Battle against car hoons gets surreal

COMMENT
Big police operations closing streets feeding Kings Cross on weekends, and the local politics around them, have taken on an Alice-in-Wonderland surrealism.

There seems to be a yawning reality gap between what resident activists, Clover Moore and police report; and street-level observation of events.

The official line, rapidly entering the public record as fact, is that police have closed Cowper Wharf Road near the Navy Base for the past few weekends, blocking all but residents and public vehicles between midnight and 4am in a four-week trial. Cars denied entry to Kings Cross were turned around in the driveway of the Navy carpark and went who knows where.

An organised group of residents then flooded Police, Councillors and media with grateful letters and emails running a common message that they had enjoyed their first good night’s sleep in years and thanking the authorities for activating the closures that they had been lobbying for. They claimed the moves had also stopped the littering of streets residents face on weekend mornings.

This version of reality continued at Clover Moore’s Community Forum in Kings Cross on Monday 9 November, after the second weekend of the trials, with Ms Moore delighted with the success of the closures and applauded by the same group of residents with the same message.

The only problem was, no such closures were apparent to The City News on Saturday 7 November, as reported in last week’s edition. While there was a large Police RBT operation near Harry’s Café de Wheels, drivers heading towards the Cross were waved onwards after being breath-tested or having their cars pulled over and examined for defects.

Our photographs show no closures along Cowper Wharf Road just after midnight. We saw none at 1am either, while returning to Kings Cross via the McElhone Stairs. Soon after, we saw Macleay St Potts Point bumper-to-bumper with cars in both directions, as usual. Two cars impatient with the delay indulged in a horn-blasting session, just as residents complained about before the trials began – but there were no police around to stop them. We saw modified vehicles crawling from Potts Point into Kings Cross in a near unbroken line for the next hour, complete with rumbling exhausts, subwoofers etc.

We saw a large truck heading up Macleay Street carrying all the paraphernalia for a road closure – barriers, witches hats and other gear. We asked the driver if he was going to be blocking any roads. “No, mate,” was the response.

It seemed like business as usual, so residents’ claims of their good night’s sleep ring a little hollow – was there a touch of propaganda in their message, telling Clover Moore exactly what she wanted to hear?

Kings Cross Police provided a partial answer to the conundrum, explaining that an earlier arrest had delayed the road closure, which they said had been erected at about 12.30 am.

A spokesperson said approximately 60 cars were turned around and there were no reported noise complaints on Macleay St. The heavy traffic observed in upper Macleay St had been banked back only to Greenknowe Avenue (which connects Elizabeth Bay and Macleay St), and had been “95 per cent taxis”. As our photos show, this was not the case at 2am.

While 60 cars does not seem enough to make any appreciable difference to vehicle counts in that area on a busy night, the heavy traffic reportedly coming from Greenknowe Avenue makes it possible that the promenading motorheads have simply switched their route from Woolloomooloo to Elizabeth Bay as they head to Kings Cross, a feasible explanation in these days of mobile phones and GPS navigators which enable networks of friends to change their routes instantly and flexibly.

This is the problem with such road closures. All they can do is quarantine one set of residents from the fallout at the expense of other residents, just as the closures at Hickson Road in The Rocks have displaced action to Kings Cross. Such measures are not going to stop Sydney’s widespread suburban car-culture or reverse the city’s role as a destination for work and entertainment – the very definition of a city.

Locking up crucial police resources to block not only Hickson road but Cowper Wharf Road every weekend, as the Macleay St residents group wants, would be ineffective and inequitable, protecting a few enclaves of wealthy people while others cop the overflow.

If the problem is noise, a few police patrolling the busy streets on foot could simply book cars that make excessive noise, enabling Sydneysiders to retain access to their public roads while the visible police presence would also deter other anti-social behaviour.

Police deployed three unmarked patrol cars to monitor traffic in Woolloomooloo during the closures, which reported no increased traffic. On Saturday night [7 November] there were 21 Mobile RBTs, 24 Traffic Infringements
and six Defect Notices issued.

by Michael Gormly