No train, much pain

Bondi can be a swine of a place to get in and out of when it's busy. I've hardly swum there this year, but that has more to do with little kids sitting on my head at 6am rather than parking problems at the beach. When I was a regular swimmer, I aimed to hit the beach at sunrise, or shortly thereafter. That's about the only time of day (weekday or weekend) when one could guarantee a free parking spot a street or two back from the sand. I like to be able to park close enough so that I can walk to the beach barefoot - although my feet are so soft now, that is a non-starter.

The RTA has decided to destroy or antagonise all the businesses along Bondi Road by putting in clearway zones on the weekends. As someone that used to live at the top of Bondi Road, and walked down that road many, many times to the beach, I can state that clearways are a futile, stupid and ridiculous idea. They are the last nervous twitches of a braindead behemoth that thinks only about moving cars from A to B, and little about what to do with the cars when they reach B. They also think nothing of the cars that want to stop between A and B to buy a hamburger or a bottle of plonk or some fruit and vegies.

The RTA is utterly obsessed with the idea of traffic speeds - probably because some idiot Minister made that a key indicator of their success. When you consider that every parking spot within a mile of Bondi is taken by 8am, what could possibly be the point of trying to funnel more cars at higher speed into a parking free zone? The RTA might have a point if the council would allow the constuction of a 50 story car park just behind the shopping zone, but until that point, having two lanes between Bondi and the rest of the planet is like having two queues at the bank - both ending at the one teller. Or, more accurately for Bondi, no bank teller at all - just a closed window.

To cap it off, it was the stupid residents of Bondi that objected to the construction of a rail line down to their suburb, fearing that it would bring in "undesirables" (Lebanese muslims and Aboriginals) who would commit crime, lounge around and generally give the place a disreputable air.

Given that the place is usually over run with drunken, sunburned British yobs who tend to bash and pillage their way through the suburb, bringing in angry, disaffected, mysoginistic drug dealers, car thieves and rapists might be an improvement.