Life Cycle: Like a Bondi tram on a cliff edge

Weaving west through traffic on Edgecliff Road I noted the worn wraiths of white-painted cyclist logos deployed to indicate what passed for cycleways before uber-Lady Lord Mayor Moore took the matter in her over-engineering hand and redefined the genre as unaffordable.

Regular readers – well … Mum and  Dad – may recall your columnist being toppled from his bike by a dark Yaarpie Harpy who left her car straddling one of the said sad logos to harangue the fallen figure of yours truly for having the temerity to be on the road where she wants to drive her European four-wheel compensation for the husband’s more indiscreet affairs.

It occurred to me that the narrow, broken surface of Edgecliff Road is appropriate to its gothic horror name. More than half a century ago trams served this sinuous track sliding through the back of Woollahra and below Bondi Junction away to the beach. A beautiful journey from the city via harbour glimpses through leafy suburbs to the Pacific.

Densely stacked apartment buildings cluster the route, now lined with the clutter of parked motor vehicles. Traffic rarely flows freely and around school start and finish times impatient parents queue to collect kids.

Why, given what sapient beings now know about Global Warming, do we not repent the stupidity of the pre-eco-scientific era 50s and put the tram tracks back? Sydney’s extensive tram system served workers and employers, shoppers and retailers, people and government.

Slater and Gordon lawyer, Steven Lewis, the likely ALP Wentworth candidate to challenge Malcolm Turnbull, has town-planning expertise.

He knows that the grand sweep of our major eastern roads was designed to accommodate the trams that graced them until the rash and reckless decision to replace them with buses and facilitate polluting commuting by car.

A returned Rudd Government might delight in distancing itself from the fiasco of NSW State Government by funding a green transport revolution that is of National Heritage significance.

by Peter Whitehead