Tarantino on two wheels?

The dextrous chap fitting a wireless speedometer to my Shiny New Bike soothed my wittering on about bi-directional separated cycleways, “There are cyclepaths everywhere. They’re called roads.”

It’s about a decade since I got back on the bike after a generation of driving and running and walking around the problem of getting from A to B. On my first nervous forays from Darlinghurst to the safety of cycling around Centennial Park, a mind better focused on avoiding the potholes of Oxford Street was swamped by images of violent collisions – grotesquely Grand Guignol – between motored Behemoths and pathetic pushbike, our inner-city streets a Tarantino movie. “There are psychopaths everywhere. They’re called rogues.”

Time tends to tame the fears of nervous Nellies (should they last so long) and nowadays I see the roads of our city as welcoming expanses. A couple of cycling tours of southern India have provided important perspective. The traffic systems of our north-western neighbour are not so strictly defined as ours. Fluid rather than fixed. Better to watch the traffic than the signal lights. Best to acknowledge Death traveling a metre away and mind that gap serenely and with respect, not panic.

So I can comprehend some Surry Hills citizen’s concerns about taking his twelve-year-old twins out on their birthday-present bikes. We do need safe places for uncertain cyclists to find the balance between transports of delight and terror of imminent termination. But if Bourke Street as it is now is not safe enough for your pampered incompetents to pedal, then travel 200 metres to Moore Park or onwards to the Elysian glades of Centennial. Every part of the whole world does not need to be made over into a sheltered workshop for your suspicions of the possibility of misery.

The depthless coffers of City Hall cannot pave our streets with salve for every qualm. There are so many things money could be well spent on before tossing it away in pursuit of Chicken Little’s panicked vote.

by Peter Whitehead