The "50 in my street" campaign to reduce traffic speed in Glenfields Boulevade is a great initiative, but I wonder if it’s a little modest.

Police and council have partnered with the community to launch the program which has involved a combination of education and signage to deal with a speeding problem that was getting out of hand.

I launched a similar program in my street several years ago, but being Mudjimba the process was a little less formal.

It involved me yelling out at the top of my lungs “Slow the .... down” every time someone came down the road at more than 30 or 40 kph.

If a driver took exception and stopped to debate the issue, I was more than happy to go out and explain the risks involved in a street containing, as it did at the time and continues to do so, a bunch of kids of varying ages who use the street as their front yard.

Fortunately none of my neighbours took exception and in fact started to join in at about the same time as my wife began urging me to pull my head in.

The consequence has been that an attitude which developed in the late 1990s endured and as the older of the local kids began to get licences they did so knowing the local road rule, which they shared with mates who inevitably started to turn up in cars to visit.

Compliance has to start from within and the now gentle education of newcomers has seen the concept spread to neighbouring streets.

Simply by talking about taking a different attitude to the way we use the roads that separate our homes has all that has been needed to develop a culture that keeps the kids safe and brings the road’s role into perspective.

Anyone who has driven down our streets knows that kids rule and cars have no choice but to give way.

Even the dogs won’t shift from the hot spot in the middle of the bitumen. Beep all you like, it’s a case of going around or over and it’s your choice to make because they don’t budge.

Just because the limit is set at 60 or even 50, it does not mean that drivers are obliged to travel at that speed.

Highways are for going fast. Byways are for living in.

You help build communities by reducing as much as possible the potentially deadly threat that separates homes and people.

Try just standing out front on the road talking to the neighbours as a means of changing the culture.

I know it won’t work everywhere but it did here, dramatically reducing through traffic and bringing real liveability into the neighbourhood.

As cold as it gets
When I first came to work on the Sunshine Coast in the mid 1970s it was experiencing the temperatures being recorded this week.

That came as a shock because I had specifically moved from my posting on the New England tableland to escape the tyranny of cold weather.

I spent my first night in the warmth of an upstairs room at the Royal George before my impoverished circumstance meant a shift, by foot, to the caravan park on the corner of the then Bruce Highway and Blackall Range Road.

There I shivered under a bare chenille bedspread and nothing else until my first pay arrived.

Fortunately I had a job so had choice, unlike the many who today find themselves clinging to fraying edges of our caring society in circumstances that we choose to ignore but would find unsatisfactory if we witnessed them somewhere else other than here in Australia.

In the ‘70s I used to work on weekends for a brickie I got to know, laying the eight-inch blocks that formed the sheds of the industrial estate up behind the sewerage treatment plant off Fishermen’s Road in Maroochydore.

On cold winter mornings we would mix the first batch of mud under the light of the ute’s headlights, freezing hands drawing water from a 44-gallon drum which some days would have a thin veneer of ice across it.

We would wash the mixer, trowels and shovels under the headlights at the day’s end.

Excuse me for going on but I’m deep in the winter of my discontent with no trip to Bali on the agenda to ease it.

In the surf the water has become as cold as the air above it.

Do you notice that no one runs the daylight saving debate at this time of the year?

Funny that.