Damn. Superparma.com is no more. And they built the site in such a way that it seems to be impossible to get at anything except the splash page via archive.org, so the ratings they compiled may be lost forever.

Groan. WarGames 2: The Dead Code now in pre-production, and aimed at direct-to-DVD.

OK. I was talking last week about not renewing with the RACV. As it happens my renewal form just arrived, and my membership runs out in a few weeks, so I’ll start shopping. Ultratune is looking pretty good (thanks Peter).

Ah, emails. Do we all know the danger of hitting Reply All instead of Reply? Will Joanna Purdy be the next Claire Swire? Or maybe this one won’t snowball. (I’m too polite to forward it around.)

PS. Sorry, a server glitch (well, actually an upgrade I forgot was happening) has (hopefully temporarily) lost a couple of comments on this post.

Many people like to whinge about the price of fuel, but Steve Fielding’s idea of cutting fuel taxes is a very bad idea — it would inevitably lead to more usage, and cutting prices is the last way you want to try and fight oil shortages.

This opinion piece for ABC Online goes into more detail.

Petrol tax cuts the road to ruin
By Daniel Bowen

Who can forget the Great Petrol Rip-Off of the late 1990s?

Outraged motoring groups pointed out that fully half of the pump price of petrol was made up of government taxes. It was a scandal and an abomination. Governments were punishing the motorist by making their petrol expensive - at a whopping 90 cents a litre.

Read the rest.

On Saturday my bro-in-law Adrian and I were headed up to Coburg in a hired van. We were just getting onto the Bolte Bridge when Adrian noticed a warning light on the dashboard. We weren’t sure what it meant, so I reached for the van owner’s manual, which said something along the lines of:

1. Make sure the handbrake is off.

Well Adrian twiddled it as much as you can when driving at freeway speeds, and it was definitely off.

2. If the handbrake is off, immediately stop the vehicle and urgently contact your dealer as the brake fluid is low, which may lead to brake failure, your van crashing into something, and you and your passengers dead. DEAD!

Well, something like that.

Naturally, we panicked. I got on the phone to the hire place, and asked if the brakes appeared to be working. They were. Then they said to drive to their Preston office, in Murray Road. Okay. I hung up.

How do you get to Murray Road? Dunno, there’s no Melway in this van. Argh!

Rang my sister for directions. Got directions. Got off the freeway, headed for Murray Road. While at traffic lights, Adrian fiddled with the hand brake again, and… you guessed it, the light went out.

Blargh. So we didn’t die from brake failure after all.

I blame the indicator light thingy. Must be over-sensitive.

I pay $73 per year to the RACV because I want someone to get me out of a scrape when I’ve locked myself out of my car or the battery is dead or whatever. It somewhat disturbs me that what’s left over from that $73 goes into lobbying for more, bigger, faster roads.

I saw this in action on Tuesday at a discussion at Treasury Place. The same day the RACV were seen on the TV news calling for the expansion of roads at the end of the Eastern Freeway, and “missing link” ring road sector through Melbourne’s northeast “green wedge” — or else Melbourne would grind to a standstill.

I don’t believe that for an instant. Melbourne would survive, and could thrive if no more freeways were built, and the money was put into public transport instead. In fact, just the $1 billion currently being spent to add two extra lanes to the Monash Freeway would pay for at least two major rail lines to be built.

And while the RACV continues to claim that more road building helps traffic, what it really does, apart from burning billions of dollars in transport funding, is provide more road space that gets more people driving, undermining cycling, walking and public transport, and leading to further traffic congestion and pollution.

I don’t want my money going to lobbying. But it turns out there are alternatives for getting roadside assistance, which don’t involve the RACV.

I found one (outdated) list of options, but of these, some are affiliated with RACV: Assist Australia, Caltex. ANZ at one stage had Auto Assist, but it’s not clear if that’s still on offer, nor who they outsource(d) to.

Some don’t make it clear if they outsource: International SOS, Mondial Roadside Assistance (won’t touch vehicles over 10 years old, which rules me and my 15-year-old Magna out).

Hard to know how good they are when you’re in a spot, but it looks like 24/7 Road Services might be one to try. Base-level coverage for $55, so it’s actually cheaper than RACV. I’ll make sure they’re not involved in lobbying, and I’ll going to sign up with them when my RACV membership expires.

And if you’re another one of the RACV’s 1.9 million members, and are only in it for the road service, and don’t want your money to pay for lobbying for paving the planet, I’d encourage you too to move your business elsewhere.

I may not be the world’s foremost expert on driving, but even I could see you made two critical mistakes driving out of the supermarket carpark.

1. You drove the wrong way around the one-way system.

2. Your baby was on the lap of your passenger.

I hope that you were pulled over and booked on the way home. But if not, I hope you didn’t collide with anything.

You, sir, are a thoughtless moron.

PS. You’re not doing the reputation of P-platers any good, either.

I got the car serviced the other day. Perhaps unusually, when I went to pick it up, there was no multi-gazillion dollar bill waiting for me; just $197.

But the guy warned me about various symptoms that were evident but not critical yet that may lead to a higher bill the next time. (He sounded like the dentist, actually.) As per usual I just nodded my head and tried to pretend I knew what he was talking about. Front and rear roll stoppers cracked. Yup. Timing case seal leaking. Oooh. Front suspension bushes cracked. Yeah, they can be nasty.

So it sounds like it’ll be ka-ching next time.

Whenever next time is. I know services are meant to be about every six months or 10,000Ks, whichever comes first. But with my small amount of driving, it takes about a year and a half to rack up 10,000 kilometres, and it’s pretty hard trying to convince myself to go to the trouble and expense of a service more frequently. Maybe I should at least learn how to change the oil.

I’ll always need to drive sometimes (if only for my own sanity… PT and a bike just isn’t going to cut it for some trips, not from where I live). Is there a car out there that is reasonably cheap, clean and safe, and is better suited to occasional driving, and thus very occasional servicing? Something that doesn’t mind if it sits in the driveway six days a week?

Ideally the answer would be a shared car, but so far none of the companies (Flexicar and GoGet seem to be the most prominent in Melbourne; are there any others) have put cars into downtown Bentleigh. It’s probably a bit too suburban. (Unlike, say, Richmond — Beth has one parked virtually outside her house.) Indeed, there are car rental outlets that are closer than any of the car sharing locations, which could potentially work, but alas none within walking distance.

No, I guess I’ll just have to put up with the occasional ka-ching huge repair bill.

It’s now just over ten years since Princess Diana died. One thing I didn’t mention in my blog post at the time was that when I got home, I found my VCR, which had been set to tape an obscure Sunday morning TV programme (the rather amusing look at the parables of Jesus, Wrestling With The Big One, with Tony Robinson), had picked up a news bulletin of the accident, from before her death had been announced. It’s kind of erie watching it today.

If nothing else, her death should serve as a reminder to always wear your seatbelt.

(I had thought that crash survivor Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard, was wearing his, but apparently not. But crash analysis did conclude that the injuries would have been minor if the car’s occupants had been wearing theirs.)

I’ve only ever been in one car accident. I was a kid, in the back of the babysitter’s car, when it hit the back of a tray truck at low speed outside our flat in Hotham Street. The tray came through the windscreen. No injuries, but shock.

Thankfully that’s all I’ve ever been involved in, with the exception of a minor carpark bump or two. But it still sticks in my mind.

Perhaps it’s one of the reasons I prefer not to travel by car when there are alternatives.

My car is dark grey. A recent study found that dark-coloured cars are more prone to accidents. In the rain, like this morning, I drive with my lights on, for visibility.

It’s like my friend Merlin, who rides a motorcycle. Where he lives in Canberra, you apparently don’t have to ride with your motorcycle headlight on (or didn’t, when I asked him about it a few years ago). But he said “my bike is road-coloured, so I do”. Sounds fair enough.

But note to self: Turn car lights off when parking.

That way, I won’t get back to it 9 hours later and find the battery flat and have to call the RACV guy and run the motor for a while to get the battery charged again. Like I did tonight.

…

On the bright side, at least I didn’t park it like this, across two parking spaces:

Or go driving like this: