Quick work

Monday - a public toilet in Ashfield. (There was no graffiti here on Friday).

Tuesday - gone. Not the greatest of cleanup jobs, but quick work nonetheless.

Someone is on the ball. Nothing to do with me.

I have just the solution for that

I found this mural today on a bit of public property. This particular spot has been hit a few times before, and each time, the RTA has painted over it fairly quickly. I went past here last week and the wall was clean, so it's quite new. Hopefully, the RTA will have the painters round soon to clean it up.

The RTA could try a bit of lateral thinking and put up a mural here. It's a nice spot, and a mural would do wonders to improve a slab of boring, grey concrete. Something to think about.

Wheelie sensible use of ratepayers cash

Up in Umina, the youngsters are hopping in wheelie bins, rolling down hills, crashing into trees and killing themselves. In Ashfield, it's pretty flat, so they have to satisfy themselves with throwing wheelie bins into canals. Spotted two floating by today.

Dropped Ashfield Council an email tonight to let them know where they can go fishing for their bins.

A tale of two councils

Leichhardt Council has a program where they commission artists to paint the RTA cabinets at traffic lights. They've been slogging their way through the long list of traffic lights in the council area, and the results vary from fairly ordinary to pretty amazing (depending on how you feel about art).

I've asked Canada Bay Council to see if they can start a similar program next financial year. The difference between the two council areas is pretty stark, as you can see below.

One fine Sunday out west

90 minutes on the road this morning. Reported 3 abandoned cars, two vandalised post offices, six graffiti'd Energy Australia kiosks, one council park strewn with rubbish from end to end, one war memorial with graffiti on it, one bridge and one grandstand with graffiti and two RTA utility boxes. Phew.

Post no bills

Update - the day after I took the photo down below, it rained. Absolutely poured down. The posters that had been taken off this pole and dumped on the ground turned into a sodden mass, and when I went past a bit later in the day, they were halfway towards the drains.

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Someone - council perhaps? - has been through here and ripped all the posters off this traffic light post. However, instead of taking them away, they've left them on the footpath.

How long before they either blow around the streets, or wash into a drain and end up either in a water way or on a beach?

I wish the people who stuck these things up would think about what happens next.

Strange place to give way

There are no missing signs at the intersection, so I am guessing the sign was ripped out and tossed in The Bay some time ago, and given the murky state of the water normally, no one knew where it went - until the tide went out.

Someone has gone to a reasonable amount of trouble to rip this out of the ground, concrete base and all.

Various things

I love it when bone lazy people use a water bubbler in a park as a rubbish bin, instead of walking 10 metres to an actual rubbish bin. These coffees were purchased at the cafe 150 metres down the road (the Audi Five Dock advertising on them gives the cafe away), so the lazy sods were clearly capable of walking some distance. They just couldn't complete the final 10 metres to the bin.

The water bubbler is working - I tested it.

The bubbler, the bin and the seat the lazy sods were presumably reclining on.

Woe is me, what a distance to travel. It's even worse when you think that these people might be locals, and walked several hundred metres home from this park.

Another abandoned car - maybe. Reported to Council.

Either Energy Australia are getting much better at cleaning their assets, or the vandals are slowing down. I have reported 9 vandalised kiosks so far this year - but I reported 24 in the last 3 months of 2009. Maybe I'm just not traveling as far and wide anymore.

Falling apart at the seams

The furniture at some of our local bus stops is looking somewhat the worse for wear. Whilst the bus shelters have to put up with unnatural damage (vandalism), the outdoor seating is suffering from years of wear and tear from the elements. A lot of seating is starting to look like the one below, on Hampden Rd in Abbotsford.

The concrete frame is fine, but the wooden slats are rotten and splitting, and the bolts holding them on are rusting away.

The seat in the foreground is in pretty good condition - the photos above are of the seat in the background. Most bus stops also have a bin - many have been sprayed with graffiti, or show signs of having been set on fire (blistered paint that has peeled off, allowing the bin to rust).

Here we have an example of the new seating that Council installed when the Wareemba shopping strip was recently upgraded - it's a fine bit of furniture.

Replacing and repairing street furniture costs money - no doubt about it. However, I wonder how regularly the seating is being looked at by Council? I can handle shabby, so long as it's safe to sit on. However, some seating is starting to look like it is ready made for a personal injury lawsuit.

Tis the season for pot holes

The recent rains have had the side effect of mucking up our local roads. Pot holes have been opening up here and there, including this one on Barnstaple Road in Five Dock. If you bother reporting them to Council (which is as easy as sending them an email), they'll be fixed within a few days. If you don't bother reporting them, they'll still be there next winter.

Update - got a phone call from Council at 8.30am this morning. They said it will be fixed today.

See - all you have to do is ask, and not treat it as somebody else's problem.

Odd way of celebrating the New Year

Like many people, I spent the morning of Jan 1 cleaning up after the night before. Champagne corks, beer and wine bottles, streamers, sparklers, chop bones, paper plates, plastic forks and so forth were scattered all over the back yard. However, none of it was permanent, and all the mess was on private property. Others obviously have other ideas about how the evening should be marked....

Gay taggers only?

There is a small sign above the door of this garage that reads "blah-blah Rd gay taggers only".

We now have gay-friendly graffiti zones?

New graffiti advice on Energy Australia website

Energy Australia has put a link on their homepage to combatting graffiti. The downside of the new page is that they want all graffiti reports to be phoned in, which in my experience, is a pain in the backside. I can enter a report via their "contact us" web page in less than 30 seconds. It usually takes 5-10 minutes to do it over the phone (once you find their number, ring it, press this and that to get through all the prompts and then wait for an operator. On top of that, the hours of their call centre are limited - I generally find myself reporting graffiti at 10pm or later, and the call centre is closed at that time - and it's shut on Sunday.


I'm going to continue with using the web page, and see how things go.

Taking a break for the school holidays

The school holidays generally see a spike in vandalism, graffiti and malicious damage. An exception to this was the August holidays, which were wet and miserable. Two weeks of rain and cold weather kept the kids inside, and offered few opportunities to get out and about and cause a bit of mayhem.

The Christmas holidays have been different - nice hot weather for most of the time. The result has been a big spike in graffiti in most of the usual areas. I'm not going to bother with reporting any of it until the holidays are over - there is a good chance that if anything is cleaned over the holidays, it will be tagged before the little dears are back in the classroom. I am building up a nice file of sites to report, and unfortunately, it gets thicker by the day. Either we have grown a new crop of vandals, or the old ones have rediscovered their mojo.

The changing face of graffiti

Here's a bit of old school graffiti. This is the sort of stuff that I have always thought of as graffiti - that is, spray-can based. There's nothing artistic in any of this, even though it was all done indoors and out of sight, allowing plenty of time to create a masterpiece if the vandal had any talent.

This is what it has evolved into - the spray cans in our area seem to have disappeared, and have been replaced with fat textas. Gone are the bright colours - it seems most vandals can only get their hands on black ink these days.

I don't know what is driving this - whether it is the tougher retailing laws, or tougher laws regarding juveniles caught with cans, or Police stopping and searching likely teenagers. Whatever the cause, I'm not seeing anything like the amount of spray paint that I saw a year ago.

Textas are useless on a rough surface, so the spray paint drought is restricting vandals to a small number of smooth surfaces. Can't complain about that.

There goes the teenage drop-in centre

We don't actually seem to have an official teenage drop in centre around these parts. So as with all things, if one doesn't exist, fertile minds will create one.

This particular building has been abandoned and empty for as long as I have lived in the area - but just recently, the developers have moved in and demolition has commenced.

The local vandals weren't deterred by security fences or boarded up doors. As you can see, they've been plenty busy on redecorating the interior.

Most of the windows have been broken, and there is evidence in several locations of fires having been lit inside.

In a year or two, all of this will probably be replaced with modern apartments like those in the background.

I was wondering how the stone blocks were being removed - with a very big saw.

Right now, the only residents at this site are a couple of ducks.

Four for the tip

Nothing to do with me - I found this abandoned car this way. The Council slapped a sticker on it recently, so it is close to being towed to the tip.

Rego expired a few months ago. Although it doesn't show in this photo, the car is well covered in leaf litter and looks like it has not moved for months.

Rego expired a few months ago. The woman who owns the car saw me photographing it and asked if I wanted to buy it! No, I just want it off the street.

Rego also expired some 6 months ago. Again, the leaf litter on this one was pretty thick, especially on the windows, indicating it has not moved in months.

These three cars were all within a few hundred metres of each other in two streets. I found all four during a short walk around an unfamiliar suburb.

Keeping track of things

As the Democrats used to say, you need to keep the bastards honest. Every time you log a graffiti incident on the Energy Australia website, they should reply with an email giving you the job number for cleaning it up. Here's a sample:

A month ago, I started to wonder whether all my jobs were being logged properly, as I was noticing that some kiosks were cleaned up pretty quickly, whilst others never seemed to get done. I therefor started tracking everything I logged in a spreadsheet.

What I've found is that most of the incidents have been logged by Energy Australia within 5 days, and generally cleaned up about 2 weeks later. I haven't been back to every site to check whether they've been cleaned or not, but as I go past them from time to time, I have a look at how they are going.

Interestingly, I logged 5 incidents this week. I got two emails back yesterday - one for an incident logged on the 4th, and another logged last night. However, the three in the middle have gone walkabout. I really wonder whether their system is eating some of the incidents, or whether they are simply failing to log them.

If I don't get a response within a few weeks, I contact Energy Australia and follow up over the phone. I shouldn't need to be doing this, but unless I am absolutely certain that they are on top of things, I'm going to check and check and check again.

The good news is that the cleaning efforts of Energy Australia appear to be bearing fruit. When I first started doing this a year ago, all their substations and kiosks were a bloody disaster - coated in graffiti half an inch thick. Now, most of them are clean and green. Yes, graffiti does creep back, but in nothing like the quantities they used to attract, and the attacks are much less frequent.

Police + people who do something = action

Tonight, I attended the quarterly meeting of our local CSPC - Community Safety Precinct Committee. It's where the Police, local councils and residents get together to discuss issues of concern and how to deal with them. I think this is the 4th meeting of our CSPC, and in my opinion, it's been very productive.

We saw attendance by the public go up by 100% this week - Councillor Helen McCaffrey convinced a fellow Rotarian to attend, so there was Ray and me. It was nice to not be the sole member of the Great Unwashed for once.

I get a lot of value out of these meetings - which only take an hour or so - because you find out a lot of stuff that never makes it into the paper (presumably because it is considered to be too boring or trivial to capture the attention of most readers). I've also found that if you raise a problem, and it's viewed as being legitimate, then it will get attention from both the Police and Council. Things actually get done - it's not a talking shop. Well, actually we talk a lot, but it's useful and productive talk. Pity about the lack of biscuits this time though. I must remember to take a packet of chocolate ones next time.

I'm pleased to say that a few items that went on the table at the start of the year are now bearing fruit. The Police asked for some kit that would assist them in catching crooks, and Council approved funding for it last night. We also suggested that Council take a different approach to removing graffiti (ie, remove it and then tell the owner afterwards, rather than asking permission, providing a quote blah blah blah) and that has made a huge difference to graffiti removal.

The committee also had a look at what was happening in our local parks after dark, and as a result, the Police scheduled a lot more patrols through the problem areas. Arrests have been made and charges laid and as a result, the parks aren't getting torn up this year by people who lack the self control to have a good time without smashing up everything around them.

The meeting this evening was in Concord (it gets moved around Canada Bay each time to give local residents a chance to attend) and on the way home, I spotted three vandalised Energy Australia kiosks (which have all been reported). Just goes to show that if you take your eye off the ball for a few months, things can go to hell in a big hurry.

Soon to be scrap

Spotted this abandoned car about a week ago. Finally got around to reporting it today. The rego expired in early November, but it hasn't moved in months. Ta ta.