I was excited as the next croc to spend the better part of a year waiting for Steve Irwin Way to be upgraded from a single lane 80km/hr stretch to a slightly wider single lane 80km/hr stretch between Beerwah and Landsborough… with a new set of traffic lights.
And for a while those lights at Australia Zoo seemed a fair cop.
It’s a popular place and there’s plenty of vehicles entering and exiting, especially during the school holidays.
But surely it’s not just me wondering which dope at Transport and Main Roads set the light change switches.
I am regularly forced to stop at a red light heading southbound when there is no actual traffic exiting south.
At the same time there are often cars banked to turn right, but the lights for northbound traffic stay green.
The result – southbound traffic is stopped for no reason. Exiting northbound traffic has to continue waiting.
It would have been smarter to allow exiting southbound traffic to have a giveway sign to exit, not be bound by lights that were clearly designed by a committee on a Friday.
Game of chicken
Where were all the eggs in Maleny last week? All I wanted last Thursday was an omelette but do you think I could find a carton of eggs? Woolies was out, the IGA was all out, barring a curated, handpicked free range case that cost about $12.
I was starting to think life would be easier as a vegan, but then I read Woodlands is expanding its poultry farm down in Beerburrum to 450,000 hens to boost supply, so I’ll hold off.
Short-stay scourge
The Sunshine Coast Council is joining others in increasing rates for Airbnb properties. Good. Wish they would quadruple it or more. These so-called tech ‘disrupters’ – who love that term until they’re accused of disrupting accepted social essentials such as, say, affordable housing – should be held to account.
In saying that, property owners should act a little less like rabid capitalists and consider the increasingly foreign concept of a moral obligation to do right by others, especially if you have the means.