Head to Head

This week’s topic: ‘That Council should make Sundays a parking-ticket holiday for cars parked in legal spots.’

Andrew Woodhouse
Let’s cut to the cadence. The car is dead. There, I’m first to say it. It’s a 19th century concept which has eaten Sydney alive, although cars are rated third in Europe, their birthplace, after pedestrian and tram transport. Good.
I don’t want or need these burping, farting, gear-driven, little-wheeled, petroleum engines, really just more mobile street clutter.
I want fast, clean, reliable urban transport.
Our councils are cobwebbed within two deceits: (1) that cars are efficient personal transport for shoppers and, (2) their own pimpish, petty cash claims. Planners confirm free car spots don’t fill shopkeepers’ tills because those who arrive first stay longer. Once a spot is taken it’s unavailable if one car stays all day. And money-grubbing councils won’t give away income from fines to disadvantage itself for others, to be sure.
So why should drivers be freed from responsibilities to share my road, also a legitimate pedestrian space, with me’ Experts deliberately don’t tell us that car spots already legally belong to us, we so-called ‘foot-traffic’ people, a hobbit-type public pejorative.
Really’ Yes, legally, a ‘road’ extends from boundary to boundary, from the shop door, over that nasty, hot grey granite footpath, to the gutter and includes that macular tarmac of black asphalt, the road, and everything in between. See the Roads Act. So car parking spots belong to us all but are publicly purloined by drivers.
This is the biggest urban land grab since Governor Phillip read out George III’s Proclamation on 26 January 1788 claiming beyond-the-horizon lands, relying on the law of terra nullius: belonging to no-one. Any proposed Sunday parking ticket moratorium is thus based on what I term vehicula nullius, a concept also deservedly still-born.
Sydney is stupidly telescoping itself back in time while cities like Melbourne (Australia’s most elegant, civilised city) are having new transport systems based on personal electric infrastructure networks; their aptly named ‘Better Place’ system. They’re increasing what I call their LIFE Index, a Liveability Index Factored Equation, which measures car abuse, transport efficiency, open spaces, heritage, etc. Why don’t we deserve the same’

Peter Whitehead (with photo upside down please ‘ I’ll be talking to Lawrence!)

At last some kindness for the nutters doing all nighter Saturdays up the Cross. Instead of loud arguments with their loved ones over catching cabs and who is sober enough to drive they can leave their cars where they left them and pick them up on the way to work Monday morning. A lifestyle break for the deserving.

And when we talk free legal parking I hope we are including opening all those carparks in the city and letting City Hall take the tab for that.

Once we have free parking in the city everyone is going to be coming for it. Because what would any right-minded citizen of the suburbs want to do on a Sunday but drive into the city and park’ Show the kids from Pymble where daddy, or mummy of course [this IS the third millennium] works. And parks. Enjoy a walk round town marvelling at the variety of vehicles at rest. Avoid being run down by kerb crawlers looking for parking spaces.
Moore Park should be open for parking. All the public parks really. That is why they are called Public Parks. Isn’t it’

What is it with cars’ Why will no psychologist publish the truth about Australians’ passion for their multi-cylindered avatars’

Apart from getting right up the nose of inner-city greenies what merit does this ‘parking ticket holiday’ have’

How about instead of this daft proposition, we have a City of Sydney car-free day every Sunday’ Or maybe just annually, the first day of April’ Does any one have a memory of a Sydney without the plague of parked cars’

There is a solution that our tunnelling State government has almost fallen into. Dig a hole. Dig heaps of holes. Big, beautiful multimillion dollar double-helix spiralling holes if you must, but holes, please. And drive the cars into them and leave those overwrought tin cans there.

And then the surface of the earth may be free once more to bring forth life ‘ as it was in that time when automobiles were not within the imagination even of the possessed.