Bicycle, car or bus?

Stuff, NZ's online newspaper, just asked the question "How do you get into work - cycle, bus or drive?".  This is my response, that they published a few days later.  So now congestion charging in Wellington will be my fault.  Note that motorcycles or trains are not acceptable ways of commuting in Stuff's world.

I probably ride, drive and bus into work about evenly, so I'm keenly aware of the pros and cons of each.

The car is by far the easiest of course, and I turn to it whenever I'm running late, have to run errands during the day, or get stuff in or out of work.  But of course, it's expensive.

The bus is ok, for wet weather, but it's uncomfortable, claustrophobic and runs to its schedule, not yours or even Go Wellington's (but the metlink website has made a huge difference in this regard).

The bike is free and I just feel so much better after a good ride.  It's my fitness regime too, it baffles me why others drive into work early and go straight to the gym!  It's uncomfortable in the wet though, and Wellington's lip service to bicycles really, really grates.  It's easy to find reasons not to bike - the weather offers some excuses but the infrastructure certainly provides lots more.

What to fix?  Make commuting by car more expensive but in a targetted way (toll roads and congestion charging), offer real alternatives to driving, and make the expensive driving experience superb when you need it.  Think about integrated travel options not just one mode at a time.  For instance, recognise that the cheapest way to fix the urban motorway would be to put a proper bike path in from Porirua and Upper Hutt, if you could get a 5% reduction in car commuters it would be like driving during the school holidays every day!

The obtuse fragmentation of public transport make it unusable for many, too.  A friend once showed me the 15 or so different tickets he had to carry, all at once, to use the various public transport modes at various different times to get from Newtown to Trentham and Porirua.  Again, it baffles me why with the 9-figure sums being spent on trains and stations, implementing Snapper or an alternative integrated system at the same time wasn't part of that.  Or why I have to carry a different ticket for each train line, plus a snapper card to get from the railway station to my final destination (and pay twice, of course).

For example?  I moved here from Melbourne where I needed to commute out from the CBD to a Johnsonville-like mid-way suburb every day.  It was a short 10min drive on near-empty motorway - for $7 each way in tolls.  Ouch!  Or a $3.50 train ride.  Or, a 45min cycle, on purpose built cycleways completely separated from traffic.  Expensive - but way cheaper than adding another lane to the motorway, for instance.  Services like that meant something like 14% of commuter traffic was by bicycle, which equated to tens of thousands of cars off the road (making driving extremely pleasant when I needed to).

In Wellington there's no joined-up thinking.  I don't think the designers of the cycle tracks here have even seen a bicycle or used one to commute, what with the broken asphalt, power poles in the middle of the path, and blind driveways feeding into the Old Hutt Rd cycle path in particular.  A modern road bike has tyres about 5mm wide and cruises at up to 50km/h - it needs a better road surface than a roadway, not a worse one.  The funniest option is the short piece of green paint right in the middle of the old hutt rd/Ngauranga Gorge/Hutt Rd lights, where you have to somehow swing across two lanes of 80km/h traffic to access, and then sit between two fast flowing streams of traffic!

Fixing cycle tracks and even more so fixing public transport is expensive.  But adding lanes to the urban motorway, building tunnels and flyovers, and increasing parking and local road capacity in the CBD is orders of magnitude more expensive, not to mention disruptive and degrading to Wellington's unique village feel. Tax some motorists off the road, but offer real alternatives to the road and provide great motoring experience in return, and everyone wins.