...And now for something completely different...

From Ray Bradbury's futuristic Fahrenheit 451 - published in 1953:

'I sometimes think that drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,' she said. 'If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?' (p. 12)

'"...Have you seen the two hundred-foot-long billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet long? But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it would last."

Alternative to the car? No, surely not.

The following two headings were in yesterday's (7 April) edition of The Dominion Post:

"Roading chaos spurs strategy rethink"

"National slips car crushing into gear"

The first related to worsening road saftey figures in Wellington while the second concerned Police Minister, Judith (Crusher) Collins' plan to crush boy racer's cars.

Unfortunately talk of shifting our transport sector away from the private motor vehicle has been conspicuous in its absence in all of this. It seems our leaders (and newspaper editors for that matter) need to consider what a 'strategy rethink' really entails.

As the often cited quote of Albert Einstein says: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."