On people who are less trustworthy than politicians

It's a sad fact that journalists are lazy buggers - and if they think they can get away with not working, they will.

Witness the coverage of last week's publication, in the UK, of the Department for Transport's (whatever happened to the Department of Transport? Fed up with people asking whether they were "for" or "against" it?) latest efforts to siphon obscene amounts of public money into private investors' pockets. Oops, sorry, I should have spelled that "... periodic survey of public attitudes to traffic congestion".

There wasn't much coverage, but such as there was, was clearly based on the Department conjunction Transport's press release. The BBC's headline is "Half of UK road users support usage-based road charging". And other outlets are no better. Even the normally-cynical El Reg has swallowed this line of spin.

There is no indication that any of these journalists has read the survey itself. If they had, they might have noticed that's not what it says.

True, over half of people are against the present system, and I don't blame them, because road tax became indefensible around the time horse-drawn carts became rare. But they don't express approval of the options being pushed here. Quite the opposite: when asked "Do you think a new charging scheme is fair?" - without giving any information about what it might involve - over half of those questioned return an unequivocal and full-throated "No!". Barely one-quarter say "Yes". And this opinion has actually hardened over the past few years.

The headline figure, as far as I can tell, comes from asking whether the current system "should be changed so that the amount people pay relates more closely to how often, when and where they use the roads" - that elicits about 50% of "Ayes". But faced with the more specific suggestions that people who drive on busy roads, or at peak times, should pay more, that proportion drops to 25% or less.

If you're advocating road pricing, those answers don't add up. The public appears to be "confused". Me, I think the public understands the issue far better than the people framing the survey, and certainly better than the journalists covering it.

Fortunately, there is one group of people whose livelihood really does depend on interpreting this kind of survey correctly: politicians. Things have come to a pretty pass when I'm appealing to politicians to save us from the idleness and corruption of journalists, but that's where I find myself today. And the UK's coalition government, bless its insecure little heart, has correctly divined what its civil servants are up to here. It "has ruled out for the duration of this Parliament national road pricing on existing roads and any preparation for such schemes beyond that time".

Let's hear it for the politicians...

Dumb ideas

"This US healthcare business is so boring." Thus Susan to me the other night, as we watched Jon Stewart dutifully mocking the president's wavering on the public option.

She's got a point. It's beyond irritating, how that "debate" is spilling out to the rest of the world.

Fortunately, New Zealand politics is livening up a little - as tends to happen in the first term of a new government, while there are still some fresh ideas. This month sees the frankly embarrassing referendum on the thorny question "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?"

I don't know if there's any official worldwide record, but I'd like to nominate this as quite possibly the dumbest question ever put to a national vote. And certainly one of the most dishonest. ("Parental correction" isn't illegal, it's discipline that is.)

I voted Yes, because I figure that's the answer more likely to irritate the referendum's initiators. But I have no illusions about the outcome.

The bright side is that the prime minister, John Key, is so mortified by the whole thing that he's felt impelled, in the closing days of voting, to make a real effort to deflect the headlines.

Yesterday, that effort took the form of a 60-page document from the Ministry of Transport listing 62 ideas to make our roads safer. A selection at random: raising the driving age to 16, raising the driving age to 17, lowering blood alcohol levels, making signs clearer, encouraging bikers to wear reflective gear, lowering speed limits, compulsory third-party insurance, ever-increasing anti-speeding/anti-drink-driving/anti-cyclists-and-pedestrians-as-targets publicity campaigns...

Much of this I'm all in favour of. But there are some truly dumb ideas in there, presumably on the basis that "everyone who's talking about this, isn't talking about That Bloody Referendum".

Making "driving while fatigued" an offence, for instance. Just what form would a roadside "fatigue test" take? The report mentions that in New Jersey, if you've been awake for 24 hours and then get in a car and kill someone, you can get 10 years in chokey. But there's a world of difference between "driving while fatigued" and "killing someone by driving while fatigued". The latter is relatively easy to detect - corpses on the road tend to draw at least some attention fairly quickly, even in New Jersey.

Then there's an idea to make child seats and restraints compulsory for all children under 148cm (4'10"), regardless of age. It's bad enough that when you drive your teenager and her short friend together, one of them will have to endure the humiliation of a booster seat. But even some adults are shorter than that. Do we have to strap them in, too? And who's responsible for that - the driver, or the adult? Can we expect to see taxi drivers turning fares down for being too short? Will short people be required to sit at the back of buses? Can we look forward to identification cards being issued to people who look kinda short, to certify that they are in fact at least 149cm tall?

All of these distractions I leafed past, in my hunt for the change that the new government hinted at last year. It's not attracting much attention right now - but it's in there, at number 17: "Change the give way rules for turning traffic". (Page 22 of the ministry's document (PDF), for completists among you.)

Not a minute before time, as the present rules make less sense than a musical about cats.

Oh wait...

Autumn

The long, hot Kiwi summer has given way to the abrupt Kiwi autumn. It's a wonderful thing how nature sees this coming and sends precursors - leaves start to drop, and cicadas go into hibernation, long before daytime temperatures have dropped below shirt-sleeve weather. But now the wisdom of those precautions is evident. It's positively nippy outdoors - rain, wind, daytime temperatures in the mid-to-low teens. Yesterday evening, I put on a jumper for the first time in six months.

Any week now, we're going to have to break out the winter duvet.

Murphy's Law dictates that this change should coincide with the arrival, in our office complex, of some bastard who gets in before I do and parks in the unmarked space that I've been using for months. Which means I now have to drive on and park on the street, a couple of hundred metres away. Not far, but quite far enough to get pretty damp if the weather wants to make it so.

And then there's the ritual walk back ten minutes later, to make sure I switched the lights off.

I could, of course, try getting up and coming in earlier. Yeah, right. I'm still enjoying the whole experience of the sun rising before I do, I don't want to throw that away.

Or I could try to pay for my own marked parking space in the complex. I don't actually know if that's allowed, for individuals, but I could ask. But that would make me sound and feel like a pampered wuss, like management.

Or I could start taking the bus to work - my walk would be about the same length that way, but at least I wouldn't have to worry about leaving the headlights on. That's quite an appealing option in some ways. Buses are a great boon to writers - they provide not only material, but also time to think. Mostly, of course, it's time spent thinking about how long the damn' journey is taking you; but in truth, it's not much longer than by car.

No, it's the waiting at the cold bus stop that puts me off. And Auckland city authorities are talking about improving its bus service by getting bigger buses. That, of course, means fewer buses, which means longer waits. Talk about missing the point.

Also in the changes - the quality of houses for sale has dropped abruptly. We saw only one place last weekend, which we dismissed laughingly; others we drove by and decided without hesitation that we didn't really want to get out of the car in those neighbourhoods, let alone live there.

We do have one place on our shortlist now. It's for auction next Wednesday. Our experience of auctions thus far has not been happy; if this one goes as badly as the first, I shall be really quite upset...

So please wish us luck. We could use it.