I know the courts are slow, but this is ridiculous

In April this year, I emailed the people responsible for managing the Downing Centre court house and asked them to replace the flags out the front - they were completely worn out. Faded, torn and tattered. I like seeing the Australian flag flying outside public buildings - but I also want to see that it's flown properly and with respect. Those responsible for the flags at the Downing Centre appeared to have no idea about flag protocol.

I noticed last week that they've finally raised two new flags.

It's incredible that it's taken them six months to procure two flags. Six months!

How fifty cents can save the world

Maybe that's just a slight exaggeration. But spending fifty cents on a stamp has helped to keep Sydney harbour clean.

Maritime NSW has installed rubbish traps on a number of canals that drain into the harbour. From time to time - either due to foul weather or foul play - the traps come adrift from their moorings. When that happens, rubbish flows straight into the harbour.

The first photo was taken on 11 October, showing the trap wide open. It had been like this since at least 29 September, when I first noticed it. I wasn't organised enough to report it straight away, although this just goes to show how many other users of the Bay Run have been paying attention to the rubbish traps (or noticing and not caring) - none!

I wrote and posted a very simple letter to NSW Maritime on 11 Oct:

Mr Steve Dunn

Chief Executive

NSW Maritime
James Craig Road

Rozelle NSW 2039

11 October 2010

Dear Mr Dunn

Reporting of broken rubbish trap on Iron Cove Creek, Rodd Point

I wrote to you in July 2010 regarding the rubbish trap on Iron Cove Creek having come adrift.

It was fixed shortly afterwards, but it has since become adrift again.

Yours sincerely

On 14 October, the trap was fixed. Last time I wrote to NSW Maritime about this problem, they fixed the trap within a day. NSW Maritime is a fairly small organisation, so the CEO doesn't need to go through a lot of management layers to get the problem fixed.

When I went past tonight, it was good to see that the trap had already collected a lot of rubbish - not that it's a good thing that a lot of rubbish is drifting down this canal, but it's good to see that at least the trap is grabbing it before it ends up in the harbour.

Downhearted

The article below appeared in this week's edition of the Inner West Courier. I pity the poor property owners in parts of Strathfield that are being hammered by vandals - it's always the businesses that get hit the most.

The problem here appears to be a disjointed approach to cleaning up an entire area. Graffiti attracts graffiti, so if a number of property owners don't pull their weight and leave their premises in an appalling state, their neighbours suffer as vandals repeatedly come back to hit the cleaned areas. You need to clean an entire area all at once, and then keep it clean, rather than just hitting single points every now and then.

As for the Liberal Party policy - I like the idea of a centralised hotline for cleaning up graffiti. I've spent months wading through bureaucratic thickets trying to find out which agency or department is responsible for cleaning up certain areas - sometimes without result. Public servants love to pass the buck to someone else - a graffiti hotline will eliminate the pain of having to contact multiple agencies before you finally find someone that will take responsibility and action.

As for taking away the driving licences of vandals - I'd handover vandal's cars to people who have had their property vandalised and let the victims spray paint them as much as they like. Let vandals feel what it is like to have their property rights abused - that might change their attitude towards graffiti.

Graffiti in EnergyAustralia’s sights

The title of this post comes from a press release that Energy Australia sent me back in April.

Energy Australia cleans up about 40 instances of graffiti per week, and graffiti reports are up by 50% since 2007. It costs Energy Australia (and energy consumers) $500,000 a year to remove graffiti. From the press release:

“Residents in suburbs with high reports of graffiti are doing the right thing in alerting us to the problem so our crews can remove the graffiti quickly.

“We’ve found that the quicker we remove graffiti from our equipment the more of a deterrent it is to other vandals.

“Graffiti vandalism is not only a blight on neighbourhoods but it’s a safety risk and most importantly, it’s a crime.

“That’s why we’ve doubled our efforts and appealed to the community to report graffiti to help us keep the network clean and safe.”

The table below is from the press release. Between 2008 and April 2010, there were 194 graffiti reports in Canada Bay. About 100 of those reports were from me, so it's nice to know there are others out there lodging reports. I've noticed that over the last two years, Energy Australia's turn around time has improved dramatically. They now sometimes remove graffiti only a few days after its been reported - which is great to see.

How Green is the electorate really?

Balmain is supposed to be one of the greenest areas in Australia. Leichhardt Council is dominated by Greens. The state seat may go Green at the next election.

The Bay Run sits right in the middle of this Green Utopia. If Greens like to exercise like everyone else, 10% of the people who walk or run around the Bay must vote Green.

All of them walk past this rubbish trap when doing a lap of The Bay. This rubbish trap keeps an enormous amount of litter out of the harbour. It is a Very Good Thing. However, it's completel useless when it comes adrift from its moorings - like it has in this photo.

Whenever this trap comes adrift, I report it to Maritime NSW. They usually come out and fix it pretty quickly. Although this area is awash with Greens, how come none of them ever, ever bother to report it? Why are they happy to walk past it, watching rubbish drift into the harbour, without feeling the urge to do something about it?

Greens - all talk, no action.

Two more cars heading for the dump

It's not a car - just a humorous amendment to a sign.

This vehicle didn't have any plates on it, and the rego expired back in April.

The rego on this one expired back in August.

I emailed all these photos to Council last week (except the "knob" photo) - they're usually pretty quick when it comes to getting rid of abandoned cars.

Three for the price of one

I dropped Ashfield Council a line this week to let them know that one of their bus shelters in Haberfield had been vandalised.

About an hour later, one of their staff rang me to ask which one exactly I had been talking about - they had been to the street in question, checked all the bus shelters and found that three had been vandalised. Three for the price of one.

Nice work Ashfield - they were onto it quickly and without any fuss.

CPTED for dummies

CPTED means "Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design". In other words, don't make things easy for crooks.

A classis CPTED strategy for reducing graffiti is to put plants in front of walls that are easy to vandalise. This road side noise wall is a classic example - the RTA has planted all along the side of it facing the houses, and although the wall stretches for several hundred metres, this spot here is the only one with graffiti on it. The creepers and bushes do a great job of discouraging vandals. (I've written to the RTA and suggested that they extend the trellising to cover this spot so that creepers will eventually cover it over).

The rest of the wall looks like this - green, pleasant and clean.

It's not so easy to use this strategy where there's not enough sunlight to encourage plant growth. When that happens, you end up with "art work" like this.

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?

Reasons to be grumpy

It took Maritime NSW the better part of a month to fix this rubbish trap on the harbour. I had to hassle them three times before they finally took action.

Here's a photo I took last year of the same trap, showing how much rubbish it collected. The trap is at least a metre deep, and they tend to fill right up between visits from the Maritime rubbish boat. Imagine how much junk flowed into the harbour during the month when it was inoperable....

Charming little sods

If you do a bit of searching, you'll quickly find academics who spend their time running around at the taxpayer's expense defending graffiti. For once, I'd like to hear one of them defend graffiti like this - a dozen tags of "cum" splashed across the top of a local business. That's so erudite, so witty, so artistic - not.

Just around the corner, we have a new boy in town. There must be a war going on in graffiti-land over turf. This bloke has been going around crossing out the tags of the long established vandals, and putting his own up instead. If the two groups involved happen to meet by accident on a dark night, things could get ugly.

Here's an example of engineering vandalism being undertaken by Leichhardt Council. I describe it as that because they're currently repeating the same mistakes they made with the last section of path that they laid through here - the path slopes the wrong way, and has no drainage, so that it turns into a canal when it rains.

I wrote to Council not long ago, and got a response saying that my letter had been passed to a particular gentleman within Council. I bet that by the time he gets around to responding, the path (or canal) will be complete and it will be too late to do anything about it. If you're going to build a path, at least build it properly. It makes my blood boil to see our money spent on such badly engineered works, when it would cost no more to do it sensibly.

I emailed the Mayor of Leichhardt about this several months ago, but I guess he decided to ignore that email - the results speak for themselves.

Not so eggcelent

I was having a drink with a friend last year and she told me a story about how she was running around the Bay and she had an egg thrown at her from a car.... I think. Or maybe the story was about a friend of hers that was egged. The details are lost in the mists of time.

I'd forgotten all about it until I was going around the Bay Run on Monday morning and spotted a number of broken eggs on the path. I went past three before I twigged to the possibility that some idiots had been driving along Henley Marine Drive and throwing eggs at pedestrians and cyclists. When I got to the next egg, I stopped and took a photo - the way it is streaked across the path suggests that it was hurled, rather than dropped.

I'm going to do a bit of asking around and see if anyone I know has ever been the victim of an attempted egging. I wouldn't want to get hit by an egg thrown from a car travelling at 40-50km/h.

To the scrap yard

I went for a wander around the Concord/North Strathfield area this morning and found six abandoned cars - which is a record. One was only 2 months out of rego, but a few had been sitting around rotting since 2008.

Reporting abandoned cars is easy. I simply email Council with a photo of the car, along with a photo of the rego sticker and the street address. They take care of the rest.

When I photograph an abandoned car, I also photograph the nearest house number and the street signs at the nearest cross street - just so I remember where they are when I get home.

Post no bills

Ever wonder where all those posters come from? From a white van like this one. It was quite a professional setup - the back was full of flat wooden racks, with the posters laid out neatly on each shelf in the racks. The two blokes putting up the posters were wearing safety vests, and looked quite legitimate.

Except that just about every Council in the area doesn't allow this sort of thing.

I saw this pair here a few months ago. They got pretty angry when they saw me taking their photo. They were also parked in a no stopping zone - a bus came around the corner from the left and the driver honked at them to move their van, which was blocking buses from turning properly. I'm going to report their registration to Leichhardt Council and see if anything happens - YLZ 461.

Success - but what a pain

At last - someone from Maritime NSW has come along and fixed up this rubbish trap. It's been a month since I first noticed that it was broken and adrift, and reported it to them. I followed up again a week later. I concluded over the weekend that the message was not getting through, so I wrote the CEO a good old fashioned letter and posted it on Monday. I guess he got it on Tuesday or Wednesday and action happened shortly thereafter.

Not much rubbish was caught by this trap for a bit over a month. What a crying shame.

This is not a swimming pool

I hate the fact that you can't walk or ride around The Bay when it rains without having to trudge through an endless stream of deep puddles in the Leichhardt area. The existing path has been laid down with no thought as to how water is supposed to drain away. Instead of building up the path in the middle so that water drains towards the edges, Council has instead built a concave path, so water runs into the middle and stays there.

There is only one drain grate along the entire path, and it isn't at the lowest point so it doesn't do much good. The entire path is built at or below the level of the surrounding turf, so water running off the hill on the right runs straight onto the path and settles there. The drainage is so bad, puddles hang around for days after any rain.

I sent the above photo to the Mayor of Leichhardt 3 months ago with a plea that when the next section of path was built, that drainage be factored in - he never bothered to respond. If the Romans could build well drained roads 2000 years ago, I don't see why we can't build properly drained paths today. A road engineer would never dream of building a road without thinking about drainage - why then do we spend taxpayers money on building paths without thinking the same way? Conceptually, they are the same - a ribbon of concrete. Just because one carries bikes or people rather than cars, doesn't mean that drainage should be ignored.

As the Mayor is ignoring me, and work is about to start on the next section of path, I dashed off a letter to the General Manager today. Maybe he'll take note - I asked him to ensure that his staff or contractors build a path, rather than a canal or a swimming pool.

One more Council in the mix

Over the weekend, I had a look at how often the Mayor of Canada Bay, Angelo Tsirekas, was appearing in Council funded publications compared to the Mayors of other Councils in our area.

Incredibly, he appeared in 72 photos, whilst the Mayors of 4 other Councils had a total of only 43 photos between the lot of them.

I have just had a look at the publications of Ashfield Council, and can now add them to the mix.

Ashfield publishes three community newsletters. Photos of the Mayor hardly appear in any of them.

The Bulletin:

• April 2009 - 0
• March 2009 - 1

Ashfield Council News

• June 2010 - 0
• March 2010 - 1
• Sept 2009 - 0
• June 2009 - 3
• Mar 2009 - 0

Ashfield Community Report

• 2008 - 1

That's a total of 6 photos in 8 publications - an average of 0.75 photos per edition. That now means that 5 Mayors have had a total of 49 photos in their Council funded publications, as opposed to Angelo Tsirekas having 72.

Here's how they rank (average photos of the Mayor per publication):

• Ashfield - 0.75
• Strathfield - 1
• Leichhardt - 1.3
• Canterbury - 1.5
• Burwood - 1.9
• Canada Bay - 5.5

You could say we are head and shoulders above the other Councils in our area - except that it is Angelo's head and shoulders that we are seeing so much of.

--------

Update.

I just couldn't resist the urge to check out some more Councils.

Ryde

City View

I could only access one back copy, but the count of Mayoral photos was zero.

Hunter's Hill

Council Newsletter

• June 2010 - 1
• Dec 2009 - 0
• Sep 2009 - 0
• July 2008 - 0

Holroyd Council

Holroyd Herald

• Sep 2009 - 3
• Apr 2009 - 1
• Nov 2008 - 1
• June 2008 - 2

Lane Cove

Jane 2010 - 0

Couldn't access any back issues.

So the updated league table looks like this:

• Lane Cove - 0
• Ryde - 0
• Hunter's Hill - 0.25
• Ashfield - 0.75
• Strathfield - 1
• Leichhardt - 1.3
• Canterbury - 1.5
• Holroyd - 1.75
• Burwood - 1.9
• Canada Bay - 5.5

However, after going through 9 Councils, I am still only up to 57 photos of their Mayor's, as opposed to 72 of our Angelo. How many Council web sites do I have to trawl through before the total of all Mayor's exceeds Angelo? 15? 20?

I give up.

NSW Maritime - 3rd time lucky

Around 15 June, I used the "contact us" section of the NSW Maritime website to let them know that the rubbish trap on Iron Cove Creek was broken.

A week later, I rang their call centre to let them know again - just in case any computer gremlins ate my initial attempt at contact.

The trap still hasn't been fixed - it's now almost 4 weeks since I first tried to let them know. Therefore, I have just wasted 10 minutes of my Sunday morning writing a polite letter to the Chief Executive of NSW Maritime, Mr Steve Dunn, to ask him if my messages are getting through to those responsible for maintaining and repairing these assets. I don't care what their problems are - I just want the trap fixed!

As I was doing a bit of Googling on this topic, I found a website for Harbourkeepers, which is worth a look.