LOTS of people here are following European trends and swinging a leg over a bike, so it’s little wonder a university graduate has just kicked off, if that’s the right word, a pushbike hire service in Sydney.
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He’s starting with 160 bikes fitted with GPS tracking and left at railway stations in central Sydney for people who can’t find a car park to get to work. His plan is to put 6000 on Sydney's streets within six months.
The bikes are found and unlocked with a smartphone app, come with a helmet, and cost $1.99 for 30 minutes. They can be left wherever you like.
Orange City Council has been providing bike paths here for years so, despite winter, why not join the mob and pedal to work? It’s wheelie good for your health, will save petrol and get cars off the streets. There’s even bike parking areas for you.
And if you want to stand out from the crowd, exotic car makers are building special edition bikes like the carbon fibre-framed Bugatti that can be yours for a mere $39,000. Or there’s the 30-speed Mercedes for $3700, automatic Porsche ($7999), BMW with computerised gears ($3430), electric motor-powered Ford ($3695), Ferrari ($2550) or an automatic Lamborghini ($3999). All have carbon fibre frames.
Cyclists have never had it so good.
A ROUNDABOUT SAFETY MOVE INDEED
WE’VE just had a new $635,000 roundabout built in Woodward Street and days after it was opened that mobile speed camera thing that’s saving so many lives there in front of Elephant Park is back raising more money for the state government.
It’s been there a good few times, including at dusk, parked on the side of the widest road in Orange in an area the Roads and Maritime Services believes is a ‘high-risk’ location.
There’s never been any serious accidents, so it’s really a wonder the roundabout was built in the first place.
WORTH CONSIDERING A CLASSIC TACTIC
LATELY Orange has been having problems on weekends with drunken yobbos flooding out of the late night pubs, hell bent on causing mayhem.
But there’s a proven formula we could follow: turn on some of the great composers and turn away the troublemakers. Even Maccas wants to give it a go.
Just think what it would be like in Robertson Park at 3am with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto blasting away from overhead speakers set up on the band rotunda?
Or streaming out of the Royal Hotel to the Lords Place taxi rank to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.
Maybe Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement, from Stanley Kubrick’s dark film Clockwork Orange would do the trick outside the Hotel Orange.
Playing concertos, overtures, minuets and symphonies to late-night hoons works in other places, so rather than depending on late night taxis, play some of this upmarket music and watch them disappear into the night at the speed of sound.
PM’S BANTER IN A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN
QUICK-WITTED former Prime Minister Sir Bob Menzies, after watching his first rugby league Test between Australia and Great Britain in Sydney in 1962, told his hosts, “I read the rules of this strange game last night but there are some points I don’t understand.
They immediately offered to make me a referee.”