The midnight hour

Sometimes insomnia can be a good thing.

Last night at around midnight it became obvious that sleep wasn't an option for me at that time. My body simply refused to accept it. I simply needed to get up and do something. I decided on a spur-of-the-moment ride to Austinville, and the glow worms. It was a beautiful night, temperatures in the mid-teens celsius, little wind, and a billion stars in the sky. As soon as I hit the Austinville road turn off and heard the rushing of the creek, filled by recent rain, I realised I'd made the right decision.

For the next however long it was I spent riding up the valley and back, I was entranced by the sound of the creek, the night bird calls, the clear rainforest air, and the green illumination of the glow worms lining the side of the road. The only real concern was the council's latest attempt at "roadwork", but with no traffic to deal with, that was negotiated easily enough. Maybe I should have sleepless nights more often.

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In other news, I heard about this story on Triple J this morning. As if we didn't already know, cyclists are apparently saving the Australian government $200 million per annum in health costs alone. It's just a pity they then go and waste a chunk of it on a study like this when there are far more effective means of silencing anti-cyclist bigots. There was another story that quoted the figure at $290 million, but I digress.

Unfortunately, most of the reaction to this seems to be the usual pie-in-the-sky crap about "rego fees" or "facilities" and so on and so on, with a little bit of self-righteous smugness thrown in for good measure. None of this makes a difference of course, as has been show in every jurisdiction in which it's been tried. Surely a better option would be in the training and education of cyclists so that they become more competent cyclists (particularly at school age), and are therefore more likely to stick with it. I'll write more about this later, but it's something to ponder. For the moment, however, I'll just say where's my share of the $200 million?