Sunday 20 August 2006

Is 50km/h sensible?

Another week, another freebie local newspaper arrives to clutter up the letterbox. The bit that caught my eye as it made its way from letterbox to recycling bin this week was a proposal by a councillor to lower the speed limit on the major roads through our suburb from 60km/h to 50km/h. That includes the main arterials.

Nice idea, except I wish he could start with getting people to obey the speed limit on the road outside our place. It's not a major road, but it gets a reasonable amount of traffic rat running from Five Dock through to the City West Link. The local bogans think that their purpose in life is to hoon along the several hundred-odd metre stretch outside our place as fast as their cars will take them, and that includes accelarating flat out as they pass our place. The odd idiot also decides to take the corner near our place way too quickly, as the rubber on the road attests.

On my next trip to Bunnings, I am going to spen $10 on a can of road marking spray paint. No, I am not about the join the legions of vandals - I am going to spray two lines one hundred metres apart on the road surface and then time cars that appear to be racing along the street.

A car doing 60km/h is doing 1km a minute, or 100 metres every 6 seconds. A car doing 90km/h will cover 100 metres in 4 seconds. Ok, I'm not going to be that accurate, but it will be interesting to see what kind of approximate speeds cars are reaching as they rip by - and I mean rip by. The fluffy dice brigade must wear shoes with soles made of lead.

Anyway, Councillor Megna will be getting a letter with the results of my impromptu survey.

If I remember to go to Bunnings. Well, I have to go there anyway. The el-cheapo $29 Chinese made whipper-snipper has bitten the dust and relocated to the rubbish bin, so I need to lay my hands on another before Spring arrives with a vengeance and the backyard disappears under several feet of weeds.

If spraying the road and timing cars doesn't produce results, I guess I can do another trip to Bunnings and manufacture my own home made road spikes. I'd just curl them up on the other side of the road with a rope running back to our place. When I hear an approaching doof-doof, it's time to pull on the rope and extend the spikes across the road.

The trick would be to get the spikes into the house before the bogan managed to get out of his car and go looking for the culprit.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From someone who once wrote to the local paper thanking the Subiaco Council for putting in challenges to your racing strip in the form of speed humps and traffic calming squiggles, you have come a long way!