So if you’ve got a big bull-barred tank and you head down the Mitchell and Great Western highways to Sydney in peak hour, you’d cop a hefty toll.

Drivers who don’t want to cough up the extra dough would be banished to secondary roads so if you’ve got a Mini and you leave at midnight and go on the back roads via Blayney, Newbridge and Tarana to Lithgow and then the Bells Line of Road, you’d pay less.

But just think what it would be like around here if the scheme was introduced.

You could put a $20 toll on Summer Street to stop the hoons racing up and down as well as taking out most of the trucks and opening up car parking spaces for the lazy people who want to park right at the front door of the shops they’re going to.

You could put $15 on some of our painfully-slow 50km/h limit streets like Bathurst, Molong, Forbes, Cargo and Woodward to give drivers a dream run because there wouldn’t be any other traffic if they had to pay that much.

And the distributor?

Well, to get more people to use it and considering its patchwork surface and snail-like 70km/h limit, a 20c toll would be fine for the stretch between the highway and Forbes Road.

But to appease the residents in the Wentworth estate when Ploughmans Lane becomes a ‘feeder’ road, a $75 toll would keep heavy traffic out. In fact it would keep all traffic out.

And isn’t that what this fool idea of tolling every road will do if introduced?

Up the pole

 There’s hardly a light pole in the shopping centre that hasn’t been plastered with advertising posters, giving Summer Street and Anson Street a cheap and shabby look.

The posters push a variety of things including concerts while others encourage people to steal, saying theft makes the chain stores less profitable.

But measures to stop these vandals could be on the way with Attorney General Brad Hazzard ordering a review of laws to crack down on bill posters who cost  councils millions of dollars a year to remove their work.

The Department of Justice next month will look at transferring responsibility from the bill poster to whoever the poster promotes, increased penalties and giving councils the power to issue penalty notices.

If the new laws were in force now, Adam, old mate, you’d be in a spot of bother.

Letting the grass grow

There’s lots of TV advertising for a Bathurst real estate company that plugs the slogan “it’s the little things that count...”

One of the commercials shows the agents mowing a lawn at a home for sale.

Perhaps Orange real estate agents could follow suit because it’s easy to spot the unoccupied homes in Orange that are for sale or lease.

The lawn at the front is usually a foot high.

That really isn’t a good look for prospective buyers.

Clock him

“I hear the boys are going to strike,” says a worker to his mate.

“What for?” he asks.

“Shorter hours.”

“Good on them. I’ve always thought 60 minutes was too long for an hour.”

Weighing in on Admire Rakti 

The death through heart failure of Melbourne Cup favourite Admire Rakti has upset animal protectionists but the sport is as safe as it can be.

What can probably be challenged is the 400-year-old practice of handicapping horses that began at fairs and markets in the Middle Ages.

It was back in the early 1600s during the reign of James 1, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, that a system of adding weight to try to equalise a horse's chances of winning was first used.

And following suit it’s been the same here for as long as horses have been going around.

But why do they take a champion horse, always the best in a race, and stick so much weight on its back that it can’t win or does itself harm trying.

Look what happed to Phar Lap.

Probably the most loved Australian icon of all he was a huge chestnut gelding who came good as a three-year-old and went on to win 36 of his next 41 starts, sometimes by 50 lengths.

That made him red-hot favourite for the 1930 Melbourne Cup months beforehand but as a firm target for the handicappers he was loaded up with 9st 12 lb (about 62.5kg) and there were doubts he could handle it.

But even after slowing down, Phar Lap won by three lengths at 11/8 on, making him the first odds-on favourite in the history of the cup.

However, the handicappers struck back and in the 1931 Melbourne Cup they penalised him a massive 10st 10lb (64.1kg) and even jockey Jim Pike doubted he could carry it.

He said it was like having a second jockey on his back and he wanted him scratched but race officials wouldn’t agree because they said it would affect their crowd.

Pike realised the weight had beaten him well before the home turn so he eased him back and finished eighth.

Admire Rakti had to carry 58.5kg (9.21st) in this year’s Melbourne Cup. Did that contribute to his heart failure?

Can you imagine penalising the champions in other sports in this doubtful way?

What about putting a 10kg weight on Rabbitohs’ star Greg Inglis’s back to slow him up so players on the opposing side can catch him?

Or making Shane Watson use a half-sized bat to keep his scoring down?

Or forcing V8 driver Jamie Whincup to race with three wheels on his car so the opposition has a chance of beating him.

Dragging down the sport’s best doesn’t make sense.