The cycle of a car fanatic
It’s been said that nobody preaches like the converted, so let’s put that to the test. I’m one of them. A regododging freeloader on your road, to be saluted with an angry honk and a wave of the fist. Yes, I’m a cyclist. Let the sermon begin.
Anyone who’s been to Napier will know that it’s more or less flat, with lonely Bluff Hill in the middle of it and some hills around the periphery. I grew up in Napier and, in what I thought was a karmic payback for unspeakable crimes in a past life, my family lived on one of those hills. The views were great, but riding my bike uphill every day after school was an extortionate and entirely unacceptable price to pay.
Deliverance came by way of a Morris Mini and a driving licence at age 15.
Fast forward another 10 years and my automotive dreams were flourishing. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Auckland and was now employed in Manukau as a Product Design Engineer by Ford Motor Company. We were one of the last holdouts of automotive design and manufacturing in the country, and I was as proud as a peacock to be part of it.
Then something happened that was even more relentless than the steamroller of manufacturing globalisation. The factory was OK (it held out another five years before going to China), but I had a realisation that would change everything.
I was too young for a mid-life crisis, but it may well have been a dry run for it. I started to get a sense of my own mortality. Specifically I could feel my arteries clogging more with every one of the uncountable minutes that I commuted in my car every day.
My lifestyle was bad: long commute, long days at work, long commute, repeat. Fortunately, I didn’t waste all my commuting time making false diagnoses of my cardiac condition. I also applied myself to the problem, in a rational engineering way, of how I could overcome this entirely imaginary (but certainly worsening) condition. Exercise wouldn’t work, because I’m just too lazy to move without a productive reason. Then an epiphany struck: the bicycle!
If I commuted on a bike rather than in a car, it wouldn’t be exercise, it would be transport. If I wasn’t doing exercise then laziness would be no impediment. My brain and my body agreed on this fragile but convenient rationalisation.
Even good plans take time to realise, but patience is a virtue. Within a year I had moved my career along and accepted an exciting new job located in Christchurch, by chance nothing to do with cars. The day I went to pick up the keys for a rental house, the landlord mentioned he had a spare bike that he was leaving and I was welcome to use it if I wanted.
Fifteen years later and the number of times I have driven to work would be fewer than the number of minutes I spent driving each morning back in Auckland.
I ride about 15 kilometres every weekday. Always I’m riding for transport, and my brain still isn’t aware any exercise has happened or it would almost surely put a stop to it.
With all this encouraging talk of cycling it might appear otherwise, but my green credentials are questionable to say the least. I now work at the University of Canterbury, mentoring students who are designing and building cars from the ground up. I encourage them to build cars that are scarily fast. Some are cutting edge electric, and some are turbocharged ozoneeating monsters. Some are so efficient they make a Toyota Prius look like an environmental calamity. It’s a matter of horses for courses.
Bruce Robertson owns two 500hp petrol-burning cars and is the faculty advisor to the awardwinning UC Shell Eco-marathon and UC Motorsport teams.