With all this walking I've been doing lately, I have had time to reflect on the art of walking and using public transport as a socio-political activity. (Pardon?)
Australian society is obsessed with the motor car. Perhaps not as much as I've witnessed in the USA, where walkers and public transport users are viewed somewhere between freaks and disreputable types, but this obsession is well and truly here.
In 1976 I worked on the Australian national census as a humble census collector. About 40% of this walking consisted on running away from every unleashed dog in the neighbourhood
Now, as a combined result of much tighter local council bye-laws about dogs, plus the further rise of the motor car in the last 32 (32!) years, the few dogs I see now seem to regard me with wonder and amusement.
My colleagues at work regard me as an object of curiosity. Many of the students catch the train to college - and rejoice at the sight of me at the local railway station, viewing my actions as some act of solidarity. But some my colleagues seem scarcely able to comprehend the thought of catching the train.
(Certainly the rail system's owners, the Government of New South Wales, seem to have difficulty in accepting the notion that some people actually use trains - but that's another story.)
In his book Notes from a small island, the author Bill Bryson describes the operating philosophy of the British rail system as that rail passengers are bludgers and parasites on the state and that we should all bugger off.
This at least was the attitude before their de-nationalisation took place in recent times; paradoxically, this attitide has now gone in a different and equally passenger-unfriendly direction as the train companies struggle to meet their performance standards whilst coping with the challenge of moving passengers about. They seem to view passengers as nuisances who are slowing down their on-time running statistics.
The attitude of our great and glorious CityRail seems to be that we too are nuisances and malingerers who should get ourselves real transport (a car) and thereby save them the trouble and expense of running a public transport system.
Coming back home, the Roads & Traffic Authority of New South Wales is unwittingly contributing to my sprinting training by the way the "walk" / "don't walk" lights are timed.
An average sequence consists of 15 seconds green followed by 10 minutes of red. And that's at the simple intersections. Sometimes I really think that the Roads & Traffic Authority doesn't like us pedestrians.
Ah well. I shall fight these inconveniences for the greater cause!
The cartoon of the dog chasing a pedestrian is from the weblog Famous Kroegers.
