Fellow Melbourne cycling commuter woowoowoo made an excellent entry last week (with a delicious title "The RACV is a 'HO" – love it!) regarding the RACV's Red Spot survey:
It is nothing short of a sham… designed to elicit one-sided, knee jerk responses to problems that cannot be easily solved. The basic problem is a no-brainer: roads designed 10, 20, 30 years ago struggle to cope with todayís traffic. Gee, why would that be? The roads havenít changed, could it be the traffic? Hang on a minute - there are more cars than there used to be! Eureka!! Lets face it, if you are sitting in a traffic jam, steaming up about the time youíre wasting, you are part of the problem!
[emphasis added]
While I agree with the general thrust, I don't think you can blame the RACV for playing to its constituency even if (as woowoowoo contends) they may be a bit out of touch with the make up of that constituency. Let's face it, none of us is purely motorist, cyclist, pedestrian, or public transport traveller. Even the most dedicated driver gets out and walks sometimes (although looking at the way some people behave in shopping centre car parks, you might wonder — but I digress).
And it's good to see the RACV respoond: Peter Daly (RACV Chief Engineer Traffic and Roads) went to the trouble of crafting a couple of fairly lengthy and reasonable responses. Some people seem to think that organisations responding on personal blogs is a bit "spooky" but we should be pleased that they're listening. And frankly they'd be stupid to ignore the free feedback; an entry like woowoowoo's amounts to market research they just couldn't buy.
So from where I sit it's thumbs-up both to woowoowoo and the RACV – what we've got there looks like healthy discusssion and debate.