Wooden escalators just aren't cricket

My dog goes with me everywhere - on trains buses and planes, into my doctors surgery, and the nice restaurants to which my wife entices me. She's a guide dog mate.

But there are two places she does not go- in two of the busiest railway stations in Sydney. The wooden "heritage" escalators at Town Hall and Wynyard.

Why doesn't she go there? Because of the risk of injury to her paws in the wide gap between the wooden slats. Two dogs have already been seriously injured this year, and I am certainly not going to put my passport to freedom of movement at risk.

Now I get heritage. Queen Victoria building, tick. Sydney Town Hall, tick. Customs House, tick.

Call me a bogan if you like. But trying to argue that a clapped-out piece of Victorian infrastructure such as a wooden escalator has heritage value is like calling Collin Cowdry back to the English test team to face Lilly and Thompson. It didn't work, and nor do these escalators.

Sure, we keep steam trains too. But in a museum, not as part of the infrastructure for our daily commute.

Now If I proposed keeping a set of dangerous open wooden stairs at our busiest railway stations the health and safety experts would be down on me faster than a Mitchell Johnson delivery at the WACA. But we have thousands of commuters "treading the boards" on these dinasaur escalators, which put guide dogs at significant risk. Not to mention the number of women's stilettos which must disappear into the Victorian maw, never to be worn again.

I know my guide dog has a dogs life- going just where I want to go, having to wait for dinner when I am at a late meeting, or go out for a beer. Getting squeezed under a train seat whilst I sit comfortably on top. But to be put at risk of serious injury by these rumbling wooden dinasaurs is just too much.

We scrapped the Big Dipper on its wooden tracks at Luna Park some years ago. Come on Sydney Trains- consign these escalators to the same fate. Give our guide dogs a chance.

Graeme Innes is Australia's Disability Discrimination Commissioner, and regularly travels on Sydney Trains with his guide dog.