Bright lights, big city in the heart of darkness
DAVE ARMSTRONG
The car in front of me was driving at a snail’s pace and wasn’t responding quick enough to the green light change up ahead.
I was muttering expletives and straining to see who was the culprit holding up traffic. The headrests in the offending vehicle made it look like there was either a person with a pin-head sitting in the driver’s seat, or I was experiencing my first interaction with a driverless car.
Eventually – after three light changes and much tooting from not only me but the guy behind me, who thought I was the culprit – we all managed to, with a nod to The Doors, ‘‘break on through to the other side’’.
For months, we’ve been told to get ready for driverless cars, that their advent will be a complete game-changer, and to prepare for insurance companies making premiums so high for old-style cars that we will be ‘‘driven’’ to switch to the new fleet. I have my doubts.
With New Zealand’s road toll at about 300 a year, even if there is one death that can be laid at the feet, as it were, of a driverless car, it will put the wind up we humans.
Better we perish at our own hands, rather than by the mistake of a machine. The increasing zombification of humanity so that its needs are taken care of by machines makes anyone who has watched a Terminator film feeling frightened, frazzled and freaked out.
Last Christmas, an autonomous 15-seater shuttle was set to be trialled at Harewood airport in Christchurch in readiness for the brave new auto world.
Former secretary of transport Martin Matthews has warned autonomous vehicles are coming – ready or not – and we better get on board the bus and embrace the future.
Tell that to TV presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May, Matt LeBlanc, The Stig, and the millions of followers of their respective motoring shows. It will take more than the threat and the shock of the new for the male to relinquish the reins of his trusty, steel steed.
How vividly I remembered what a blow it was to my father when he was told, post-diagnosis of a brain tumour, that his driving days were over. Even though his car wasn’t much chop – my mother referred to it as that ‘‘fugged-up, moving chesterfield’’ – it was a place an hombre could call home.
Dreamily driving around the district and beyond its environs – sometimes ending up halfway down the South Island – of a weekend with me in the passenger seat, was an indulgence that sent my mother absolutely orbital.
On our return, he would try to silently navigate the crunch of the gravelled driveway to the garage without encountering my exasperated mother three hours a-stewing and a-slaving away in the garden. Her head would pop up from a herbaceous border and she would yell: ‘‘Where the hell have you been?’’
He would stuff his hands in his pockets, lower his head and mutter something about having just gone out to the dairy as she furiously raked the leaves, threw them into the burning drum and set fire to it with the hot-eyed anger of a pyromaniac.
Now that I look back and toil my own garden without assistance, I feel deep shame at leaving my mother to slog away in hers. How callous was that child not to perform the Brownies’ motto and immediately ‘‘lend a hand’’.
Escape – it’s only an ignition switch away with the master and commander of his/her own universe at the wheel and the open road before you, as you drive while the mind processes all the hurts and triumphs of the day.
It will be a massive psychological wrench to relinquish the human-controlled cockpit to a control-freak machine. Frankly, I’d rather be plucked from the road by the talons of a haast eagle and spirited away to be used as lining for its nest, rather than be driven by a robot.
But there is one instance where the driverless car could be useful. I keep a bag of small change in the sleeve of my car door to give to window-washers at the lights.
I’ve never had a bad experience with a window-washer, till recently when I agreed to employ one of them. After he had completed his task washing the bird shot from the screen, I passed him a bag – the wrong bag containing fruit peelings!
The lights suddenly changed and I had to drive off as he angrily mimed trying to kick my passenger door in.
I felt like doing a loop to go back to explain my mistake and offer the proper bag of loot. But there was a pressing appointment to keep, and one does feel at a disadvantage sitting in a car trying to offer a lame explanation as an enraged youth stands over you. Where’s the mace when you need it?
Fed-up commuters tired of being harassed by non-tax-paying window-washers, who can make up to hundreds of dollars a day, have called for legislation to make window-washing illegal.
Councils can ignore this clamour, knowing that driverless cars will soon become so common place that window-washers, unable to negotiate with humans, will completely disappear from the landscape.
What a shame. I like their chancer grins, grubby rags and dirty bottles of water. That’s what I call proper street theatre.
Twas the night before Christmas in lovely Newtown. Our street light wasn’t working, was the whole city down? So we called the council to express our dismay. They assured us they’d fix it, in just a few days.
Generally, I tire of people who think councils should only concern themselves with footpaths, drains and street lighting. I like that Wellington City Council provides housing, supports the arts and many other things. Yet I also want them to clear drains and fix street lights when necessary.
So when, on Christmas Eve, I noticed that our street was very dark, I became concerned. I would hate the many people who walk down our street at night to get mugged, or worse, which is much more likely if there is no street lighting.
Further investigation revealed that while the street light 30 metres down the road was working perfectly, the one right outside our house was not, plunging more than half the street into darkness.
I decided it was time to take immediate action so I said to my wife, ‘‘you should ring the council about that street light’’.
She was gobsmacked at actually getting through to the council on Christmas Eve. A pleasant woman answered the phone and assured us she was ‘‘on to it’’. The council would fix it in a few days.
Well actually, the company that the council outsources maintenance of the city’s street lights to would fix it. She even gave us a reference number.
Exactly a week later, the street was still dark. Would we wake up on New Year’s Day to find someone dead on our footpath?
A second call to the council found an equally pleasant person assuring us that action would be taken. Call reference numbers were handed out like they were New Year’s kisses.
Yet our street light’s bulb wasn’t replaced that week.
How many Wellington City Council employees does it actually take to change a light bulb? One to change the bulb and 14 to work in the call centre? One to change the bulb and eight to stand for mayor?
One to change the bulb, one to write a report recommending that bulb-changing be outsourced, one to engage with the community, one to work on community resilience to darkness events, and one to run an expensive communications campaign entitled ‘‘Wellington – the lightbulb capital’’?
For nearly four weeks, we watched shadowy figures lurk around our street in darkness. Then a post-Christmas miracle occurred. The light was fixed and our street was safe again.
There will be talk of many bigspending civic projects this year. But let’s hope our council keeps its eye on the ball about those really boring but necessary things such as drains and taking less than a month to change a lightbulb.
How would the council feel if I paid my rates or delivered my library books back four weeks’ late?
During last week’s ‘‘weather bomb’’, our street flooded. A drain which has had more ratepayers’ money spent on it that the Aswan High Dam blocked again. Would we have to wait a month for the council to unblock this drain? No! They were ‘‘on to it’’ in minutes.
A pleasant woman answered the phone and assured us she was ‘on to it’. The council would fix it in a few days. Exactly a week later, the street was still dark.
Or should I say, the company sub-contracted by the company that won the council outsourcing tender to unblock drains was onto it in minutes. Sure, they used a hire truck, and the ‘‘ditch witch’’ they used to clear the drain looked like it was last utilised during the 1942 siege of Leningrad– but it did the job very well.
Even better, the Red Army troops manning the ‘‘ditch witch’’ did not knock on our door and charge us nearly $10,000 for fixing the drain, as happened to the unfortunate Warwick Eves who was asked by the council to pay for a faulty sewer pipe well outside his Khandallah property.
I have a solution for Mr Eves. He should propose building an airport runway or convention centre in his backyard. That way, not only will the council likely fix the pipe for no charge, they may even shower him with millions of dollars for ‘‘moving Wellington forward’’, whether his plan is a sensible one or not.