A wine bar by any other name would smell as…

Who’s Your Mumma opened up last weekend.

The workers who finished it off need congratulating for the speed with which it was done. Really, even though the finish is minimalist (such as exposed concrete flooring), it was done pretty quickly for a fit out in Perth.

I haven’t had a chance to go there yet and am not entirely sure I want to.

I have championed a wine bar on this street (and for Fremantle) for a long time and argued against other locals who have opposed it.

This particular wine bar just isn’t what I was hoping for. I wasn’t exactly wishing for something with the class of a Must Wine Bar but, well, I’ve made my position clear in a previous post.

At the end of the day the aesthetic isn’t really me and frankly I don’t think it is really Wray Avenue either. Not that I claim to have specific authority over what is and isn’t “Wray” but I think I know the avenue pretty well. At the very least I have deliberately chosen to live here with a sense of what I was moving in to.

In my previous post, I wrote of the connotation the terribly named wine bar had with Ed Hardy clothing and couldn’t imagine how sooth I was being until I saw their sign and logo affixed to the building.

I wouldn’t be surprised is Ed Hardy sued for copyright infringement.

Buses vs Bikes

I missed my precinct meeting yesterday to head out Mt Lawley way to watch a performance at the new Spectrum Project (read my review of this performance here).

The issue of traffic calming was on the agenda again.

My view on this is that we have an problem coming from outside our community. Since Wray Avenue is a throughway, we necessarily have to accept traffic. The extent to which this traffic is dangerous and exceeds the speed limit can be managed in several ways. I’m not sure what the right way to do this is, but I believe wholeheartedly that the wrong way is to sacrifice any of our amenity to counteract it.

Changing the direction of streets – or making them “one way” – or adding speed bumps and chicanery will only impact on what we already have. It is reactive and creates a streetscape that is not ideal for local residents.

It is a streetscape that we will have to endure everyday whereas the people who make our streets dangerous will likely come across it only once a week or less.

There are other proactive ways of addressing speed, such as the Safe Speed Promise that the City of Stirling have taken up.

My personal gripe with speed is largely aimed at the buses. In my opinion, they are the worst offenders, particularly along South Terrace at the end of Wray Avenue.

Yesterday, as I walked back from town, one such bus roared through the new roundabout and nearly took out a cyclist coming out of Wray Avenue. This cyclist was not a lycra-ed up speed cyclist but a middle aged woman with a pannier full of groceries.

Thinking about it, I should have got the bus’s number and called Transperth to make a complaint. This is another proactive measure that we can take – one that I intend to make more of.

An unfortunate thing about Wray Avenue is that cyclists persist on riding (illegally) on the footpath. But with bus drivers behaving so badly, I sometimes don’t feel safe near one when I’m behind the wheel of my car. I can hardly blame cyclists for fearing to ride on the bitumen.