« Telstra: the spin isn't working | Main | Falling in love with English words »
June 25, 2008
Getting it wrong on roads ... again and again and again
How is it possible that our legislators can get transport policies so badly wrong, time and time again? Is there some stupid school for administrators that they all graduate from? What was Einstein's analysis? "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting to get different results."
Is the government's mania for digging tunnels an unconscious reflection of our brilliant leaders' desire to bury their heads in the sand? Or just yet another attempt to devote a lot of public money to postponing unpleasant realities until somebody else is in office? These days, the art of "good" government seems to be blaming the previous mob for what's gone wrong, and appointing "expert" committees to do the worrying and cop all the shit until the politicians are enjoying their gold passes and other retirement privileges. They seem to be some bizarre form of Time Lords moving their little telephone boxes into a future world, where water never runs out, rivers never die, and the buck never stops.
We know that cars are increasingly costly on the wallet and the environment - and you'll pay $50 more per week for a hybrid, to say nothing, of course, about the utter chaos of Melbourne's public transport system, thanks to Jeff Kennett's brilliant idea, and the Bracks/Brumby Do Nothing School of Public Administration, which seems to be founded exclusively on the concept of maintaining a surplus, no matter what.
What fascinates Bleeding Edge is the way the bicycle seems to be the only alternative our brilliant bureaucrats can come up with. We suspect there's some secret plan to increase the number of firm, lycra-clad buttocks they can survey. No doubt that will be leaked too, in due course.
Having spent years bike commuting in Sydney and Melbourne, we can testify to the fact that push bike commuting is often impractical, and a lot of those firm buttocks are going to end up in casualty wards or the morgue. The unpleasant truth is that bicycles are sitting ducks on our roads, particularly when our brilliant bureaucrats constantly squib on corralling cars with real bike paths to stop irresponsible/inattentive/cowboy drivers killing cyclists.
What fascinates us is the way motor scooters are ignored as a cheaper, clutter-free, safer (yes, much safer than bicycles, despite brainless scooter riders failing to dress for the road) much more realistic traffic solution. You can accelerate away from those reckless, apparently sightless drivers; you can learn defensive techniques that will get you places far more quickly than cars and keep you alive, even without proper training of learner drivers and curbs on the advertising industry's insane campaigns to encourage hoon drivers. Why aren't learner drivers taught that they don't personally own the roads? That they don't have the right to cut off, muscle around, abuse and spit at other road users? Why aren't they taught rigorously to respect the rights of two-wheel riders? Why, instead of drivers being encouraged to move over a bit to maximise use of lanes, do we have a police blitz on motor scooters and motor bikes filtering through lines of stationary traffic? Is it absolutely necessary that everyone has to stay stuck in traffic jams, so car drivers feel that their expensive, polluting, selfish existence isn't being threatened?
We just loved that Boston journalist's experience: "Cars actually let the [scooter] cut in front of them. Pedestrians stopped midstep and waved the scooter by ... a man in a white sedan stopped at a light and chatted about the Vespa he had owned 40 years ago, his face aglow as if he were remembering a lost lover. It seemed like perhaps all of Boston would be a happier, kinder place if more people drove this way." Here in Melbourne, if a scooter cut in front of a car, a lot of drivers would stencil it into the bitumen. With quite vicious relish. And coppers prowl around giving tickets to scooters and motor bikes for things that are perfectly legal and sensible in the UK - even in California, for God's sake - rather than to some driver chatting on a mobile phone or doing her make-up while tootling along at 70kph or so.
So look, Mr Brumby, how about this? Until you manage - unlikely as it may seem - to sort out the public transport mess, dig a few more tunnels, get a few more trains, pay off a few more corporations to put in tenders for this or that, why not try to encourage - genuinely, imaginatively, firmly encourage - anything that doesn't take up a lot of road space, burn a lot of petrol, and cost a lot of money? Including motor scooters.
Posted by cw at June 25, 2008 11:24 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://bleedingedge.com.au/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1513
Comments
Ah, Edge old chap. You haven't been paying attention, have you? If you had you would not be asking why politicians love roads and abhor trains, and make impractical propositions that we all take to bicycles -- which they know we will never do.
Have you looked recently at what politicians do after they retire from using our money to build pointless roads, like the Mitcham to Frankston thing? I'll tell you what they do -- they go to "work" [one puts "work" in quotation marks because two days "consulting" a month hardly qualifies as hard yakka] for the merchant banks that they helped in the wonderful private-public road/electricity/telecommunications/water money making scams.
Politicians these days are merely middle men in the business of transferring our money into the pockets of mind-bogglingly greedy bankers. And when they retire they go to "work" for the bastards they have made rich at our expense.
Public transport, which by definition is for losers, is not a profitable area of investment. But don't worry. The brains in the banks are working out how best to screw us, post-oil.
Posted by: TerryL at June 26, 2008 10:10 AM
Sadly, cycling in Australia has always been viewed as a phenomenally dangerous activity that can only be undertaken on specially constructed bicycle facilities while wearing special bicycle clothing.
Compare this with European cities where huge numbers of people simply ride to work wearing whatever they wear to work, using the ordinary roads along with all the other bikes, scooters, motorbikes, cars and trucks. From being a world leader in cycling up until the 1950s or so, Australia, the UK and the USA have managed to marginalise all transport other than the mighty car.
As for the "Cars actually let the [scooter] cut in front of them"... sorry Charles, despite the number of computers in your average vehicle it isn't the car doing the letting. People let other vehicles in front of them, or, more usually in Australia, the people intimidate and aggressively push in front of any vehicle smaller or more vulnerable than them. From thirty years of riding bicycles, motorbikes and scooters in Australian cities I can assure you its the people and their attitudes that are the problem, not the vehicles and the infrastructure.
Posted by: ajft ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://bleedingedge.com.au/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 28, 2008 12:23 PM