Just a quick one...

Once again, my apologies for the lack of posting, I promise I'm doing my best to research some meaty topics for presentation and discussion. Work and home seem to be doing their best to conspire against me at the moment... still, at least things are busy!

In the meantime, I'll just briefly mention a couple of things. The first is AM Gareth Bacon's residents' survey of the Olympics in Greenwich. I shall be very interested to see the results of the survey and find out what people think - though in my (small) experience of conducting surveys it will likely only be those with the strongest opinions who will respond. For my part, as I might have already mentioned a while ago, I support holding the Equestrian events in Greenwich Park - with the caveat that care and detailed planning ensure that disruption throughout the Games is minimised.

On the other hand, I do recongnise a lot of the concerns of those who strongly oppose the park events (and to a seemingly lesser extent the shooting events on Woolwich common). It's just that having balanced the positives against the negatives, it is my considered opinion that the benefits of raising the profile of the borough, bringing new faces into the area and being able to show the world the beauty of our heritage outweigh concerns about legacies, congestion and so on.

For a full rundown of the arguments for and against, I recommend the following:

Seb Coe puts the case for the events in this article.

Nogoe2012 provides detailed opinion on why the events should not be held in the park here.

Secondly, the use of public transport in Greenwich, or rather the surveying of it. The Council are currently running a poll on their website which aims to find out more about peoples' transport habits in the borough. Thing is, the third party polling software they're using doesn't seem to be displaying the results very helpfully. Which is quite amusing given how easy it is to set up free polls on tools like Blogger and Facebook, or even just embedding a freeware tool onto your own website. I wonder how much of our money a year the council pays Vovici? To be charitable I'm sure it's a minor glitch, but does it really make financial sense to outsource such small widgets?