Tuesday 27 October 2009

It's wet - who cares?

It's been a wet few days here in Sydney. I delayed leaving until around 8.30am yesterday in order to miss the worst of the rain - it tapered off from bucketing down to simply raining by that time. You might be thinking, "Why not catch the bus on such a day?" - and a few people in the office asked me just that when I walked in looking like a bedraggled soaked dishrag.

The answer is simple - plenty of people who caught the bus got wet yesterday as well as the wind turned their umbrellas inside out, or passing cars hit a puddle and soaked them from head to toe. Getting wet on a bike is no big deal - so long as you are wearing the proper kit. Lycra on a day like today is vital in order to prevent chafing and crotch rot - two things that guys can do without.

Here's one of the benefits of automation - the park just in front of me here had received so much rain, it had turned into a swamp. However, on the right, you can see that the sprinklers are running.


The councils around here are not too hot on designing drainage systems that work. Leichhardt, which is stuffed full of Greens, is the worst of the lot by a long way. I reckon they believe that thanks to global warming, it is never going to rain again, so why bother designing drains to take the rain away?

Flooded bike/pedestrian paths like the one above are rife around Leichhardt, and the drainage is so bad, puddles like this hang around for days. Many are so deep, my bottom shoe ends up being partly submerged as I go through them. Ick.

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