It is not often that I find anyone agreeing with me Natalie!
Making more roads will possibly increase traffic... It's not quite what I
favour. Just that restricting the roads for some motorists will only allow
room for other motorists. Therefore, traffic counts will not be reduced.
Put bluntly, if restrictions are placed on motorists (like toll charges
during peak hours) then the poorer, non-perked workers will tend to give up
their car use (and possibly their job) and their car space will be taken up
by someone like a real estate agent who "needs a car for my work", or by a
city council employee who has been loaned a corporate car so they can attend
important meetings....Socialists will no doubt find this very fair....
Party buses! I have a fondness for clapped-out old buses. They are slightly
narrower than the massive chunks floating noisily up and down Colombo St -
and more particularly - they lack the gruesome front overhang that has
become so fundamental to modern municipal buses. By removing the regulation
requiring wheelchair access (which earlier correspondents who use
wheelchairs have pointed out don't damn well work anyway) and by restricting
access to a minimum girth of, say, 185 cms... then municipal buses would
become more civilised. They would not swoop around corners in such a wide
arc, and they would not cut across corners quite so dramatically as they
enter and exit the bus depot on Lichfield St. Yeah! Bring back the old SB
Bedfords - or even better, the AEC and Leyland Half cabs!
Natalie, the Party bus operators are helping preserve old buses. Their
customers, many of them almost comatose, don't seem to need special access
facilities on the buses! They can clamber up steps and along narrow aisles
to the back seat without any trouble. Some are even quite happy to lie down
on the aisle floor for an hour or so! And getting off is a cinch!
However, some of these dear old buses are also used by school pupils. There
are a few reasons for this. Firstly, schools have to work within Education
budgets. The cheaper the bus hire the more kids and trips the school can
organise. Secondly, party buses are available during the day. Sitting in a
dusty yard somewhere all day does not contribute to their income. So, even a
low income is better than no income - anything to cover the fixed operating
costs of the business will do. Thirdly, these dear old crocks remain on the
road because they keep passing their Certificates of Fitness. Yep, they may
be old crocks, but they pass. How? Well, they have the bits required to
pass. Rear vision mirrors? Yep... "Ok, pass" but the mirrors may point
skyward or be two thirds corroded so that barely any of the original
reflective stuff remains on them. Wipers work? Yep, "But you've only got one
wiper!" Yeah, that's all the old girl needs... Better to have only one wiper
than two where one is no longer working... The test for a wiper is merely
that it goes backwards and forwards in a broad stroke across the driver's
window when it is switched on. There is no test to see if it will actually
wipe water off the window, no test to see if the damn thing will even remain
on the window over a speed of 60 KPH.... Same with the brakes. Fortunately,
most of the old bangers have manual gears with most of the gears still
somewhere within the gearbox so brakes are not particularly important.
(Amazingly, many old bangers have a few of the gears outside the gearbox as
well, though few of them seem to work anymore... but I am digressing) And
most of them can't hit 90 KPH anymore anyway.
Despite their crankiness the old party bus bangers are rarely involved in
accidents - and school buses have had a very good safety record since
whenever such things were worried about.
Natalie asks about the pollution levels of diesel buses, idling diesel buses
and cars. Frankly I don't know. Modern petrol engines are pretty clean - in
some cases modern cars can suck in polluted city air and spew out a cleaner
product at the other end. I am not sure diesels can not do that yet -
although a lot of progress is being made in this respect. They do spew out
fine particulates - although even this is being addressed.
Of course the old bangers don't meet modern pollution standards - but why
should they? There aren't many of them - and they provide a cheap and useful
service.
Lets remember, we have fewer than 4 million cars in lil' ol' NZ, and they
stuff they spew out drifts across the Pacific to Chile. Compare that to,
say, 4 million clapped-out vehicles in one city! And that city bordering
another country that also has 4 million old cars farting out pollution! Grab
a hand rail in a city like that and then look at your palm - It'll be black
with soot. People live in these cities! Seriously! We don't have a car, or
pollution problem here!
But, unless we stop wringing our hands about particulates and smoke and
pollution and saving the bloody planet, we will fail to keep a sharp eye on
our production input costs, our transport infrastructure and our export
markets. Failure to do this will result in all of us riding bloody bicycles
while the rest of the world gleefully uses up the rest of the world's oil
supplies!
Already Watties is canning Chinese peaches and Chilean and South African
apricots because these products can no longer be produced in New Zealand.
Instead, we grow grapes. Now grapes are a really useful self-sustainment
product! Yeah, right!
Reduce the roads, make light rail compulsory, increase pollution compliance
costs and watch our national productivity slump. We need roads, we need
ports, we need a bit of rail and a couple of airports - we need
horticulturists and farmers - we need exports because we need (or at least
want) imports!
Cheers,
Tim Kerr