Killing flies with cannons

On a recent Monday morning, about half past nine, a car cannoned off two four-wheel-drives parked either side of Forbes Street and speared across Burton Street into the sandstone wall of the National Art School. The explosive sound of impact turned me from locking up my bike across the street. Concerned bystanders scrambled to help. An elderly woman – the sole occupant of the car apart from the airbags and smoke billowing from the busted engine – staggered clear rather more steadily than expected.

Moments earlier your correspondent had been pedalling along that same street. An hour earlier the vicinity was thick with schoolgirls. This happened in our densely populated inner-east and yet no-one was badly injured or killed.

Some of you are familiar with the teeming throngs of foreign cities, particularly where street vendors profit from passing pedestrian trade. A vehicle so wildly out of control in such places would have racked up a casualty count to rival terrorist bombings.

Maybe it was nothing more than dumb Darlinghurst luck. Or maybe, as some are prone to point out when they are over the bleating of the pampered bourgeoisie who want the public thoroughfares outside their well-appointed townhouses to be – well – private cul-de-sacs, just maybe, it is true that you could fire a cannon down most inner-city streets most hours of the day without hurting more than a few listless flies.

So maybe someone somewhere [are you going Clover again? – ed.] should rethink a Cycle Strategy and Action Plan that ignores the bleeding obvious. We have a wonderful cycling infrastructure spread wide as the streets of Sydney before us.

It would well behove our bureaucrats to turn their sharp intellects to the problems of properly organising and maintaining what we manifestly have rather than scurrying between planning meetings to redesign the layout for the publication of glossy provisional reports on [project code name] WHEEL.

There must be less expensive ways to eliminate parking spaces than building unneeded cycleways.

by Peter Whitehead