Article — — 1,475 words

Personal

Me taking a selfie before the start of Highbury Fields parkrun

I’ve been running on-and-off for about six years. But it was only a year ago that I took part in my first Parkrun. Since then, I have done five different Parkruns in four different locations. My aim was always to run a sub-25 minute 5k. But it somehow always eluded me — until the fifth one.

Linknote — — 175 words

Current affairs — Technology

Broadband speed map reveals Britain’s new digital divide

It turns out that it is not just rural areas that are suffering due to BT/Openreach’s inability install broadband infrastructure fit for the 2010s, never mind the future.

The UK’s status as a fibre laggard has been the subject of intense debate within the telecoms industry, with only 4 per cent of residential and small business premises connected to full-fibre networks capable of delivering ultrafast speeds, compared with 80 per cent of units in Portugal.

It transpires that some of the slowest postcodes are within our largest cities, including London and Edinburgh.

With rural areas and second cities saying they have been left behind in the race to install ultrafast broadband networks, it is surprising to see that areas of London, including Kensington, Millwall on the Isle of Dogs and Rotherhithe, have clusters of postcodes with average speeds below the minimum required by the government. Central Manchester is a broadband blackspot, as is the Baltic Triangle in the heart of Liverpool, according to the postcode-level data.

Linknote — — 156 words

Human-centred approaches — Travel

The psychological tricks TfL uses to make London’s tube feel faster

A great piece of the little experiments TfL is carrying out in an attempt to improve the efficiency of the London Underground.

But it’s striking that the consensus of most of the experts in this piece seems to be that real improvements wouldn’t be possible without fundamental transformations in the infrastructure.

Short of building new stations and drilling tunnels for larger trains, we’re stuck, says Simeon Koole, lecturer at the University of Bristol. “I would be reluctant to argue there is anything specific about behaviour that makes it difficult to change, and focus more on particular material restrictions of the tube: the confined space limits the possibilities for redesigning tube cars and platforms and therefore for managing passenger flow and conduct.”

But as cities grow, perhaps any little thing we can do will be worth investigating.

See also: The amazing psychology of Japanese train stations