Those of you who come to this blog every now and again, will have probably noticed that I often have photographs of the sky. There is something about the sky, that just calls to me.  The pure blue of a clear day just draws my attention to it like a bedazzled moth to a flame.  I particularly like to see unobstructed sky, like what one would see on the prairies or high up on a mountain. Just to look up and around to see 360° of sky is for me pure bliss.

I think I like the sky because it makes me aware of the fact that I am on a planet surrounded by a thin atmosphere. I quite often find myself just watching the sky and the weather that it brings; wondering about the forces of nature and their complexities.

Because I love the sky, I am also automatically very antipollution and I think that we should do everything we can to keep our environment healthy.  The trouble is that street cars or trams as we call them here in Australia, require overhead wires that clutter up the view of the sky.  I have lived in and visited various cities around the world that have opted to have electrical transportation on the roads. While I can only applaud the rationale for such a decision, I absolutely hate the way how such systems with their overhead wiring make a city look.

The cable cars in San Francisco are a huge tourist attraction but the overhead wires detract from the charmingly scruffy beauty of that city.

In Vancouver, the overhead trolley bus wires are like some giant piece of vandalism that destroys the view of the nearby mountains and gives the whole town and dingy grubby look. What should be a beautiful city is in fact quite ugly downtown.

Melbourne, which has had an incredible urban renewal facelift over the last 20 years is still blighted by overhead wires for the trams.  The city authorities in Melbourne have gone to great lengths to make it a more liveable city by investing heavily in public artworks for the street, and the creation of open spaces. One would think that people in Melbourne would want, nay, even demand, some unobstructed sky in their open spaces. But what do we see instead, on the south bank of the Yarra? More overhead wires as decoration to hang little lights from. I would love to give whoever made the decision to do such a thing a good shake, while asking them what was going through their tiny little minds to do such a thing.

I don’t like Toronto, so to my mind the overhead wires for the street cars only make a drab city even more unattractive. I once had a fairly serious bicycle accident when I was in Toronto as I was turning a corner. My bicycle wheel got caught in a streetcar track, and I was flung off the bike headfirst into at a retaining wall made up of jagged pieces of recycled concrete pavement.  All I can say is, thank goodness for my helmet, or I would have been much more seriously brain damaged than what I already am.

So as you can see from my rant above I’m not a fan of transportation systems that obscure the sky.

Subways are good.  

Yes, yes, yes, I know……..

they cost more.