PERTH TO BECOME LOTS MORE EXCITING

City futures specialist (I don't know either) Charles Landry, hired to help Perth shed its "dullsville" reputation, suggests lowering the speed limit:

“If you build the city for cars to travel through at 60km/hr rather than 10km/hr then you can’t have boulevards with trees because if someone hits a tree at 60km/hr, they will die. But if you design roads that slow cars down (through town centres) then you can have trees and people will start to walk more.”

Traffic moving at 10km/hr, how exciting. Lynda Dorrington, arts and crafts promoter and Landry collaborator, also offers some exciting suggestions:

“We are going into a period of sustained economic growth – people are going to keep working 12-14 hour days – so exercise needs to be part of their day,” she says. “They need to be able to cycle to work, have somewhere to put their bike and somewhere to shower. And there has to be the kind of environment that people want to exercise in."

Yep, there's nothing like a good long bike ride -- at 10km/hr along tree-lined boulevards, in the dark -- after 14 hours at work. I suspect these two know nothing about 14 hour work days.