Drought's over!

[skyring]

First book order since I got back and restored my inventory. Clara Morison by the awesome Catherine Helen Spence, a solid $US25!

Only cost me a few cents at a Lifeline book fair two years back, and maybe as much again in monthly fees since then.

In other news, I got an e-Tag enabling me to use any tollway in Australia. This includes the newly-opened M7 which starts charging in three weeks, but cuts out a vast amount of Sydney roads, along with traffic lights and delays and the inevitable wondering whether I'm in the correct lane.

Not that we'll use it much for the M7, but it will be handy for the tollway into the middle of Sydney, which we use every couple of months, and there's always those baffling tollways in Melbourne.

Couple of news items recently. Queenslanders are being slugged $40 a year as a minimum usage fee. If they don't use $10 worth of tolls a quarter, they get a $10 bill. And there's talk of making the remaining two-lane sections of the Pacific Highway into tollways otherwise they might never be upgraded.

WTF are our State Governments doing with their money, i've got to ask? These sorts of big infrastructure projects benefit everyone directly or indirectly, they save lives and they are one of the few remaining State responsibilities after health, schooling and police. The Cross-City Tunnel in Sydney has been a total fiasco and I think the Liberals will coast into government next election on the back of it.

In the meantime, the ACT government continues to try to force people onto the lousy public transport system by building over carparks and making car ownership ever more expensive.

Comments

[meril.livejournal.com]

And let me guess, their idea of public transport is the same one that Minneapolis has: works great within the city, but goes all to heck in the suburbs. A friend of mine lost his job because of suburban bus route cuts--all the jobs are outside of Minneapolis, of course, not within it.

[skyring.livejournal.com]

I remember back when I worked in one of Canberra's Town Centres. I travelled by bus and it worked well. The government held one of their periodic timetable reorganisations to give the travelling public more buses when they needed them, and suddenly I found that I was spending a lot longer waiting for buses and the connections that I had previously depended upon were no longer available. I had to leave half an hour earlier to get to work at the same time as before. It sucked.

We bought a second car and I used that.

The problem with public transport is that it doesn't suit the way that we, as a car-based society have organised our lives. Dropping kids off at childcare before going on to work, stopping off to buy groceries etc. These things are easy to do with a car, difficult with public transport, and it's hard for politicians with their government-subsidised cars and parking spaces to appreciate the very real difficulties.