Gladys Berejiklian on the bus on her way to work from Willoughby. Credit:Dean Sewell And I would say her resolve was strengthened by her rides on the bus. She could intuitively see the problem with trying to accommodate Sydney's growing population on more buses squeezing onto tight CBD roads. Light rail will not make her trip from Willoughby any easier. (The trams are replacing buses only south of the harbour). But Berejiklian, my thesis goes, was receptive to the idea of replacing buses that regularly get stuck behind other buses with a more efficient mode of surface transport. It is possible to project a similar nuanced understanding onto Duncan Gay's relationship with the heavy vehicle industry. The Roads Minister owns a family farm in Crookwell. Before entering Parliament, he ran a trucking business. He knows that goods need to be trucked, and he knows the dangers involved in doing so.

Roads Minister Duncan Gay. Credit:Louie Douvis For all Gay has done to cement himself as the pantomime villain of the "chattering classes" – his cliche – everyone in the state who has driven alongside a towering semi-trailer can be thankful for some of the work he has done with the trucking industry. After horror crashes at Menangle and Mona Vale, Gay, his department and the cops have pursued drivers, their managers and their customers with a rare relentlessness. The trucking supply chain is fragmented. Time pressures are built into the job. Temptations to speed, to forego maintenance, to take drugs to keep working, are inherent in the way the system operates. Gay has done a genuinely forceful job in improving standards. RMS officers and the police have raided distribution hubs of some of the biggest companies in the country. They have raised the frequency and monitoring at checking stations and across the state.

And the program has delivered some results. The number of heavy vehicles detected speeding in NSW has dropped about 95 per cent in three years. Despite constant growth in the number of heavy vehicles on the road, fatalities in NSW have fallen. In 2012, there were 73 deaths from crashes involving articulated and heavy rigid trucks in the state. In 2015 there were 58. You might ask why the NSW government did not crack down on unsafe trucking practices before 2012? That would be a good question. But the fact is that it didn't. And it wouldn't surprise if Gay's particular attention to the issue was informed by his experiences and feel for the industry. Which brings us to the changes to cycling regulation that took effect this month. These changes include the requirement for motorists to leave at least a metre when driving past cyclists. But the effectiveness of that message has surely been undermined by the publicity given to the array of other changes imposed onto cyclists. Gay says that with cycling injury rates increasing, he needed to do something to arrest the problem. But it does not necessarily follow that imposing a huge increase in fines on cyclists who run a red light is getting at the heart of the problem. Particularly so when cyclists can be booked for not using special cycling traffic signals that are often not even triggered by a bike at the lights. It seems more likely the policies will discourage people from jumping on a bike.

And it is hard not to think that Gay's disdain for cyclists reflects another sub-constituency of which the minister, who also has a house in Redfern, is a part. That is, inner city residents who enjoy the amenity of the area, at the same time as they are reflexively opposed to some of the changes about them. The shame of it all is that the latest cycling policies, and the debates they have triggered, have only served to entrench a completely unhelpful culture war aspect to the development of transport policy. Gay is part of a government, after all, which wants to erect 10,000 apartments on a couple of blocks at Waterloo. That would be density to make London look like the Lakes district. Does he want people buying these apartments to drive everywhere? Should he not be encouraging them to hop a bike to the shops or the office? Would that not make his own trips from Redfern a little easier? I recently used freedom of information laws to request itemised expenditure for cycling infrastructure projects in the past five years costing more than $1 million. The result, predictably enough, was that overwhelmingly the largest piece of "cycling infrastructure" funded by Gay's government was a frankly stupid bridge across Anzac Parade rarely used by anyone. Imagine if the government had taken a different tack these past five years, and built new infrastructure to help separate cyclists and motorists on dangerous routes across town.

Perhaps it might have, if more ministers caught the bus, or even rode to the odd meeting. Jacob Saulwick is city editor.