As someone who would like to get out of my truck and onto a bike to turn my daily work commute into a useful form of exercise instead of the frustrating, angst-filled grind it now represents, I was more than a little shocked by reporter Kathy Sundstrom’s story on Monday.

How could a government that says it wants us out of cars and in public transport or on treddlies spend $30 million on a new bridge and forget to make any provision for cyclists?

And how could a local authority, which presumably would have had some sort of look at the plans, just shrug its shoulders and let it happen.

For those of you who may have missed Kathy’s Monday Agenda piece, it explained that while there is a beautifully wide stretch of pavement for bikes and people across the new bridge , when you get to the north side there is nowhere to go.

Well, there is somewhere to go, but that somewhere is a ridiculous route through canefields and across the busy David Low Way up near Bli Bli.

If you wanted to go to any of the population centres on the north shore – like Twin Waters, Mudjimba or Pacific Paradise – you would take a car.

Maroochy Council was hell-bent on building a bikeway straight through an environmentally sensitive parabolic dune at Yaroomba until the screams of residents and the sobering effect of an impending election intervened.

But, when it came to this expensive new piece of infrastructure, apparently none of our councillors gave much of a thought nor offered much of an argument for including the critical bit that links the much-touted coastal bikeway.

Politicians are quick to don a helmet and jump on a bike for a publicity shot but that appears the limit of their commitment to providing real alternatives in our transport matrix.

The $600,000 worth of glass screens on the bridge do look pretty cool but I know how the money could have been better spent.

Just what’s the plan?

What’s going on? That’s the question being asked in the planning community about the seemingly indecent haste with which an application for a new high-rise at Mooloolaba is being processed.

When a development application fails to comply on boundary setbacks and falls miserably short on its provision of car parking as prescribed under the town plan, that is probably a signal for it to be returned to sender.

The Urban Development Institute of Australia constantly states that all it wants is to know what the rules are and for there to be consistency in their application.

The Maroochy Council decision to even consider the Hunt application on the corner of Venning Street and the Esplanade at Mooloolaba sends a very poor message indeed.

The argument that the development doesn’t need the required car parking because guests won’t arrive by cars beggars belief.

What’s this one to be, a bicyclists’ backpacker retreat? I can just picture the conga line of pushie-riding tourists, bags balanced precariously on their heads as they make their way through the canefields on the North Shore, over the shiny new bridge, and improbably up through the CBD and on to Mooloolaba.

Give us a break.

Pollies dish up same old dross

Am I alone in being sick to death of the adversarial nature of our political system?

We got a glimpse of what may be possible with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s offer of a bipartisan approach to addressing Aboriginal disadvantage but Parliament shortly thereafter descended into its usual sewer of abuse.

I, for one, don’t find the cheap point scoring of the political process particularly edifying, just a counter-productive and inefficient way of dealing with the country’s best interests.

If politicians thought first about the needs of their country and then the needs of their constituents, instead of solely the interests of their political parties, we all may be in a better position to seize the opportunities of the future.

Instead, their behaviour condemns us all to wallow more in the distractions of the past rather than see the country’s wealth applied through an efficient decision-making process to better position us to maintain it for future generations.

It is to be hoped that the Sunshine Coast electorate can see past the pretenders and the spoilers and elect a new council with a focus firmly on the main game.