For those of you who don't live in NSW, Frank Sartor is our state Planning Minister. He used to be the Lord Mayor of Sydney before he got airs and jumped into parliament. He has ended up with the Planning portfolio, which means he is the lucky bugger that gets to boot all the blackfellas and druggies and shoplifters out of Redfern. What a fun job. It's no wonder the cops are buying a water cannon. Knowing Frank, he will want to drive it when the first relocation riot erupts. Good luck to him - he might be half useful at wetting down screaming blackfellas with a big hose. He isn't up to doing the simple things right.
Take Sydney at the moment. The stand out thing this week has been the weather. It has rained most days. On some days, it has bucketed down. On others, it has been a steady light drizzle all day long. Whichever way you look at it, it has been wet. Wet stuff has fallen from the sky. In order to stay dry, you can do one of several things. You can carry a brolly. You can wear a wide brimmed hat and a japara or a drizabone. You can wear a normal sort of rain coat.
The one thing you can't do is walk along the pavement underneath the awnings out the front of buildings, as most of Sydney seems to be missing them. OK, some buildings have them, but they rarely join up with the awning of the building next door, so you have to walk through this six inch or two foot gap of bucketing rain between awnings. Or they lack guttering, so the water pisses off the edge and soaks you as you walk by. The best ones are the architect designed features where the awning is not attached to the building - you walk out the front door, and get soaked as you cross the gap between the building and the "ooh-ah" awning feature out the front. I hate architects. They should all be sacrificed when the building foundations are being laid by being cast into the concrete.
I blame Frank for all of this. He was mayor for years, and now he is in charge of planning. He decides on non-important issues like how high a skyscraper should be. Who cares if it is 100m tall or 200m tall? A bird flying into the top floor at speed will still be dead when they hit the bottom even if the building is only 20m tall. Get over it Frank. Concentrate on the Things That Matter, like awnings, which keep me dry. You want to get me out of my car, you fucker? Keep me dry when I am walking around the city at lunchtime trying to get fed. Or when I am trying to get to a meeting on the other end of town.
The best place to see Frank's vision of "planning" in action is the Wynyard bus area when the rain is coming down. They redeveloped the area a few years ago and put in lots of flash bus shelters. Woops, they hadn't considered how people react when it rains.
For starters, the bus that I used to catch was at the far end of the Wynyard bus thingy, so I had to walk about 100m down the street behind lots of bus shelters. In fine weather, that is not a problem - there is room for two people to pass. However, when it rains, and you and the other guy have an umbrella over your head, you will clash. The walk becomes one long umbrella fight as you try and get to the end of the street without you umbrella being snagged by someone else and having it ripped out of your hands. If the "planners" had planned ahead, they might have made the path wide enough for people to actually get past each other. Or, they could have extended the bus shelter awnings out the back so that people could walk behind them without requiring an umbrella to be open over their scone.
The other stupendously bright manouvere was to put in lots of individual bus shelters that are separated by a few feet of open space. Again, human behaviour was not brought into the equation. Lobotomised baboons probably have more insight into how humans behave than Frank's crack team of crack smoking crackers. The queue for a bus starts at the end of the street, extends through the first bus shelter, across the gap, into the second bus shelter, across the gap, into the third bus shelter etc etc. When it rains, you shuffle forward in the queue constantly opening and closing your umbrella as you move from shelter to gap. No one is game to leave the gap vacant as gap thieves will push in and take their place ahead of you in the bus queue. Granted, they should be beaten to death with umbrellas, but that is not the way things are done around here.
That's our Frank - the master of planning. Not that he would know how the city actually works, as I doubt he actually walks anywhere. The sooner our local members lose their car allowances and chauffer driven cars, the sooner our transport and infrastructure problems will be fixed.
No comments:
Post a Comment