Come on Brumby, on your bike. (By Ozzyfrog)

Premier Brumby has today announced part of the new transport plan in Melbourne. Good stuff, was the initial response I had, but it appears that this response could not have been more wrong. Brumby has decided to have a push for motorbikes and scooters, and urging drivers to leave their cars at home. Oh, ok Brumby, I’ll just forget about my nice $30,000 Peugeot in the garage, and I’ll go buy a new motorcycle for a few thousand dollars. And get a motorcycle license. And all the gear you need to ride motorbikes, like helmets. And extra insurance. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because in a few weeks I’ll be in hospital with a broken spine, or dead. No, no, it really doesn’t matter that motorbikes are just about the most dangerous means of transport there are, and that they cost a huge amount for what is basically a road bike with a noisy engine. It’ll be fine.

Also, is there a more useless way of getting what you want other than ‘urging’ the public to do something? Last time I checked, we do not do something because some twat ‘urges’ us to. It doesn’t work. But back to the point. Brumby has said that the government will try to make the roads safer for motorbikes and scooters, and the important word of this sentence is ‘try’. What on earth can they do to make the roads safer for bikes? Motorbikes don’t use bike lanes, for obvious reasons, so extending those will do nothing. Maybe we will end up with humongous yellow signs everywhere warning us to look for bikes. They’ve already started that on television. Don’t think that the timing of those recent ads to “look again for bikes” is a coincidence. Of course, there will be so many signs that they will simply obscure the view of oncoming bikes, and so they will be mown down like pigeons (and no, I don’t know why pigeons are mown down, it just sounds cool).

And we should remember that we currently have a shortage of nurses and doctors, and hospital waiting lists are enormous. So sending halve the population to serious injury is not really going to help. Of course, as Brumby points out, the alternative is public transport, and he is correct. Unfortunately, we don’t have public transport. We have a few bus routes that are always late, trains that don’t turn up and trams that can’t stop because of their pathetic brakes. Imagine going to work on a tram surrounded by people on motorbikes. The windscreen will be so full of pieces of bike and people that the tram has run over that the driver won’t be able to see, and so trams are out of the equation. And buses, for that matter. Trains will be safe, but they’re overcrowded as it is so that won’ t do.

In my book, if adding a seat belt to something makes it more dangerous, then that thing is not worth travelling in. Normal bikes are the exception, as they are fun and don’t go fast enough to cause serious injury. But motorbikes? Uh uh, no way Brumby. Keen bike enthusiasts of course will be jumping for joy, and will all go out for a ride and be killed, because of humongous yellow signs and extended bike lanes. So what are waiting for Brumby, go on, on your bike.