Not my responsibility

My bike's a few years old now and is starting to show its age and look a bit daggy. The only thing it has in its favour is the very groovy Copenhagen Parts Bike Porter I put on it when I needed a new set of handlebars.

When I bought my bike, it was a fabulously bright fire engine red. It's still fairly bright but has a number of chips and scuffs in it. One of the first that was inflicted on it was when it was about a week old. I rode it to my local corner shop, which like in most Australia suburbs is a big supermarket in the middle of a car park the size of a school oval. The shop itself is not exactly an architectural masterpiece. It's a large vomit coloured box.

For such a large shop there are surprisingly few places to lock a bike. In total it has zero. I had to lock my bike against the steel thing where the shopping trolleys are kept. There was nothing to hold the wheels still so the bike slipped a bit (very different from this bike rack that holds your bike upright so you can load it) The crossbar scratched against the steel frame of the trolley bay. It wasn't that smooth left to deep chips in my paintwork.

I filled out one of the "please rate us" cards and suggested that a little bit of bike parking would not go astray given that this served people who lives a stone's throw away.

NOt long afterwards, I received a letter saying that they were looking into it. It turned out Woolworths was renting the space from the building owner. At the time, in additional to the Woolworths, there was a pharmacy, a cafe, a bank and a "Cheap as Chips" shop. Woolworths took by far the bulk of the floor space.

That was 5 years ago and I'm still waiting. I suppose because the building does not belong to Woolworths there's nothing they can do. It must be the greedy building owner. You might think that Woolworths would have the clout to be able to require bike racks but what would I know?

Meanwhile, the local council has to reject a plan to open a restaurant because it didn't provide sufficient car parks to satisfy the development plan.

Wouldn't it be great if Woolworths (or Tesco or Wallmart depending on where you live) did not get permission to open a new store until adequate parking for bicycles was organised?