Quick work

This van has been sitting here for months, slowly getting covered in leaves as the tyres go flat. As the rego expired last month, I finally got around to reporting it last week. When I went past a few days later, there was already an orange council sticker on it communicating an intention to tow it away. See the plastic box on the roof with beach gear in it? That's been sitting there for at least 3 months as well.

If the car has a visible rego sticker, I take a photo of that as well and email it to Council. That lets them know all the details of the car (make, model, rego and expiry date) and seems to help things along. Councils can't tow a vehicle away if the registration is current, so if you can show that the rego has expired, it makes their life easier.

Common sense appears at Sydney Water

My com-padre sent me the following email earlier this week:

Please be informed that this location is currently under our Fortnightly inspection that our contractor attends the site every 2 weeks and they will remove the graffiti if there is any.

The idea is to send the message to offender that Sydney water will persistently remove the graffiti at this site until they stop.

Any question please feel free to contact me via this email address

Regards,

It's only taken a few years, but it's great to see that they've finally gotten the point. Inspect regularly, paint quickly and the problem quickly diminishes. Be proactive.

I've noticed around our area that the same idea seems to have sunk in at Australia Post, and things have much improved with the RTA. However, Energy Australia just don't appear to be interested in being more proactive. If I can convince Energy Australia to start undertaking regular visual inspections of their kiosks, I can hang up my camera and find a more interesting past time.

How to attract people to public transport

Public transport is one area that cops a beating from vandals. Big graffiti murals on trains make the news, but the acres of small tags spread across all the bus infrastructure has been forgotten about. Bus shelters, seats and signage are repeatedly hit by vandals. Cleaning a shelter or seat isn't that hard, but cleaning the signage tends to result in the information on the sign being erased by the chemical cleaning agents.

Apart from being a mess, this sign is out of date. It advertises a "travelpass", which has been replaced by the "mybus" or "myzone" travel system. I guess the people in charge of marketing the new ticketing system forgot about cleaning up and updating all the bus info poles out there in the suburbs.

What continues to frustrate me is that a bus driver pulls up at this spot every 15 minutes or so between 6am and 8pm. Dozens of bus drivers would see the state of this sign (and many others like it) every day. However, none can ever be bothered to report the vandalism. The excuse from Sydney Buses is that councils are responsible for the seating and signage. Fine - but why is there no mechanism for communicating damage to that infrastructure between Sydney Buses and councils? Why do Sydney Buses just wash their hands of the matter and claim that it is somebody else's problem?