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| Storm damage Wellington 21/06/2013 |
I know all of this, primarily because Wellington's storm dominated the news hour on Radio NZ National this morning. Just about all of the useful information I got about road closures, transport cancellations came from the radio rather than the internet. I trawled the websites of the schools to try to work out if the kids were staying home (they are) but no information there. I got a piecemeal report of closures from the newstalkzb.co.nz site but not all closures were posted there either.
In this day and age I would expect that every town, city, country should have a single central information hub that aggregates updates from all over the region and presents them in a coherent form. I haven't yet found such a resource in New Zealand.
It's the same with road traffic problems. How can I easily find out that SH1 is blocked due to an accident on the Kapiti coast or roadworks on Centennial Highway are causing long tailbacks? It should be easy enough, shouldn't it. I'm not suggesting the piecemeal approach of say of visiting the AA or Transit NZ because I'm enquiring about roads. I want a central hub with roads as one of the many options.
Such a resource would be great as a focus for people to visit but it needs to be up-to-date and reliable. It needs to have feeds from emergency services, from local councils, from government departments, from schools and colleges, from anyone who has a message of interest to share.
I see no reason why something like this couldn't be made viable through the support of commercial sponsors - if it's as effective as I think it could be the sponsors would be queuing up to be associated with such a project.
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