ORANGE drivers can expect to spend about two full 24-hour days a year stuck at traffic lights and intersections.
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Add a few trips to a takeaway where you’re likely to be in the drive-through for anything up to 10 minutes and you’re adding more time lost.
So traffic controls in Orange aren’t doing drivers any favours along with the city having more registered vehicles on the roads than people living here.
And the delays are costing us dearly with cars burning up an average 1.6 litres of petrol a week while stopped with engines idling.
This equates to about 84 litres a year which at present prices is costing you $112 while your car is standing still.
For every two minutes an engine is idling, it uses about the same amount of fuel it takes to drive 1.6km.
An hour’s idling burns nearly 1.6 litres of fuel and that’s about what the average Orange driver does in a week with traffic surveys showing they idle their car between five and 10 minutes a day.
The traffic experts say you should turn off your engine if the wait is longer than 15 seconds because idling after that uses more fuel compared with restarting the engine.
Theoretically if all the 38,000 drivers in Orange cut their idling time by only three minutes a day for a year, it would collectively save them more than one million litres of fuel, or around $1.6 million.
TV schoolgirl Kylie Mole in her TV show The Comedy Company popularised the term ‘bogan’ as a dopey person “who rooly sux”.
That was 25 years ago but bogan has since become an accepted description of a stupid feeble person that in the words of Kylie Mole had the real Bogans in Western NSW “rooly spewin’”.
They distanced themselves from the common usage of the word and a Bogan Shire Council spokesman at the time said people who used the term in a derogatory way were relatively uneducated, hadn’t had an opportunity in life and deserved a bit of worldliness.
But now Bogan Shire at Nyngan has done a complete u-turn and, of all things, intends to put up an $8000 3.6m-high statue of its perception of a bogan complete with thongs, singlet, fishing rod and beer cooler.
Shire mayor Ray Donald says while people view the term bogan in a negative way, efforts to promote the more attractive aspects of the bogan identity has the potential to boost tourism in the shire.
The Rev Graham McLeod from Nyngan’s St Mark’s Anglican Church originally suggested the Big Bogan to the council and says it was about tourist potential and place recognition and would give travellers another reason to stop.
He even hoped Nyngan could attract people from overseas to visit the town to have their photo taken with the Big Bogan.
Well, good luck with that.
ON a school trip to an observatory a boy watches an astronomer looking through a telescope.
Just then a star falls.
“Wow,’ says the boy. “You sure are a great shot.”
THOSE futuristic flying machines called drones are really starting to take off, so to speak.
It’s a far cry from the early days when farmers threatened to shoot them down after animal welfare activists used a drone to spy on free-range chook farms at Dora Creek on the Central Coast.
However, the wheel has turned and farmers like Ben Watts at Molong is now using a drone to keep a check on sheep on his property.
Drones are also being used by NRL team coaches to film training to give them an aerial perspective of players’ moves and by real estate agents photographing houses and units.
But bureaucracy has plans to tighten regulations in the next few months.
The Civil Aviation Safety Authority already requires drones to be kept more than 30 metres away from other people, not be flown over crowds at sporting events, only be operated in daylight, not be closer than 5km from airports and flown below 121 metres.
CASA requires commercial operators to be licensed while infringement notices can be issued if the regulations are broken.
Let’s hope the new regulations don’t put too many restrictions on people flying drones they can buy cheaply from places like Orange Hobby Kingdom in Summer Street.
These smaller quadcopters can give P-plate pilots good practice delivering chocolates over the fence to neighbours in readiness for bigger machines later that could deliver a six-pack from the pub, a book from the library or bread from the supermarket.
The possibilities are endless.
Because all you people are sending emails and text messages rather than sticking a stamp on a letter and posting it, Australia Post is going broke and that’s having all sorts of effects on communities like Orange.
Australia Post wants to charge you a special annual postie fee in addition to a proposed $1 stamp price if you want your letters delivered daily otherwise you’ll have to be satisfied with a two-day delay for low-priority mail.
But it’s not only our posties who are under threat. Australia Post wants to pull out our red postboxes if they attract less than 25 letters a day.
Orange has a good spread of the boxes in residential areas and there’s no doubt some of them will be deemed commercially unviable and will bite the dust.
Obviously that will inconvenience the people in all parts of the city who still write letters and send cards but it’s a clear sign the internet age is taking over our lives.
And, really, that’s not a good thing.