As part of  the community project, A Walk in the Park, I put in a Freedom of Information (FOI) application on pedestrian accident statistics.

What a brilliant thing is this FOI!  Just taking the application to the Council was a revelation.  The receptionist snapped to attention as if she were in the army and I were someone who could have her do 100 pushups on the spot.  She didn’t just accept the form, but rang the FOI department to make sure someone was there to start processing it forthwith.  And the tones in which she spoke into the phone, “It’s an FOI application!”  So serious, compelling, self-important.  So unlike the real world, I was reluctant to leave.

It turned out the application had to be transferred a couple of times.   First, from one arm of the Council to another, and then from the Council to VicRoads.  At each step of the way, I was informed by letter, with sweet punctiliousness, about the progress of my application. It’s as if the life of these various Government employees depended on communicating with me.  More, on not even dreaming of thwarting my application.  As if the machine of Government were running just for me.

I tell you, it’s worth putting in a FOI application on any subject just for the satisfaction of experiencing the creme de la creme of customer responsiveness.  Wouldn’t you pay $22 (the lodgement fee) over and over again for this?

I even got a call from the VicRoads FOI officer in the late afternoon of the day before Good Friday, a time when surely every other employee in Australia had already left,  describing the information she had assembled and asking if it were satisfactory, or whether I wanted detailed police reports on each incident as well.

Today I received the result of all this beautiful industriousness.  Not as thrilling as the process, but interesting all the same.  In short, there have been 704 accidents involving pedestrians in the electorate of Stonnington in the last 10 years.  I think I thought there’d be more.  In the tiny little square kilometre I’m interested in, there were 20 pedestrian accidents in that period, one of them a fatality.  There’s no particular pattern to the age of the pedestrian (or the driver), or the time of day, or whether the weather was wet or dry in these 20 accidents.  They’re all pretty evenly spread across the spectrum.  Only one thing stands out: only four of them (20%) occurred at traffic lights; the rest occurred at either stop signs, roundabouts or, the majority (45%), where there were no traffic controls at all.  And I reckon I can use this fact to strengthen the case for installing, in particular, a set of traffic lights on the dangerous Williams Road.