Petrol, bicycles, and gridlock

The price of petrol rose to $1.709/litre last week. When we moved here four months ago, the price of regular gas was $1.419/litre. That's a 20% increase in four months, or 60% annualised. I'm sure the increases are similar all over the world. For you US readers, $1.709/litre in NZ converts to about $4.08/gallon in US currency and gallons. So quit your whining. You still have cheap fuel. You just don't realise it.

One thing that Aucklanders and Portlanders have in common is that they whinge (that's the word Kiwis use for whine) a lot about rush hour traffic. The motorways (freeways) are clogged with commuters from 6:30AM until about 9:00AM and again from 4:00PM until 7:00PM. Auckland is inconveniently located geographically on a narrow isthmus. Early settlers obviously didn't consider the traffic implications of siting a metropolis on such a difficult piece of real estate for automobile transportation planners. What were they thinking? There are three major motorways that converge in downtown Auckland, and the transportation engineers have created a nightmare of interconnecting ramps, exits, and bypasses at their confluence, which has been affectionately dubbed "Spaghetti Junction."

My commute from our house in the western suburb of Avondale to my work place in the eastern/central suburb of Newmarket is 16 km (10 miles). We chose to rent a house in Avondale because it's a short commute to Te Atatu (about 4 km) where Megan teaches school and she got a job first so I had to deal with the extra travel time when I got a job. It pays to be first.

For the first six weeks of my job, I patiently navigated my way through gridlock traffic. The bumper-to-bumper morning commute takes about 35 minutes by car if there are no crashes (that averages at 27 kph). If the weather is bad, or if sun strike occurs (eastbound traffic can be blinded in the early morning), or if there is a pile up, the commute time stretches out and can take as much as an hour and usually averages about 45 minutes. The evening return commute is worse. It could take as much as 25 minutes just to drive five blocks from my car park to get on the motorway. I can't remember a day when I sat anxiously in gridlock traffic listening to the traffic report on the radio when they didn't say, "Traffic is crawling from Spaghetti Junction to Te Atatu." The last straw occurred when a major accident shut down all but one westbound lane, effectively closing the motorway, sending me along clogged urban arterial streets, taking a full 90 minutes to drive 10 miles, Ugh. I decided to buy a bicycle and ride to work.

I used to ride to work in Bellingham when my commute was about 1.5 miles, there were no hills to speak of, and I was 20 years younger. I stopped bicycling to work after I got clobbered by an inattentive driver who opened his parked AMC Pacer door (the widest doors in the industry) in front of me just in time to clip my front wheel and send me sprawling in front of an oncoming city bus. When we moved to a new house on a hill, and I had to negotiate busy traffic without bike lanes on Lakeway Drive, I prudently decided to drive to work. A few years later, I started my own business, working at home, and my commute was reduced to walking down the stairs in my bathrobe with a cup of coffee.

Twenty years ago, my bicycle was your basic ten-speed with gear shifters mounted on drop ram-style handlebars, and cost about $220. There were no "mountain bikes" and high-end racing bikes were just coming into vogue. How times have changed. When I went shopping for a bike this time, the selections were endless. You can spend up to $6,000 on a high performance bicycle if you are so inclined, which I am not. I finally settled on a Vivente Novara Sport, a commuter bike which is sometimes called a hybrid and which has 24 gears (3 sprockets in front and 8 in rear), upright seating with flat touring-style handlebars and finger controlled shifters, costing $600. It's lightweight and ideal for commuting on Auckland's hilly landscape.

My bicycle commute to work follows the motorway on an adjacent dedicated cycleway for most of the way. I actually travel faster than the cars next to me much of the time, as I smugly whiz past agitated and frustrated drivers. Eventually, the cycleway ends and the last few kilometres are an exercise in survival as I dodge cars on busy city streets with no bike lanes and impatient drivers with impaired attitudes. It takes a little while to get comfortable with the exposure to dangers and to learn safe following distances and when you can sneak through queues of traffic and when you shouldn't. The bike commute takes about 50 minutes (a few minutes less coming home which is slightly downhill overall), which is about what I averaged in the car.

Here are the advantages of riding a bicycle to work: (1) there's one less car on the road. (2) I save about $3.20 per day in fuel cost and about $8.00 for parking. (3) I get daily exercise morning and evening, releasing mood-altering endorphins through my veins instead of corrosive adrenaline. (4) My commute time is consistently 50 minutes and I don't spend any time worrying about the attention span and driving skills of the guy on a cell phone in front of me or a bimbo applying make-up while smoking a cigarette beside me. It's really quite relaxing on the sparsely used cycleway. (5) Fuel costs are headed north and my bicycle has no gas tank. While George W. Bush is trying to protect American interests (read OIL) in the Gulf (did you really think it was about WMD, enhancing national security by fighting terrorism abroad, or replacing a tyrant with a free and democratically elected government? Ha!), the reality is that oil production (not reserves!) is peaking or has peaked and $4/gallon gas today will seem like a distant dream five years from now.

By the way, yesterday I got absolutely drenched in a downpour on my way to work. So what. I didn't melt and my riding clothes and shoes were dry by the time I left work.

Curt