SO MUCH good work has been done to promote Ballarat as this state’s cycle city.
The council has done its bit by attracting a host of first class cycling events to town, as evidenced by ‘‘our’’ official launch of the Herald Sun Tour.
And the local traders, from our bike shops to our kerbside
cafes, have welcomed riders from all points of the globe
with big toothy grins.
Then we have a range of entertaining and convenient
bike paths about the place, and those who choose to pedal rather than pedal-to-the-metal for their day-to-day commute are well served by bike lanes on many arterial roads.
If only we could control the fickle Ballarat weather.
Yes, all of the important boxes are ticked for Ballarat to
be bike-friendliest borough this side of Barcelona.
What a shame it also seems to be the broken-glass capital of the planet.
As anyone on a bicycle knows, nothing deflates one’s
warm fuzzy feeling about supposedly doing the right
thing and cycling rather than driving, than a puncture
courtesy of a piece of pointlessly smashed beer bottle. And I can’t remember seeing any city anywhere recently with more smashed glass lying around on streets and paths conveniently placed just to stuff up someone’s day.
Do I exaggerate? Well, if personal experience counts for
anything, I’ve had three punctures in a month, each costing me anywhere between $40 and $100 to fix. Fair
dinkum, it would have been cheaper just to drive.
Ballarat must be plagued by the kind of halfwit that thinks tossing a glass bottle onto the road, presumably to watch it shatter while they stagger to wherever the hell they are going, is the highest form of comedic expression.
People who get their jollies smashing glass, or who toss
bottles out of car windows, are the inevitable downside of society protecting evolutionary dead-ends from
themselves.
Once upon a time, the braindead actions of these ignorant trolls to draw attention to themselves would hopefully have attracted the interest of some kind of giant cat. The predator would then have been able to nourish itself while also doing the total human gene pool a favour.
Sadly there are precious few big cats around these days to control the troll population.
So, as a society, we must take matters into our own hands, in this case by making the consequences of being
caught smashing glass on the road as unpleasant as possible.
There are, of course, litter laws that might apply equally
to chip packets as they would bottles. The penalties on the rare occasions they are enforced, though, are a slap on the wrist.
But perhaps there’s a case for treating those who smash
glass in a more severe category. With the pigignorant
twits who throw cigarette butts out the window of cars, for example, there’s a quantum leap in terms of punishment because of the greater risk of harm.
Maybe smashing glass, which either recklessly or deliberately endangers others, could be punished in a similar manner?
Let’s face it, smashing a bottle on the road is a more
aggressive and destructive act than dropping a chocolate bar wrapper.
Either way, the increased penalty would still be substantially less severe than what I would have liked to
have done to our troll after the remains of a VB stubbie
destroyed a perfectly good rear tyre last month. You know I’m right about this.
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