Emissions Down Under: Kilian Doyle blows his last Australian gasket
Returning to Sydney after 10 idyllic days in the surfing paradise of Byron Bay, it's shocking the force with which civilisation hits your peace of mind. Among other things, this city is - to my untrained eyes - a motorist's nightmare. Its layout appears without rhyme or reason, with streets as higgledy piggledy as some medieval Moroccan kasbah.
I'd prefer to goosestep down New York's Fifth Avenue wearing an Osama Bin Laden outfit rather than try to get from one side of this city to the other in a hurry. It's a maze of little one-way streets, which change direction intermittently, leaving drivers dumbfounded and forced to relearn pet short cuts and private routes on a regular basis. The horror!
So challenging is navigation that my friends here have taxi races with each other, the object being to direct famously clueless Sydney taxi-drivers from point A to B in the shortest time. Expensive, pointless and lots of fun. But hardly good PR for the city planners.
There's also nowhere to park. I'm fully aware, being a Dubliner, that this phenomenon is hardly exclusive to Sydney, that most big cities suffer similar crises, with insomniac citizens spending fitful sleepless hours over where they're going to park the next day, except in Germany where they just leave towels in parking spaces the night before. The problem is compounded by the fact that Aussies like their cars real big. And, to add more misery, the city is littered with camper vans, bought, driven and trashed by backpackers who abandon them in the suburbs before going home to England.
I survived in Byron without a mobile phone. It was a revelation. One Tuesday I agreed to meet one local chap at a certain place at a certain time on Thursday. Come the agreed time and, hey presto, there we were on time in the same place without having made 15 phonecalls in the intervening 39 hours. I had to sit down to steady myself, so I did.
Come the trip home, mobile technology reared its ugly head again on the runway. My flight was delayed because some yuppie refused to switch off his phone, arguing vociferously that his was designed for important frequent travellers - such as himself - so that it wouldn't interfere with the aircraft controls. Presumably, he used his phone to call a taxi to pick him up from the airport tarmac where he was abandoned to our cheers.
Back in Sydney, everyone has mobiles. The sunny climate here has mellowed me somewhat. Notice the distinct lack of fear and loathing in the preceding paragraphs? But the first sight of a communicational cripple prattling mindlessly into his right hand while negotiating a four-lane roundabout with the left had me reaching for my imaginary shotgun.
So it was with some pleasure that I later found out that the New South Wales police has a novel approach to the problem of these gimps. There's nothing complicated about it, it's pretty pure and simple. They bust them. If cops see you on a mobile as you're driving, they do you. Not from them the bleats of "unenforceable" so bandied about by the Garda when such laws were proposed in Ireland. Oh happy, happy, joy, joy, the delight of seeing justice in action.
In an area with a population one-and-a-half times the size of Ireland's, nearly 800 people are caught each month, receiving fines of around €140 for their troubles. Last December, fines totalled over €100,000. Roughly translated, that'd work out at around a million spondoolicks a year if it were enforced on Irish roads. To our lovely Government, for whom money appears to be the great god above all else, think about it, surely it's temptation enough. How many votes could that buy?