Optimal Price For Swimming In Christchurch For Disabled Swimmers

The Christchurch City Council changed its fee structure for swimming pool admission as of October 1st, 2022. There are some important changes for disabled swimmers who have a Hāpai Access card.

While there is a 25% discount for annual pool membership, there is a 50% discount for casual entry fees. The later includes multi-visit pass. The question now is, how often do you need to swim per week before the annual membership becomes the cheaper option.

Annual Entry Costs based on number per weekly visits.

The graph above shows that you need to swim around 3.25 times on average per week before the annual membership becomes cheaper.

While I applaud the Christchurch City Council for increasing the discount for casual fees from 25% to 50%, I would have appreciated it even more if they had extended this discount to the annual membership. Active swimmers will be forced to give up their annual membership if they swim more than three times a week. Normally, discounts are setup so that the more you use a service, the higher the discount becomes.

No other discount category, such as Community Services Card or Super Gold Card, has this inconsistency.

For abled visitors with no discount or visitors with a 25% discount (Community Services Card or Super Gold Card), already visiting the pool more than twice a week justifies an annual pool membership:

 

It is unclear why the Christchurch City Council wants to make going to the pool for disabled swimmers more of a hassle than for others. Annual memberships is quick an easy. No need to constantly refresh the cards or pay every time at the counter.

It would be great if the CCC would make our live not only more affordable, but also easier.

South Island Short Course Championship 2021

JASI Masters are looking forward to hosting the South Island Short Course Champs on 10/11 September 2021 at Jellie Park. Please come and join us. The meet will be held over three sessions – Friday night, Saturday morning and afternoon.

Para entries are also very welcome for the first time ever. Registration details will be available in early July.

South Island Short Course Championship 2021

How religious is Christchurch?

While driving around Christchurch I noticed a church on almost every corner. The name of the city could have already given me that hint, but it is better to check the facts first before jumping to conclusions. Christchurch was named after the Christ Church College at Oxford University.

There does not seem to be any register for churches in New Zealand and hence I searched the Charities Register for charities that provide religious services. The results contain more than 7000 charities, but many of them are no longer registered and/or have stopped operation. After some cleaning of the data I was left with 5590 records for New Zealand. It is important to note that not every religious charity is a church and not all churches are registered as a charity. One charity could also operate several churches. But for what it is worth, this approach does seem like a good approximation. The various Anglican parishes, for example, are listed individually.

Mapping these religious charities on a map would be slightly misleading since bigger cities will naturally have a higher number of charities. To create a density map of the religious charities in New Zealand I had to take the population distribution into account.

InfoShare from StatsNZ allows you to download the download the Estimated Resident Population for Urban Areas. It contains population estimates for many of New Zealand’s cities. Unfortunately, this list does not contain all the small cities, such as Akaroa.

After cross referencing the charities with the population information I created this density map of religious charities in New Zealand. Christchurch has 517 registered religious charities and a population of 404,600 in 2018 which results in 0.0012 people per charity. This puts Christchurch in the lower half.

You can have a look at the full visualization over at Tableau Public where you can also download the source data.

Click on the image to go to the full interactive graph.


Draft Proposal for a Memorial Exhibit about the Christchurch Mosque Tragedy At the Christchurch Brick Show 2019

Proposal for a LEGO memorial for the Christchurch Mosque Shooting victims.

On Friday March 15th 2019 New Zealand experienced its biggest terrorist attack in Christchurch that took the lives of 50 people. The loss to their families and their community is indescribable. It is our responsibility to pay respect to the victims, their families and their communities. Moreover, we must take action to prevent that such an event will ever happen again.

For this purpose we propose to build a memorial exhibit for the Christchurch Brick Show. The exhibit will consist of two parts.

Continue reading “Draft Proposal for a Memorial Exhibit about the Christchurch Mosque Tragedy At the Christchurch Brick Show 2019”