No more scat

North Strathfield public school, 2 days after calling the school and telling them they had "scat" sprayed on two demountable classrooms.  When they know about it, and they know what to do, things can be fixed quickly.  When they don't know and don't care, it hangs around forever.

And the rest of this entry will also be graffiti-free, emphasising that this blog is about more than petty vandalism.

Abandoned car in Concord.  

The registration expired nearly a year ago, and the number of spiders living in the car suggests it hasn't been driven for some time.  Reported to council tonight.

This to me is an example of a badly designed bike diversion.  Most cyclists will not jink around it and stay in the bike lane - they'll just go through this pinch point with the cars.

The diversion on the other side of the road doesn't have this interesting "jinking" concrete feature.  It seems odd that council have installed it on one side of the road and not the other.  I'm going to ask council to remove it.

Here's a spot where there's no bike diversion lane through a traffic calming device.  The result is that bikes have to leave the safety of the side of the road and mix it up with cars (and cement trucks) as they go through the pinch point.  Some vehicles slow down as they go through these, but I watched a semi-trailer go blasting through one of these just before I took the photo, its tyres scrubbing the kerbs as it went through.  The idea of a separate bike lane through the traffic calming islands is to keep bikes safe by keeping them away from cars.

Another amazing traffic calming island.  I am standing in a bus stop, so I presume the idea is to slow cars down as they come around the corner, so they don't crash into the back of a bus picking up passengers.  Again, it didn't seem to be working.  I watched a van come around the corner so fast, it was almost riding on two wheels.  Again, all it does is compress bikes and cars together in an unforgiving environment.  It wouldn't be that bad if they'd enlarged the gap down the side to make it wide enough for bikes to fit through.

An example of signage that is past its used-by date.  This sign was put up by the Municipality of Concord, which ceased to exist at least 10 years ago.  Note the brand new Canada Bay street sign in front of it.  Council is spending a lot of money refreshing and rebranding all the street signage across our city, which means it must believe that bright, clean signage promotes a good image.  If that's the case, they shouldn't need to be convinced that the old brown sign has to go.