relative ranking compared to all the other areas in England. The area I live in ranked better (lower depravity) than ~91% of all other areas in 2010 [8], but that went significantly down to ~83% in 2015 [9].

Even when checking the absolute numbers, both overall and for each important subdomain (income, crime, health, employment), my area got worse in every metric over the past five years. I really did not expect that. Given that the relative ranking dropped even further, apparently my area got worse at a a faster rate than the rest of the country. People in my area are now poorer, unhealthier, less employed and more criminal than five years ago.

This appears to contradict my crime rates findings, which suggests that the number of crimes reported decreased over the years. The only way I can explain this result is that the area of the deprivation index is quite small compared to the crime reporting area. It's quite possible that my immediate local area has gotten slightly worse, and my greater local area has still improved. In fact, looking at my county's score, it did improve slightly over the past five years. But not significantly.

Conclusion

I was quite wrong about the public transport I use getting worse over the years, but it didn't get much better either, which is definitely not a good sign. The deprivation index roughly confirmed what I suspected, although I didn't think my (tiny, immediate, local) area was that much better five years ago. The thing that surprised me the most was how much the crime rate dropped over the past five years. There's very clear progress there, and I'm very happy with that.

For future research it would be interesting to compare this with neighborhoods in other countries. I wonder if other countries I've lived in have experienced similar trends in crime, transport and deprivation. My suspicion is that the UK is a bit slow to change, but that's something to find out.

Sources

[1]: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/ [2]: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices-in-my-area.html [3]: http://landregistry.data.gov.uk/app/ukhpi/explore [4]: https://www.police.uk/ [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate [6]: http://www.crashmap.co.uk/Search [7]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35312562 [8]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-indices-of-deprivation-2010 [9]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-indices-of-deprivation-2015

Cool depravity map bonus: http://dclgapps.communities.gov.uk/imd/idmap.html

Posted in UK | Tagged , ,

The Brexit

Posted on 2016-06-21 23:18 by rv

I swore to myself I wouldn't let this crap get into my head, but I am bombarded my brexit-ness in my daily life so I might as well write a bit about it. Is it a good idea? I have no fucking clue. I'm not allowed to vote, despite being a EU citizen who has lived in the UK for over five years already. I never bothered to do the required research about whether or not the UK leaving the EU is a good idea. My gut instinct says it's a bad idea, but I have not poured across the countless articles and documents describing what the effects of leaving versus staying would be. But I am really annoyed at how politicians and media are turning something that could be a purely rational decision based on empirical data and facts into one of bullshit propaganda and dumbing-down of the issue to appeal to the mass public. It utterly disgusts me how this turned out. A politician got stabbed because of her position on the brexit, other politicians are using it for their own personal gain and the more ignorant among the population are using it as an excuse to spew some generic anti-foreigner hate. Regardless of the final outcome, I already am not happy about how this turned out.

Seriously though, do people really see the world as a whole being a better place if the UK and the EU go their separate ways? Even if the UK gets stronger in the short term, I believe if you look at it in a timespan of 10-20 years, the UK won't be stronger from leaving. I have no hard arguments for this, it's all probabilities based on reading stuff on the internet and talking to people who know more about it than me. It might be the best game-theoretical decision to maximize your own benefits right now, and then later, as soon as you get more benefit from rejoining, get back in. But the whole would suffer from that, and the end result could be better for everyone involved if the UK stays in. In the long term.

Also, why the hell are votes not weighted? There should be a general political knowledge test to see how much a voter understands about politics in general, and then another specific one about whichever problem or party or thing being voted on. People who have more knowledge about the issues should be better able to predict what would be the best course of action, and they should get votes that weigh heavier than those of people who know nothing and just vote whatever their family or friends are voting. I seriously don't get why this is not a thing yet. Would love to hear counterarguments to this.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

Lazy context switcher

Posted on 2016-06-18 17:42 by rv

I often hear programmers complain about being interrupted by people, breaking their concentration. Strangely enough I rarely have that issue. Every time people interrupt me my current context doesn't really get 'switched', rather I just do away with the interruption with the bare minimum of effort while keeping the context in my head. It takes a pretty big interruption to really disrupt my context, but as a consequence I probably seem a bit 'away' when responding to people while I'm trying to hold in the context. In some occasions when I've walked to the kitchen to get a drink, while concentrating on a difficult programming problem, I somehow lose the ability to have regular conversation, and I can only come up with standard replies to things. The same thing has happened to me in the elevator on the way out right after work, especially on days where I had to leave a problem unsolved. Oops. There's pros and cons to not being easily disruptable, I guess.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

A day without a phone

Posted on 2016-06-11 09:27 by rv

The other day I wrote about how my opinion on mobile phones is shifting. I realize I'm not the first hipster to call out mobile phones on being too mainstream, but it's genuinely how my opinion seems to swing these days. During most days since I'm back from cycling I've tried to limit my usage, keeping it in my bag or facing down in silent mode so it can't disturb me. A few days ago I tried to go all radical and actually left my phone at home.

It's probably too short to form any serious opinion on this, but I can definitely say that it didn't feel quite as liberating as I imagined. It was quite easy to adjust to not having it in the morning; I just put on some nice music on my ipod classic and enjoyed a peaceful train ride in to work, and some pleasant mindwanderings that I wouldn't have had if I was reading Hacker News articles or if I was browsing 9gag.

But it was after the working day that I missed my phone the most, on the commute back. I didn't have much mental energy left and would quite have liked to do mindless activities on the phone. Somehow I've gotten so used to the phone that it costs more mental energy to not use it. That's definitely not right. In practical terms I did not 'miss out' on anything. No important messages were had, and they could have been delivered via email instead. My lack of 'connection' throughout the day did not result in a horrible social catastrophe like being too late to wish someone a happy birthday on Facebook. (By the way I don't do that).

Even on the way back, with a tired mind, I enjoyed more mindwanderings than usual, and felt more refreshed than usual when I got home. Not being preoccupied with the phone is likely a large factor in this, but also the fact that I used noise cancelling earphones to listen to music on the way home, something I never do when I'm playing around with my phone. I'm not sure if a combination of phone play and music is too much, but for the moment at least I don't feel the urge to use both.

Not having a phone with me for the day felt good, but I think it did cost me willpower. But then again, what  kind of self-improvement does not cost willpower? Worth a try.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

Roads

Posted on 2016-06-08 19:28 by rv

IMG_0095PS

I still love roads. I still have energy. I still have zest. I am excited.

 

Posted in Photography , UK

Energy

Posted on 2016-06-01 23:08 by rv

The more things stay the same, the more I change. I'm back at work now. I felt quite energetic and fresh today, which I'm guessing is thanks to the weight loss and exercise. I really need to keep that up. Anyway, here's some short thoughts.

For the past year or so I have been coming completely around on my opinion about mobile phones. I hated my first Android phone, then got a Galaxy S4 which I still absolutely love, but now that I've gotten used to the presence of a reliable phone and internet access all the time, all I can think of is that I no longer want that any more. The mobile phone is a device that seemingly has the power to disturb you at any given moment. I don't give that right to nearly anyone or anything, and my mobile phone certainly does not deserve that privilege. It's merely a device of distraction that does not really better my life in any way, other than as a tool for navigation. I'm going to really try to avoid using it from now on. I might even leave it at home on some days.

Today was my first day back at the old workplace. I walked past the ugly building that I walk past every time on my way to work; the building that had come to represent the worst possible life I could imagine. But it has no power over me now. I no longer look it at with dread or disgust or any other kind of strong feeling. It's just a building now. I used to play with the thought that one day I too would have an apartment, a mortgage, a commute, a girlfriend/wife, a car, a 9-to-5 job and all the other things that I at the time thought would change my life from 'super fucking awesome' to 'normal'. That ugly building that I passed every morning represented that idea to me. I was in the process of gaining all those normal things that I thought would make my life meh-er, but the only reason my life ever was meh was because of my own attitude. I've become used to the change in lifestyle and have realized that at the end of it all I am still myself. The idea represented by the building has proven to be false. So now I walk past it without giving it a second thought. Except today, because I felt the need to blog about it. Feels good.

I've blogged before about my love-hate relationship with time. I had another good moment today on the overground, where instead of playing on my phone I decided to listen to some music instead, which always promotes good thoughts. I somehow ended up imagining how a particular situation that happened today could have played out a million times more awkwardly for me, and then I realized that even if that did happen, it wouldn't affect me negatively in any way whatsoever in the future. All that would remain is the strong memory a terrible day, which I'm starting to think is worth more than a weak memory of an average day. Relating this back to time - if you think about things this way, you can use the power of time to your advantage to get out of your comfort zone and do crazy things, knowing that after a while it'll just be a good, or bad, memory. But at least it'll be a strong one.

Perhaps the above paragraph sounds like obvious, maybe even cheesy life advice. I've heard or read something similar many times myself, but my brain needs to connects the dots for itself, it needs to relate the 'generic life lesson' to actual life experiences that I've had, and it's only after those experiences that everything really clicks into place. It's like you're pre-loading your brain with knowledge for later, to be unlocked once you gain experience, which turns the knowledge into wisdom. I wouldn't dare presume to call myself wise in any way, but the words sounds pleasantly descriptive for the concepts I'm describing.

Real life numbs. Keep stepping out of your comfort zone to slap yourself awake. I hope I can keep this post-holiday energy for as long as I can. Thanks everyone for telling me that you're reading this blog! That means a lot to me. I will keep writing for as long as my energy and mindset allows :)

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts