Skip to main content

On yer bike Prius boy.


Have you noticed the empty car parking spaces in Auckland city car parking buildings - the ones that are designated to be for 'hybrid' vehicles. If you own one of these ridiculous vehicles you get priority parking. No one uses them because there are so few hybrids in use. The empty spaces (paradoxically) increase the city's carbon footprint because more vehicles have to continue the ascent to a higher level.

The logic of rewarding owners of hybrid powered cars with prius-ority parking is discriminatory and denies the reality that all cars congest the city, causing wasted fuel consumption for all and the emission of tons of toxic exhausts into the atmosphere. Recent research has suggested that air pollution kills over a thousand people in New Zealand each year. So, while in 'silent running' mode (ala a U Boat), your Prius may be emitting little more than an unpleasant smugness into the atmos but it is holding up the guy in the smoky diesel Citroen that you sold to buy you stupid little jalopy. If people with hybrids really cared for the environment they would catch the bus or ride a bike.

I think I shall attach a little sail to the roof of my limo (attached by one of those little suckers that you might find attached to a kid's bow and arrow set). Then it will be a Hybrid - harnessing both the throbbing power of a 2.5 litre, 24 valve Swedish donk and the fickle wind. Let the bureaucrats argue that my efforts to save the planet are any more meaningful than the feeble Prius and, therefore any less worthy of being placed at the head of the queue.

Comments

  1. Maybe the people who own the hybrids are riding bikes and catching the bus . . . hence the empty parking spaces!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ze Frank thinks so you don't have to

Ze Frank appeared on my radar when I saw his presentation among the excellent TED Talks videos . This morning I was reading Russell Davies planning blog in which he referred to a clip by Ze Frank - Where do ideas come from. Here's the transcript: "...Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima [sic] writes, "Are you ever gonna break into song again? Are you running out of ideas?" Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima, that's a good question. I run out of ideas every day! Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themse...

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St...

Why billboards must go.

The problem with billboards and advertising in public places is they are an invasion of privacy. Unlike magazine, tv, radio (etc) advertising you cannot choose to turn it off or avoid it. Nor does it offer anything in return. It is a medium that offers no benefit or advantage to the person it is inflicted on. At least television ads subsidise the programming. Without doubt some billboards are entertaining - I thought the anti GE poster for short lived MADGE activist group was particularly good. But most are rubbish. Literally. Badly executed. Nothing important to say. The debate has led to a great deal of hysteria - mostly from people with a vested interest in perpetuating the deployment of hoardings. Perhaps the idea that the issue at stake is 'property rights' is the creepiest. If you own a building you have every right to plaster anything you like on its external surfaces. Is that an antisocial point of view? I think so. In the UK you could have an ASBO slapped on you for si...