I was dead keen to get into town this morning, expecting a Spielberg-ian disaster zone, with people wailing and crying openly in the streets at the devastating gridlock bringing our largest city to its’ knees.
Actually, it was a bit of a laugh.
Sure, unless you were on two wheels, you weren’t going anywhere on Queen Street. Truckies had it fairly well clogged in both directions, but with good humor, happily chatting to anyone who wandered up to their cabs for a yarn. Pedestrians were laughing at the spectacle, most with a phone-camera at the ready. The media were heavily represented, with photographers clambering over awnings to get the best views, and TV reporters being crossed live to all over the place. For cyclists, it was awesome, with a whole Queen Street lane utterly empty for your swooping pleasure.
This protest was most notable for people trying to high-jack it for their own purposes; one GPS company had branded vehicles parked conspicuously close to the TV cameras, and the guy with the ‘Stop Using Petrol’ sign was doing a lot of work.
Still, no-one in my office was greatly inconvenienced – one North Shore commuter who brazenly left home at 8.00am described it as the best commute ever, and rumours were the North-Western motorway was empty. Even the horns couldn’t drown out the photocopier in our office (a stone’s throw form Queen St). If the truckies wanted media coverage, they got it alright, but did the trucks really cause serious chaos to make their point? This wasn’t farmers in Paris by any stretch, it was too polite by half for that, with the route and times well publicised ahead of time. As far as I could tell, everyone got into town fine, and went home happy.