"Roads, rates and rubbish" are supposed to be the traditional priorities of Australian local councils.
Mayors and councillors elected to Lower Hunter local governments this month should note that roads come first in that list. And when we talk about councils attending to roads, we mean improving them, not debilitating them.
In fact, this is mainly a controversy for the Newcastle local government area, because the other Lower Hunter councils have a mostly realistic understanding of the need for better roads.
It's Newcastle council that has been off with the pixies. The Newcastle LGA is the one that has had a trendy, anti-car local government, one that's been completely out of sync with the great majority of its voters. Yet this is a problem for people elsewhere in the urban area, too, because they also have to drive in the Newcastle LGA.
Newcastle council, working with Transport for NSW, has been the most vigorous in reducing speed limits, fouling roads with speed humps and transferring space from motor vehicles to cycling. And the council is hardly interested in pressuring the state to build new main roads that most Novocastrians would be delighted to have.
One big threat is its cycling plan: it wants to plaster the LGA with cycleways. In street after street, suburb after suburb, the policy calls for taking road width away from motor vehicles to create separated cycling lanes - and, if it can't get that space, it wants 30kmh speed limits instead.
So far, this pest of a policy has been applied only in the inner city, on Hunter and Darby streets. But, according to the planning document, it's coming to roads near you - many, many roads that you use every day.
Another big threat is planning for a tramline extension to Broadmeadow. The council and state government, incredibly, want to cripple automobile capacity of the route along Tudor and Belford streets to make space for trams. They want to do this even though parallel tramline paths along Hamilton back streets are available.
So here's a message for Labor, Liberal and independent councillors and for incoming independent lord mayor Ross Kerridge: you have not been elected to make life a misery for Novocastrians. The people of the LGA, and indeed everywhere in Greater Newcastle, like the convenience of driving and don't appreciate unnecessary council efforts to hinder them.
But here's a different message to the Greens group on the council: you have been elected to make life a misery for Novocastrians. So go for your life. The rest of us can only hope you get outvoted in the council chamber.
The Greens, alone, did go to the election with a stated policy of creating more cycleways, necessarily at the expense of driving. People who voted for the Greens can't complain that that's what the party will now try to do.
But maybe non-Greens groups on the council have begun to wake up to themselves, actually taking an interest in the preferences of the average person.
For example, some councillors have objected to a proposed plan that would promote walking and, in doing so, inhibit driving (of course).
"This isn't a plan about remediating existing footpaths or constructing new ones," Liberal councillor Callum Pull said in June. "This is primarily about repurposing road space and reducing the amenity of our roads to tip the scale in favour of pedestrians."
Well, most of us are pedestrians, and we like to walk. But it's hard to see why driving needs to be hammered (again) to give us the opportunity.
Sometimes the council's campaign against motor vehicle use looks simply spiteful. It seems to have woken up one day and thought: "Walking! That's another good excuse for bashing cars. Let's work out a plan to do that."
Outgoing independent councillor John Church criticised the proposed walking policy, saying "there are some elements that members of the community may consider anti-car: reduced speed limits, more road-quietening suggestions and things that might see the promotion of active transport over cars."
In another sign of councillors getting in touch with the real world that voters live in, the Liberals went to the Newcastle council election calling for removal of the annoying 30kmh speed limits on Honeysuckle Drive and Darby Street. They'd probably have got more votes if more people had known of their policy.
Cr Pull has called for renewed consideration of the defunct plan for a 7 kilometre, four-lane road from Wallsend to Mayfield. The route for the road has been available for decades and the people of Newcastle would love to have it, but the state and council are uninterested.
Still, Labor's poor showing in the election may slightly raise our chances of getting road improvements and other infrastructure. The party looks like dropping from seven of the 13 members on the council to five, partly because Nuatali Nelmes also lost the lord mayorship, which automatically comes with one seat.
Many Novocastrians reckon we get little from the state and federal governments because Labor is so comfortable with its solid support here.
After the election, it must be a little less comfortable. Maybe local Labor members of state Parliament will get more attention in Sydney when they next beg for state funding.
So let's see whether state Labor sticks by its policy of selling the land from under the basketball stadium and refusing to provide a site for a new facility. Maybe it will see that the council shouldn't be forced into the highly unpopular measure, proposed before the election, of ploughing up two sports ovals at Lambton for a new stadium.
And do we now have a chance of getting a road tunnel to remove the decades-old frustration of waiting at the Adamstown railway gates?
Well, that's probably too much to hope for.
But maybe the council will ask for a cycling tunnel instead.
