First came the pretty coloured lights to control the traffic. Now they're numbering the buildings in Queen Street - in ascending order no less. What will they think of next? Reserving footpaths for pedestrian use only, perhaps?
Reports that Auckland's blind citizens association was concerned about proposals to rope off pavement restaurant seating got me thinking again about the 600 or so sandwich boards still cluttering downtown footpaths.
Why are they still there, six months after the chairwoman of the city council's powerful planning and regulatory committee, Juliet Yates, declared war on this ``visual pollution''?
Talk about a phony war. In March, when Mrs Yates issued her war cry, a survey had revealed that more than 60 per cent were breaking the bylaws. Yet half a year on, the thickets of signs are just as thick and my guess is that not one offender has been challenged.
You may recall how, back in June, Mrs Yates' committee chickened out of implementing a total ban. Instead, it decided on ``a managed withdrawal'' of the signs, to take place after further consultation by downtown business organisation Heart of the City.
By my reckoning at the time, local businesses had already been surveyed three times and invited to five meetings on the proposal. Not enough - do it again, said the committee.
At a cost of around $25,000, Heart of the City also set about street-numbering the central city. On shop awnings and above shop doors, antique-style numberplates now grace Queen St and adjacent roads.
This is undoubtedly a great advance in user-
friendliness in a city where lookalike glass towers seem to change names by the season.
Of course, this numbering is long overdue, but why building owners couldn't do it themselves, like any home-owner out in suburbia, I don't know. Still, Mrs Yates' committee felt that free street numbers would be a good sweetener to shop owners who claim they have to use sandwich boards for customers to know where they are.
As for the resurveying, three months after the June meeting, that is still to be undertaken. Currently being distributed is a council booklet pointing out to shop-owners and office dwellers what sort of signage is available other than sandwich boards.
Why a booklet was felt to be needed is a mystery to me. All they have to do is look about them for ideas. There are attractive cloth banners hanging down building frontages and overhead signage attached to verandas. In arcade entrances, the obvious solution is a communally organised directory board.
With consultation still to get under way, it is unlikely a report will be made to Mrs Yates' committee before its mid-November meeting. The recommendation will be a total ban. But if this conjures up visions of a Christmas-rush Queen St free of pavement impediments, I'm sorry to mislead. The ban is to be introduced in stages.
First stage, it seems, will be to remove all illegally sited or sized sandwich boards. You could well ask why they weren't removed last week or a year or two or three ago. After all, illegally parked cars don't avoid the council's attention just because the owner claims he has nowhere else to put his car.
Anyway, after the illegal ones have been rounded up, the rest will receive a warning ticket for not complying with the new bylaw. This softly-softly warning phase will go on for a month. After that, council officers will growl some more, presumably a little louder.
But they still won't seize the signs. That won't happen until the two months is up. Only then will the pavements be free, once more, for you and me.
That is unless, of course, the sign owners start crying as their boards get taken away. If that happens, all bets are off.
Given the namby-pamby history of this war so far, I wouldn't be surprised if Mrs Yates and her committee at this stage rushed around with a plate of scones and the sign and said, ``Sorry, we didn't really mean it.''
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