The PA vs the petrolhead
Last week it was your columnist’s happy lot to be at a ‘pop-up bar’ in Rushcutters Bay sampling the fine Italian varietals produced in Victoria’s King Valley.
Off his bike with a dodgy hip and tetchy from insufficient riding, your reporter eschewed circumspection when that lukewarm topic of cycleways was broached. A lively-minded young lady [bound by the vicissitudes of fate and a progressive pay scale to assist our state member for Sydney] sang the praises of the Separated Bi-Directional Cycleway in Bourke Street. Like her boss she assumed that opposition to a SB-DC betrayed high-octane petrol-headedness and ambitions to develop Moore Park into a memorial carpark.
Your mild mannered man in the street explained patiently from his great height that the SB-DCs are narrow and inappropriate. They are, indeed, over-engineered exorbitancies being shoe-horned like an ugly sister’s foot into the small but perfectly proportioned bicycle boulevarde that is Bourke Street now.
Like that King Street thing turning cyclists away in droves, this set-in-stone goat-track of stupidity and nanny-state fussiness will fust little-used. The desperate straws of Lord Mayor Moore’s “high quality network of cycle paths and lanes that will make cycling a relaxed, safe, mainstream activity” will not be pressed into effective service in the political lifetime of our independent coalition’s control of City Hall.
The exponential rise of biking numbers will make narrow concrete runnels dangerously unviable – about as useful as a fist up the cloaca of Sydney’s straining traffic “systems”.
Loosening the RTA’s hold on our inner city roadways will permit them to be unblocked of cars. But those greasy, grey, granite constructions – Clover’s chokers – will lie lurking like liver flukes, in perpetuity – murmuring “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”.
Better that the space commandeered for the SB-DC be made parking for electric CoS share cars.
Our hapless politician’s PA did wave in my direction as she left. But I couldn’t count how many fingers were engaged in the gesture.
by Peter Whitehead
