Carl Scully, the ex NSW roads minister, has a piece in the SMH today in which he tries to blame cyclists for his mistakes. He claims that we’re second class citizens who shouldn’t be on the roads and who don’t pay for our use of the roads anyway. The comments have it right in calling him on his bullshit; it’s not vehicle registrations that pay for roads, but taxes.

Anyway, non-motorised transport was in Sydney before cars, and we’ll be here afterwards when all the oil has gone. By the way, there’s new reports from a whistleblower that the International Energy Agency has covered up the extent to which oil reserves are being depleted. Of course, they’re denying that.

Anyway, you can see, from the embedded OSM map, that the M7 cycleway that Sculley trumpets as his gift to us, that keeps us away from traffic, does indeed go from nowhere to nowhere as a commentator on the article says.

I guess it’s nice to have about 40 kilometres of dedicated cycleway paralleling a freeway, but it’d be nice to actually have it connect to other cycling facilities. That’s the same issue as several inner-city cycleways, and part of Sculley’s problem – that, like all NSW ministers and departments, they generally  do a half-arsed job that caters to the masses, and do only enough to get themselves re-elected not to fix serious problems in infrastructure. If Carl had been competent in his job as roads minister we would have had decent cycling and public transport facilities in all the west of north-west of Sydney and none of the current congestion issues.

Since he’s popped out of nowhere to defend his reputation (black as it is), he must be planning to suck from the public teat again, or to get a consulting job in private industry – most likely with Macquarie. They must have made so much money through his “planning” that it’s payback time.