This post is about a local issue and most readers of this blog won’t understand it at all. But I feel the need to vent.

Ever since an extension a few years back, the intersection of Yangebup Road and Spearwood Avenue near my house has been obscenely dangerous. Spearwood Ave has become a major truck route into the nearby light industrial area, and has a speed limit of 70 km/h. Trouble is, there’s a hill leading up to the intersection that makes it impossible to see cars turning out of Yangebup Road. About six months ago, the City of Cockburn promised traffic lights at the intersection and took the (rather bizarre) step of closing Yangebup Road on the western side of Spearwood Ave to (supposedly) make the intersection less dangerous.

Three weeks ago, they sent out a flyer saying that the plan had changed, and the current T-junction would remain in place, albeit with a so-called ‘seagull’ island. We’d like your opinion on this change, the flyer said, and by the way there’ll be a public forum about it. Yesterday.

In my submission, I basically said that weirdo islands are not the answer and that blocking off Yangebup Road is little more than a joke (it blocks a major bus route!). The other day, the city were kind enough to send me a reply, explaining the council’s final decision … which is to go ahead with the new plan regardless of its stupidity.

Either someone will die at that intersection soon, or the City of Cockburn will lobby hard for a grant in the next round of Federal ‘black spot’ funding. (Oh wait … maybe that was their plan all along?)

Hot on the heels of ZoomIn: Google Maps (but not Google Earth) finally has Australian road data!

But alas, their search doesn’t work yet, and the data’s about five years old. Oh well.

In another mildly exciting development, Transperth have effectively announced that the SmartRider trial is officially over and they are now moving to Full Implementation ™ … at a staggered rate.

They have sent out SmartRiders to everyone who had a Seniors Card (my dad got his two days ago) and told them to start using it immediately. They’ve also stopped giving fare reimbursements to us guinea-pig types, and declared in an e-mail that “the level of system reliability continues to improve” and “we are most confident that the rollout will continue with full implementation to all users by the end of this year”.

I’m not sure they can claim that everything works just right — I still occasionally get told “Invalid, Wait for Stop” — but then if they don’t roll out now they probably never will.