0n the left you have working class activism, on the right you have middle class activism.
Let me be clear when I state I don’t have a dog in this fight.
I don’t drive a car, never have, never will. I’m a long suffering urban shmuck in that I do what I’m supposed to do – I don’t own a car, I walk, use public transport and ride-share.
I’m a pedestrian and I can’t stand car drivers OR cyclists!
I think there are two kinds of driver. Those sexually aroused by driving (which seems like almost every male) and those held hostage to it by decades of poor urban planning and pitiful investment in public transport infrastructure.
Both types are climate crisis pollution creating vandals and both types seem to loath cyclists with homicidal glee.
The amount of times I’ve been a passenger in a car and the driver immediately blurts out some hatred towards a cyclist as we pass is always surprising as a nondriver, like you are taken aback by just how resentful the most mild mannered driver is the moment they see a cyclist. It’s like a dog after a cat or a Twitter mob cancelling Friends for being too white and privileged. It’s instinctual while being self-righteously superior for no real reason.
My interaction with drivers as a pedestrian is a completely different experience from my philosophical disgust at their global warming pollution production.
I always make eye contact with the driver when crossing the road and always make a smiling acknowledgment that they’ve seen me and won’t run me over. I always receive cheerful smiles and the right of way.
My experience with cyclists is far more antagonistic despite my completely agreeing with their call to reengineer the city into a dour cycling utopia.
I’ve been kicked, pushed, yelled at as angry cyclists speed past me on the footpath. I think cyclists are so angered by the abuse they get from drivers that they take it out on pedestrians. The way the Israeli Army does with Palestinians.
Let me remind the cyclists – as pedestrians – we can’t hear you when you approach us from behind!
I’d be a cyclist if they weren’t such smug condescending wankers.
There’s this terrible truth that once you go middle class woke you start doing 5 things:
1 – You start loudly correcting Te Reo mispronunciation in public.
2 – You become humourless about your veganism.
3 – You pay a subscription to The Spinoff and Stuff.
4 – You buy Tim Minchin concert tickets.
5 – You become unbearably militant about your cycling.
Auckland City Councilor Efeso Collins has already questioned the way police allowed middle class militant cyclists over the bridge while working class South Aucklanders get a very different kind of policing. This free the bridge hashtag thing was and is middle class activism at its most eye rolling.
It’s like rioting for a greater range of trans friendly pre-school daycare centers.
This revolution comes with a variety of soft cheeses.
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You are on form Martyn.
I am a filthy fossil fuel burner who lives rural and drives a lot for work, I enjoy driving. I seldom encounter cyclists on the open road.
Cycling is picking up, recreationally at least in rural areas and I often see neighbours or random townsfolk cycling about the countryside politely, no dramas.
The ultimate wanker though combines the worst of cycling and driving : it is the urban middle class tool bag in the Beamer with the bikes on the roof, tailgating and overtaking multiple vehicles at a time to get to the bach and don Lycra to ride 3 abreast with mates and block traffic somewhere else.
Fact: most cyclists also drive, and if they are rude and dangerous on 2 wheels they are on 4.
Agreed.
good points!
Firstly let me state I support the need for a new harbour crossing that has cycle lanes or frees-up existing lanes on the current bridge for cycle lanes; but dreaming of putting a cycle lane on the current bridge at present is as daft as eyeing up the Manukau Harbour as a viable alternative for the Auckland port. For one thing closing existing lanes to traffic would cause enormous extra congestion and therefore pollution.
Now, the sight of self-righteous protesters who believe their cause is so important that they must ignore Police Officers who are there solely to protect public safety in my book identifies them as nutters. Are these same people of an ilk that they would storm parliament as seen recently overseas? What sort of example have they set for the children they took along for the ‘ride’?
If one of the cyclists had been hit by a car who would they have blamed? Whilst expecting the Police to keep them safe on the road they willfully ignore instructions to keep them safe; do they believe it’s one rule for them and another rule for others?
I guess that it is too much to hope that those who took part in this mass hysteria driven protest will now see how stupid and ill conceived it all was.
Who the fuck does the engineering calculations AFTER they make it a huge election promise??? Not just Labour it seems.
Just before the election Judith Collins announced to Northland that National would build a tunnel under the Brynderwyn Hills in Northland. No idea of cost. I asked. Deservedly she was buried deeper than the tunnel would have been.
Peter, we’d done the concept engineering design for a tunnel through the Brynderwyn Hill during the Key government as part of the long term planning for extending SH1 as a motorway up to Whangarei. (I’m was a consultant engineer before I retired)
I appreciate that work had been done, it was an option but turned out to not be the preferred choice to progress. Suddenly, with the election looming it jumped not just back into consideration, but as the National thing.
Bishop couldn’t/wouldn’t say what it would cost. Jaspinda rubbishes Labour for not doing the engineering calculations before making huge election promises. Not unique.
Personally I think a tunnel would be the best option but expecting us to accept the bullshit way they played fast and loose with it?
This all sounds a bit Auckland, and Nelson boondocks. In the Windy City, the only viciously- wheeled persons are likely to be oldies on mobility scooters aiming at walkers’ shins or trying to topple the book stalls in Paper Plus just for a bit of senile fun.
Everyone else is punctiliously polite, they even thank the bus drivers, but that could be because buses are as rare as hens’ teeth, and nobody knows if they will ever see another one again, and thanking the driver may induce her/him to actually stop at the bus stop should they ever pass this way again, and it is also cute public karma.Alighting onto a crumbling pavement calling, “ Thank you, driver,” provides a momentary feeling of lordship, akin to being deposited by one’s carriage at Covent Garden, or Whitehall, or a Soho Vice den.
The guy on the bike going to work is as likely to be a nurse or a cleaner who has no carpark, let alone car, and not noticeably Lycra-clad at all. Not everybody has the luxury of unlimited time to walk to their destination.
Ok, someone may have blundered in inventing the wheel, so by all means abolish all wheels and let the fire brigade and the ambulance service and the police and emergency medicos hop on horseback to go about their business, and everyone can play Thomas Hardy or Charlotte Bronte in gentler misted times. Canoes for sodden Christchurch, and Central Otago is hell-bent on vandalising itself anyway, because they had a good thing going down there and couldn’t resist vandalising it for easy bucks, and the sleeping gods in the mountains are starting to rumble them right now.
Before walking the Bridle Path over the Port Hills to Christchurch, I once visited a cheese factory in Lyttelton.
Those cheeses looked very hard to me. I remember them all as round. Square off the cheeses too – if they still exist, and are still being made in the co-ops of Sth Canterbury where farmers engaged in the sort of team work which today’s politicians and mad civil servants could see as an existential threat – but not half as bad as the menace of the modern wheel, it seems.
It looks as if the walkers and bikers doing their virtue-signalling protest on what, when I lived in Auckland, we used to call the Nippon Clip-on, had absolutely no idea at all of the danger in which they’d put themselves.
I’m not talking about the rozzers, or motor vehicles of various sorts. It’s the clip-ons themselves that are so dangerous. They aren’t designed to take the loads put on them by pedestrians and people on bikes. Any halfway decent structural engineer could tell them. There’s a real risk that, while they’re on it, the clip-on will simply break away from the main structure. I hope that they can all swim! And that’s before anyone considers how such people would access the bridge, then get to where they’re going once they’d crossed.
They’d be safer on the main span, in truth, even though access issues would be even worse.
But Martyn, how very unkind of you!!!
Because they’re so virtuous, they’re entitled to more privileges than the rest of us (including me as a very occasional cyclist).
They’re allowed to overtake on the left, go through red lights, ride across pedestrian crossings, ride home half cut after a few post work drinkies, go down one way streets in the wrong direction, and obscure their rear number plates when their apparatus is mounted on the rear of one of those over-sized petrol guzzlers. And as individuals they have a better right to a bus carrying 50 in a bus lane.
It’s all about safety dontcha know. It’s in the book!
I can say having seen this lot by chance on Sunday that it was whiter than a Remuera tennis club, probably emptied many a house in Grey Lynn and Pt Chev and more self righteous than a Mother Teresa appreciation society.
And smug, so deeply smug.
No, road rules did not apply to this lot, nothing ever does whence the entitled are doing God’s work.
Collins kinda spiced it up too. Yes the police were an embarrassment, they knew about this and sent 6 cops to do something with no intention of doing anything. Plus they warned 1, yep, that’s one person. But then again the police appear to have given up policing as we’ve come to know it as of late and morphed into some weird PR cult with followers so they probably aren’t much more likely to do much anywhere nowadays. But he had a point too.
I just don’t know what it is with cyclists but they are instantly more detestable than a gang rally on a bad day. They truly gridlocked the motorways in several parts by riding on a motorway. Who would have thought, not the police that’s for sure.
But they got selfies up the top on $2000 + iPhones to put on insta, Facebook, Twitter and whatever other platform these fuckwits get into.
And really, that was a big part of the attraction!
Xray don’t forget 70% of us are white in this country so maybe you are just looking at a normal cross section of the population. Don’t forget its the middle class who pay a majority of the tax.
However I will agree that I hate shared paths and the expectation that pedestrians should jump out of their way and cyclists on foot paths who by law should not be there,
My comment was when this lot storm a motorway as a protest about their entitlement to pedal their bikes wherever they want and I can I reassure you, doing that is dangerous, stuff all cops were there and it was allowed to happen with no ramifications to them.
Yet Ihumatao was eventually a protest of genuinely confiscated land, and police were there in force. No traffic disruptions, no danger to anyone.
I don’t buy into the evil white man is to blame for everything narrative but these two protests were chalk and cheese. One was exceedingly dangerous and allowed to happen free of charge, the other the polar opposite with arrests and law enforcement.
The trendy white lycra recreational crowd who politicians flock to to look all progressive are by far the bigger problem yet were treated far more passively.
“The trendy white lycra recreational crowd…
Didn’t see much lyra there, XRAY, if any, unless you’re using lycra as a metaphor.
We’ve been chasing cracks on the Nippon Clip-ons for decades. This involves spraying a penetrating dye on to the steel and then illuminating it with a UV light to find the cracks. Then the cracks have to be painstakingly ‘chased’ out. This involves manually grinding out each crack until the crack is removed and finally putting in weld metal to fill in the groove created by the grinding. We’ve also added a fair amount of additional steel at points of frequent cracking to slow it down and banned the ultra heavy trucks from the clip-ons.
The bottom line is that the bridge is reaching its normal service life and needs replacement. The only practical option is a new bridge alongside the old one (for reasons I can explain if you wish). Once that’s done, we can allocate one lane of the old bridge for cycling and walking, like they have with the Brooklyn Bridge when it was replaced with the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges.
But no doubt New Zealand with its terrible habit of dithering for years will allow the bridge to get into a poor state of repair and only be prompted into action once a crisis is reached, rather like the Auckland power crisis and similar issues. As Peter Jackson once said: “New Zealand is always a dollar short and a day late.”
Overall NZ is about a quarter of a trillion dollars behind on infrastructure spend.
Nice, a practical comment….cheers!
“Overall NZ is about a quarter of a trillion dollars behind on infrastructure spend.”
Ain’t that the damn truth!
It would be entertaining how many of them manage to stay upright when we get those August 50kph Southwester lies pumping through.
In all reality this will be like the other 100 cycle ways in Auckland – barely used and quite frankly the worst utilization of land.
When it’s really wet, cold or stormy few cyclists will use the bridge. The results from that? Lane space saved for bikes lying empty while less lanes for increased vehicle numbers.
I’ve spent over two decades cycling some of it combined with being pedestrian in urban environment and over three decades as a motorist.
I do understand cyclist’s fear of injury and defensiveness at hands of motorists. It’s real and it’s serious.
The hate directed at cyclists by motorists baffles me.
Some of you people ought to get a grip, you are pathetic.
Absolutely agree Richard, my 90 year old dad cycled all his life, never had a license, yet still manged to get from A to B. He cycled 30 km every second day to court my mother. Most of us as a young child desired a pushbike as our first toy/thing. The anger towards cyclist borders on psychopathic, not sure the harbour bridge group are the “norm” however.
If you want a real world problem think Lime Green Scooters!
Richard Christie. Well said.
…”Middle class militant cyclist activism with a selection of soft cheeses”…
————–
ROFL !
Cmon , Martyn , climb off your high horse, … horses have been with us for way longer than Bicycles and Veerhickles. About as long as pedestrians!
Dean Martin & John Wayne on horse
https://youtu.be/Lpwt7KefGGE?t=2
Horse Rolls Over Rider: Two Shocking Stunts From “Fort Apache” & “Rio Grande” (John Wayne/John Ford)
https://youtu.be/CfZuYPeeqtY?t=4
Oh I thought they were DHB staff creating a diversion, silly me.
I have cycled for most of my adult life. Two rules: Ride to the conditions/environment. Show respect to ALL around you. Can’t go wrong.
This means not racing along Wellington waterfront and passing people within 1 metre at speed. This really pisses me off as a pedestrian. As a cyclist I observe 1 metre or slow to walking pace if the area is well peopled.
Yes the worst offenders are probably drivers who cycle.
I have cycled for most of my adult life. Two rules: Ride to the conditions/environment. Show respect to ALL around you. Can’t go wrong.
This means not racing along Wellington waterfront and passing people within 1 metre at speed. This really pisses me off as a pedestrian. As a cyclist I observe 1 metre or slow to walking pace if the area is well peopled.
Yes the worst offenders are probably drivers who cycle.
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