A dedicated Auckland ebiker tells us about one of her favourite cycle-and-ferry excursions – with or without her 3-year-old son on the back.
Amanda Chapman likes hopping on her bike with her 3-year-old son, Ori. She’s been cycling for years and appreciates the speed and ease of it. Since getting an ebike, she’s particularly liked how easy it makes things as a parent. At the end of her pregnancy, biking was easier than walking, and cycling with her son was always part of the plan.
“It’s very normalised to him. When we’re leaving Ori will always ask ‘are we taking the car or the bike?’” she says. On the bike, he tends to be chatty, pointing things out or waving to people as they ride along. Their bike is popular with the kids at daycare, too: Amanda has gotten used to fielding questions from small people about it, and wrapping her son up warmly so he doesn’t get cold on the back of the bike.
Amanda initially started cycling as a kid, but stopped in her teens, worried about the traffic and exposure to cars. She eased back into biking by borrowing bikes from friends, mostly because she wanted to go faster and further than walking. “I realised it was faster to get to the train with a bike.” She’s now been cycle commuting for eight years, and the experience of biking lots of calm streets during lockdown encouraged her to get an ebike, realising it could replace a car.
After Ori was born, it took a while for Amanda to get back on her bike. Ori was too small for a bike seat, and they didn’t have a bike trailer. “It really affected my mental health. It was a lot harder to get out and do things, or to go from suburb to suburb.” Getting back into cycling took time and a few new pieces of equipment. Once Amanda and her partner Tom bought a trailer, and then later a child’s seat that fits on both their bikes, it made things a lot simpler.
“I found it really positively impacted me as I was able to get out and do things more easily,” she says. Now she appreciates that she can take her bike most places and that it gives her lots of freedom. “If I want to go real fast I can go fast, If I want to go slowly, I can. If I suddenly remember ‘oh I need to drop something off’ I can go and drop something off.” Being outside and moving gives her lots of energy, no matter the weather.
While Amanda commutes to work via Te Ara Ki Uta ki Tai (Glen Innes to Tāmaki Drive) and often takes her son to Playcentre by bike, she also loves biking for the joy of it, going for recreational rides on weekends. She shared a recent Saturday trip, featuring a ferry ride, a cafe and a stop at the Auckland Library of Tools.
First stop: the ferry
Amanda and her family live in Beach Haven, so the route to the ferry terminal at Birkenhead – and the ferry schedule – are embedded in her mind. “There’s heaps of people on the ferries [on Saturday mornings] and lots of kids, which Ori loves,” she says. There’s a bit of an art to manoeuvring the bike onto the ferry, and she often gets Ori to hop off so it’s easier to steer the bike on the gangway. She prefers the Birkenhead ferry as it has more space.
All the same, the ferry trip is usually a nice beginning to a day out, with a glimpse of the shining sea and the easy avoidance of traffic across the Harbour Bridge. Amanda shows me the map she made by tracking her trip on Strava: it shows a perfectly straight line, demonstrating how quick and direct travelling across the water can be.
Stop two: Lighthouse Cafe
Wheeling her bike off the boat, Amanda hopped on and headed for Lighthouse Cafe. About 12 minutes away, this eatery is on the water, at the Yacht Squadron base in Westhaven. It was an ideal point to connect with some friends who live nearby. “They messaged me and we decided to go on a ride together.” Amanda’s son and her friends’ kids love the cafe, which has a great view of interesting vehicles – boats, cars, trucks, buses – at work. “We were trying to take a photo and the kids all got distracted, because at that moment a digger came past and a scissor lift was rising up – they all got very excited.”
As she left the cafe, Amanda checked the AT Mobile app to figure out her route to the Auckland Library of Tools, knowing her friends needed to be on bike lanes so it would be safe for their kids in a bike trailer. “I knew the app loves to send us on any cycle lanes – and I found we could pretty much go the whole way on cycle lanes.”
The 25-minute route wasn’t the most direct, but with ebikes, the hills and the diversions didn’t seem to matter. The group progressed around the marina on the shared path, then travelled through Victoria Park, onto the Nelson Street cycleway and Te Ara I Whiti (The Lightpath), then along K Road.
The final destination: the Auckland Library of Tools
The Auckland Library of Tools, where I am chatting to Amanda, is a community space, with tools from dehydrators to ladder extensions, heatguns and car jacks available for members. There’s a narrow kitchen for volunteers to use and a comfortable couch at the back, where the area is shared with the makerspace Hackland.
The Library of Tools recently started hosting regular repair cafes as well as monthly repair workshops. It gets busy, with people bringing their broken household items to get repaired by experts. “My friends actually realised there was a hole in the mesh of their bike trailer, and they got that fixed,” Amanda says. She’d brought along a few household items to repair too.
The group ended up staying for a while, since the kids were having lots of fun playing on the floor and running around.
Then it was time to go home: a 17-minute ride back down the same route to the ferry terminal, waving goodbye to their friends on the way; wheeling the bike onto the ferry; biking up the hill towards the Birkenhead library and the playground for some slides and swings, then on to a Matariki celebration at the family’s Playcentre. “I just like that my bike makes things so easy,” Amanda reflects on her day out.
