Sunday, April 29, 2007

changing lanes

Someone said to me "We kiwis drive like we shag...as fast as possible with no control at all."

Considering my experience of driving on State Highway 1, I half expected them to add "yeah and we continue with great vigour while alarmingly close to your arse and could slip up it at any moment."

The New Zealand Driving Experience™ is certainly markedly different from what I was expecting. After 9 years on the roads of London, the M25 and the A303 I thought I'd seen it all, but I'm constantly impressed.

In South Island for example there are many places you may not see a car for 3 or 4 hours at a time - the true open road. However, when you do catch sight of one, as it passess you'll notice what you thought was one car is actually three - all doing over 130k/hr and exactly six inches apart. It seems that the very idea of braking distances was lost shortly after Capt Cook dropped anchor and has never been heard of since.

While in North Island, after 2 years of residence here in Auckland I'm still learning, nee uncovering the atrocities carried out by Aucklanders against their fellow road users.

A brief history of traffic in Auckland

Nobody thought there would be any.

In 1959 they built a bridge (the harbour bridge) which joined the (rapid expanding suburbs of the) North Shore to the city consisting of only 2 lanes in each direction. Talk about lack of future-proofing!

Ten years later, the powers that be realised that 4 lanes might be a bit of a squash considering the tens of thousands crossing it every day and added 2 more more lanes on each side - a feat of engineering never before attemped or since (thats because everyone else builds their bloody bridges big enough in the first place!) These additionals were affectionately known as the Nippon Clip-ons (after the Japanse contractors who created the engineering world first.)

Today the bridge remains the only structure to link the countless settlements north of the city with the er, city. Leaving London where bridges can be seen every 50 paces it seems absurd to me that an entire city is reliant on a single bridge. Havent they seen the Mothman Prophecies?

We travel over this bridge every day, and sometimes get stuck in a traffic jam at the top. While we sit waiting to crawl into town we notice how much the clip-ons bounce around compared to the main bridge structure. Not too alarming until Ken told me they come to the end of their useful life this year and that in 2006 over 40 fatigue cracks we found in them. Gulp.

So no surprise then when this week headlines read Alarm bells ring over the bridge yep, its not like everyone else on earth except Auckland City Council didnt realise ages ago that 1 bridge simply wasn't enough and that its age and overuse could cause it to plop into the water at anytime. Though not in rush hour please, that would be bloody inconvenient.

More alarming is Mayor Dick Hubbard's statement that the news is a "big wake-up call". YEAH, ONLY IF YOU'VE BEEN ASLEEP FOR THE PAST 40 YEARS. DICK.

And so to joys of driving…

On the road, Auckland drivers are as much piss-takers as they are risk takers. For example, common advice to foreign visitors is to wait at least 2 seconds after a green light to avoid collisions with any late red light runners from ther other direction.

The concept of motorway flow and slow lane/fast lane/overtaking lane is as abstract over here as a de Kooning. At the merest hint of a brakelight they look for a gap in any of the other lanes and fill it mercilessly with their 2.6 m of (usually souped-up) metal. Its less like driving and more like a video game, indeed a vigourous competition: weaving recklessly in and out, overtaking on the left, the right, crossing multiple lanes from a slip road, its all fair game. Even when traffic is crawling, a slow motion version of the same is executed with equal lack of regard for human safety. I've lost count of the number of rear shunts I've seen (and no, not just in that adult DVD you've got Peps.)

Lane positioning is also an issue. I mean, how difficult is it to keep your vehicle between two white lines, created specifically as your guide?

As for corners, well just forget it. I havent seen anyone manoevre a vehicle through a 90 degree turn at a junction, ever. A gentle arc that scoops nail-bitingly close to oncoming traffic and others paintwork is more the norm.

Safety for oneself and one's passengers also seems deeply unfashionable. Not content with mobile phone conversations while driving, nearly everyone feels its only natural to go "one louder" and write lengthy text messages to virtually ensure ones hands are off the wheel at the same time as ones eyes are off the road. Fuck it, why not just get into the back seat and play on the parcel shelf, the car will drive itself!

Add to this a love of drink-driving (Nah, I'm okay to drive. I've had 6 pints over 3 hrs, so it should have all gone out of me system by now*); no requirement for insurance and young experienced road users driving cars you only usually see on a Gran Turismo wish list, makes me considerably concerned for my safety.

* Er, no. You've had 6 pints, you twat.

Drunk and Deadly
Crashes tied to lower drink age
Four dead in weekend crashes
Mown down at a party

Thursday, April 19, 2007

beermat


Alison from BluishOrange finds a beer mat after my our heart.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

trying

I've been trying all day to get my team at work to enter a pub quiz. Not because I'm brilliant at them or indeed spend any time whatsoever in pubs but to simply increase the bonding amongst our team members.

Theres been alot of new faces in the last 6 months (including myself) and I thought it would be a good opportunity to let our hair down abit after work and get to know eachother better.

I shouldn't have bothered because although 3 of us are up for it, every other person I've asked is fixed on not winning because they are not very good at pub quizes.

Christ! What happenend to "its not the winning, its the taking part" you whiney bitches?

Monday, April 16, 2007

the m.ellingham returns


I caught some stolen moments with my friend Matt Ellingham last night (see links panel at right). He'd returned to NZ for his 30th birthday - amongst other things. Although he'd been here in New Zealand for 3 weeks or so he wasn't able to make it to see us in Auckland. However, I was determined not to let this guy travel all the way back here only to miss us by a few kms - no way.

The only window of opportunity to catch him was between his domestic flight from Wellington to Auckland and his international departure from Auckland to London - the space of a couple hours. It meant I had to drive 45 mins to the airport to see him - but I've done crazier things (like drive 3 hrs to teach snowboarding) and besides, it was bloody well worth it.

I first met Matt in London when he joined the company I was working for. It was about 4 months after my first holiday in New Zealand so we bonded immediately: sharing stories about kayaking in Punakaiki, mountain biking in Christchurch etc. After that first trip I was already completely in love with New Zealand and so everything Matt said seemed to reinforce the notion that I should head there, permanently.

Matt's workload meant I rarely saw him socially - it was usually just at work when our server stuffed up and he'd come down and do the big fix. I think he liked visiting our design studio, it was a bit less uptight than head office and besides, we had a greasy café downstairs and Matt loved a "dirty burger".

I'm pretty sure that Matt and I would have become really great friends if we'd spent more time together. Sadly, within months of meeting him I was leaving the UK - emigrating to the very country he'd left 2 years before. I remember driving to Clapham in the wintery blackness to give Matt our microwave (we were ditching everything). I met his flatties and then Tracey texted me asking to pick up some bread. Matt kindly volunteered his Vogel's loaf(which I now realise was a huge gesture for a kiwi living in London)

Last night we shot the breeze as if it was very next day. It was like the 2 years since we saw eachother never happened. A catch up over a beer was just the ticket but sadly all too brief. We talked jobs, London, crazy landladies, boy racers and drink driving. He said I looked well and he also said I'd nearly lost my accent - I wasn't sure whether he meant my english accent or the acquired cockney geeza twang that would have permeated my vowels in London.

When it was time, we grabbed some photos and said our goodbyes and resolved to keep in touch. See ya bro - lets hook up next year, South Island styles - yeeah.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

saving the planet

If there an any of you who still haven't seen Al Gore's An Incovenient Truth I'd consider it your duty as a world citizen to do so. I thought the same about Michael Moore's Farenheit 911 but for different reasons.

Common perceptions of NZ is that it is clean, green and lovely. And for the most part it is but there are still many New Zealanders who are too lazy or too ignorant to understand their own impact on their environment.

This is highlighted in a new TV series called Wasted. Essentially its a makeover show for the environmentally challenged. I was disgusted to see a family of throwing away a bag of rubbish a day, running their washing machine virtually 24 hrs and living in a house where heaters and radiators blazed all day while the house itself remained uninsulated. They were completely oblivious - even the $7,000 annual energy bill didn't give them a clue. That family alone created a household footprint 37 times the size of their home.

Just yesterday I read two articles. One on how neo-green was the new black, the other about a kiwi chef in Australia. The thrust of the first was obvious, the second however focussed more on the fact that the chef bought locally, travelled to markets himself and other "green" ideas to reduce the impact of his industry on his environment.

I think its finally here. We stand on the cusp of great change. Now there are more generations that believe than do not. More importantly those generations have come of voting age. While old folks will always moan (like my mum does) about having too many bins for recycling, only having rubbish collected fortnightly and the death of the old school light bulb*. She isn't quick to realise that she is forced to comply with what she considers an annoyance because her generation (and others) were to fucking slow to do anything about it.

*And any other Daily Mail claptrap. If there was ever a newspaper to champion the misplaced, misinformed causes of the middle classes "I'm alright Jack"s and "Not in my backyard"s, it this turgid reactionary piece of shit on a page.

To be (mildy) fair, my mum is actually very green. She grows loads of her own fruit and vegetables, has a compost heap, keeps chickens for eggs and manure, maintains a flowering wilderness, doesn't have central heating, has double glazing and insulation, uses those energy light bulb and NEVER EVER puts a TV on standby. Its just what goes into her head everyday by reading that rag that scares me.

Permit me one more aside: All those people doing cardio workouts in gyms across the planet, on bikes, cross trainers and treadmill are creating energy. Why doesn't SOMEONE harness that energy to power the city or area where the gym is located. ITS A GENIUS IDEA!

So to what I was really going to say: its only been 3 years or so since the Roberts family started becoming more environmentally friendly. After an enlightening project at work we began to recycle the usual elements: cans, bottles, paper swell as some others like books and clothes. It did mean a short trip in the car to Sainsbury's car park but the benefits definitely outweighed the impact.

Now we are homeowners in a beautiful part of the world we have done the following:
  1. Starting using the bokashi composting system

  2. Take cloth bags for shopping to eliminate the need for plastic ones

  3. Have changed our lightbulbs to the energy saving kind

  4. Bought bikes for quick trips to the shops and other replaceable car journeys

  5. Recycle paper, plastic, metal and glass

  6. Only put the dishwasher on when its full (sometimes we wsh-up old skool style) and dry washing on the line rather than using the dryer

  7. Use mostly cold washes for the washing machine - 1 hot wash for badly soiled stuff and gym things

  8. Never put the TV on standby (mum hs always said it was a fire risk) and try not to leave things on at the switch: like the stereo, phone chargers, the kettle and the like

  9. Decomissioned our wood burner and are in the process of installing heat pump technology (300% efficient).

Things we haven't done:
  1. Purchased high energy efficiency rated appliances - sadly they were just too expensive for first time home buyers - ours have one or two stars, next time we hope to afford them

  2. Elimated the car for journeys to work - we live 40km from where we work and public transport is poor. We do however travel to work together


Like always, there's more we can do but its a bloody good start. What are you doing?