By MIKE STACEY
I had a good giggle when I saw the cartoon in last week’s Driftwood, until I suddenly realized it was not actually the cartoon but the proposed Local Community Commission Ganges Hill accident scene.
Naturally the whole plan for town is based on the assumption that vehicles are the villains. (Except electric cars, of course, whose drivers are next in line for sainthood.)
Mind you, I foresee no problems arising with heavily loaded trucks, having come down a mile-long hill with hot brakes (don’t use those engine brakes, boys and girls!) entering the steepest part of the grade and then having to make a “lock ‘em all up” panic stop when some Rhodes Scholar drifts aimlessly onto the crosswalk without looking to see what exactly it is that is going to kill him.
Going the other direction, the same heavily loaded truck, at that point where it is necessary to “give it some welly” to get up the hill in a timely manner, has to grind to a halt as the same Nobel Prize candidate heads back the other way. Now the truck has to get moving again, and will be crawling all the way to the top, with impatient drivers passing at really stupid places. Since they have been tailgating the truck, they can’t see what is coming the other way, especially if it’s one of those stupid steering-wheel-on-the- wrong-side abominations. But, they are in a hurry to get somewhere, so it is well worth risking a head-on collision. (Electric car drivers won’t do this, of course, as they are above that sort of behaviour.)
Now, I can’t stand here and say that this is the stupidest place on the planet for a crosswalk — it IS the stupidest place on the planet for a crosswalk, I just can’t stand here and say it — but when the body count begins to rise it will become clear.
Anyone who has driven through Ganges should know by now that the real problem is the free frontal lobotomies being performed on 80 per cent of the pedestrian population. No amount of planning will stop these buffoons walking down the middle of the street, crossing wherever the hell they want and generally doing everything they can think of to screw things up. The only thing a crosswalk will do at that location is to encourage people to cross at that spot, and when one of them gets flattened everyone can say with conviction that obviously the driver was at fault, unless it’s an electric car, in which case it will have been an Act of God.
If only there was another way for those nasty, problematic and obviously totally unnecessary trucks to go, maybe even bypassing town altogether.
As for Bob Weeden’s proposed “Hugging Zone,” I have a few old cans of paint kicking around and I’m ready to get started on it. How about competitive hugging? No holds barred, Aussie rules . . . I think we’re onto something here.