Indecision

First published in Column Eight on the 31^st March 1993

Otago: wild coasts, arid inlands, lush pasturelands. A province of marvellous contradictions. That last word sums up not only the piece of Earth we inhabit but also this province’s prevailing attitude to its Anniversary Day.

Do other provinces take such an ad hoc approach to their holiday? Would we so arbitrarily toss around Labour Weekend, Good Friday or Boxing Day? (We have better reason to do so with Queen’s Birthday, since the Queen celebrates it twice each year.)

This year confusion was added to confusion as banks and offices took one stance, retailers another, and some schools a third, in order to fit in with a much more important event – the cricket.

With some shops believing that they have to trade every day, or die, shoppers had no idea what would be open in town.

What are we celebrating? Not much it seems. The newspaper presented some historical articles on the earliest settlers, and reported on the high school’s Anniversary Day speech. I didn’t see anything else.

Quite honestly, while we fluff around year after year, the whole point of the holiday ceases to be. What will take to make us unite? An Act of Parliament?

Indecision continues in another area: the Andy Bay roundabout. I had high hopes for improvement when I saw Citiworks back there digging and delving. Yes, the plot in the middle is bigger, with a nice kerb for cars to ride up on to. It still, however, looks like a base for some civic dignitary’s bronze statute which hasn’t arrived from the foundry.

Let’s face it, a roundabout doesn’t work in this location. Abandon it and put in some plain old-fashioned traffic lights before an enormous semi-trailer demolishes a Mini trying simultaneously to negotiate that pitiful zig-zag of a double lane.

Yet more indecision: the buses. The free day must have shown that Dunedinites don’t have any inherent problem about riding on buses. (Although I have some inherent problems about that seamy ‘You can do it on a bus’ piece of advertising. It’s about as clever as most toilet graffiti. 

Where Dunedinites do have problems is the basic fact that it costs more to travel daily on a bus than to take the car – in terms of petrol, at least. If every member of our family used a bus instead of being taxied everywhere (that’s assuming with the present timetable they could find a bus), our budget would skyrocket. Either that, or we’d just stop going lots of places.

The chicken or the egg. As long as prices stay up, and as long as there are no buses when they’re needed, who’s going to bother going on them?

More indecision: parking meters back in the main shopping area. Just when we’d got the city beginning to look halfway decent, someone want to clutter it up again. (Why not bring back overhead electricity wiring as well?)

The problem isn’t the fact of parking in the main street, it’s the fact of cars in the main street. Rather than plant rows of meters again, let’s think about making the Octagon through to Frederick St a pedestrian-only zone. The idea’s been around for years – let’s move with the times and get on with it.

And finally, a possible decision – 16-year-olds in night clubs.

I’d like to be optimistic about human nature, so I’ll try. Of course they won’t drink, of course no one will  buy drinks for them, of course the bar staff will have time to supervise, of course there won’t be trouble, of course the drinking problem in New Zealand won’t be encouraged.

Of course, pigs will become a problem to air traffic controllers.

 

Trooping the Colour 

The Queen herself didn’t actually celebrate her birthday twice a year; but we in New Zealand celebrated it on a day different to the actual day she was born. Apparently the first Monday in June is the day – in England – when the Trooping the Colour takes place. In England, of course, it’s also the start of Summer, and the ‘official’ birthday of whichever monarch is in power. New Zealand, without consideration, celebrates it at the beginning of winter, which makes no sense at all.

Otago Anniversary Day is supposed to be observed on the closest Monday to the 23^rd of March. However, most schools celebrate it on Easter Tuesday, even when the school holidays occur at the same time. Offices tend to close on the official day, but shops often stay open and also tack it onto Easter. Even though many of them now stay open as well!

I don’t know which Andersons (Andy) Bay roundabout I’m talking about here. Partly this is my ongoing dislike of roundabouts that aren’t really big enough, or are too big – or like the newest one in Oamaru, where I now live, are so big that they barely fit the intersection, and cars struggle to rotate around them. Ambulances and fire engines avoid it completely.images 

I’m intrigued that way back in 1993 I was advocating for a pedestrian only main street. I've long since changed my mind about this. In the last couple of years, part of George St (the main street), was turned into a semi-pedestrian street. Except that cars can drive along it single file, and in one direction, as well. It has not exactly proved popular, and worse, it’s removed even more parking spaces from the central city, something that a peculiarly ideological City Council (the one before the current one) decided was a good idea. Now traffic flow in the city is worse than it was, and finding a park is more of a nightmare than ever. Pro-bikies, who have gained sections of the roads where car used to park and where bikies seldom appear, say this is a great thing, carefully forgetting that the elderly don’t tend to ride bikes, that it’s very difficult to take home your weekly grocery shopping on a bike, that getting children to school is impossible on one bike and so on. And that Dunedin has many hills…