Is there nothing that public transport can’t do?
My commute nearly killed me. And it also came pretty close to dismantling my marriage.
To get from my home in Titirangi to my previous job in Penrose, I had little choice but to drive. The journey by car was 30 minutes to an hour depending on weather, the school year, and what time I managed to get out of the house. Out through the Waitakere bush, along the Hillsborough ridge line with the views of the Manukau harbour, briefly into the thick traffic of the motorway, and on to the light industrial neighbourhoods of Penrose where lunch bars sell soggy cheese toasties and every second business is WOF shop.
I hated it. Driving in dense traffic is stressful. In the mornings it’s just too early for concentrating that hard. In the evenings I just wanted to be home. Instead I was trapped in a mosh pit of lonely quarantined steel sorrow, limping along the on ramp to the South Western Motorway.
Each day I was locked in a battle with my fellow commuters for every minute I was on the road. I’d frantically change lanes, desperate for the tiniest advantage. I’d take parallel back streets, marking my position in relation to trucks as I returned to the main artery; success was two cars ahead of when I turned off. I’d take the outside lane at busy roundabouts and do a full rotation to advance my position. I’d roll the dice and drive in the bus lane, knowing at least 20% of the time a Council employee in a floppy hat would be there protecting the territory.
It was a Sisyphean mission. I never achieved anything other than near crashes, too much adrenaline, and extreme frustration by the time I arrived home at the end of the day, knowing I would need to do it all again the next day.
The journey started to make me angry. It made me hate our beautiful little house surrounded by native bush. It made me long for my former flat in Ponsonby, for my old life.
Driving to work each day made me a bad person. Spending hours in traffic every day made me grumpy and ungrateful. I’d become a poor husband, short and curt and unhappy. Life was good. We were lucky to own a home. My wife ran her own successful business, and I had a job I loved. But commuting in my car blinded me to all the good things.
Then my commute tried to kill me. It was 14 February 2017. It was raining heavily and I was running late. The 9 o’clock bulletin came on RNZ as I shot through the Blockhouse Bay roundabout and I had the bus lane, at that hour legally available for cars, to myself. I laughed haughtily at the long line of cars in the right lane crawling towards their jobs, afraid to use the left lane, as I passed them by the dozen.
Then out of a small hole left in the long line of stationary vehicles at an intersection, a car turned through the gap and crashed into the front side of my vehicle just in front of my driver’s door. I was travelling around 50km an hour and as I was shunted across the road it felt like I was in a video game. The world moved in slow motion as I barely avoided crashing head-on into a power pole. I bounced over the curb and came to rest on the footpath against a fence. I sat shaking in shock, but completely unharmed, as I waited for the police to arrive. I was lucky. My beloved Toyota Caldina less so – she was a write off.
Without a car I was forced to try and take public transport. First I had to get to New Lynn transport hub, from here my bus would take over an hour as it weaved through the back streets of Onehunga. If I missed one bus the next one wasn’t for another 60 minutes. I was forced to buy a new car as soon as possible even though I wanted to stop driving.
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Then the 171 and the Western Line saved me.
My new job at The Spinoff was in Britomart and suddenly public transport was my friend. The 171 leaves from almost directly outside my house and drops me at New Lynn. The Western Line takes 33 minutes from New Lynn to drop me two minutes walk from the office. Door to door it takes 55 minutes. I almost wish it took a little longer.
There are few other times when I have an hour all to myself. In the last year I’ve read the most books since the lazy days of university. I listen to podcasts about US politics. I spend guilt free time on Instagram. If I really need to I get a valuable head start on sending some emails.
Both the bus and train are modern and clean, warm in winter, cool in summer. Mostly they’re on time. It costs $4.80. It’s relaxing and pleasant. And I feel proud to be a part of the public transport revolution, a participant in the future functionality of the city.
It’s made me love living in Titirangi. When I get home to the bush each evening I feel like I’ve left the stress and grind of the city behind. It’s a sanctuary. I feel refreshed after my time on the train and the bus. It’s given me perspective and clarity on my life. Without the stress and frustration of driving I am a happier, kinder person. A better partner.
Public transport might just have saved my marriage.
Read more from Commute Week here
SocietyMay 12, 2018
Social investment will lead to more Māori in youth court
Why are young Māori over-represented in New Zealand’s youth justice system? Maybe we could start by asking them, writes Victoria University’s Sarah Monod de Froideville.
The first Youth Justice Indicators Summary Report, recently released by the Ministry of Justice, shows that young Māori (and Pasifika) increasingly make up the greatest proportion of young people who appear in Youth Court.
We’ve known for a while that young Māori are over-represented in New Zealand’s youth justice system. What we don’t know is why.
Some say young Māori offend more as they are suffering trauma from the intergenerational effects of colonisation. Others say parental incarceration is to blame, as it robs Māori children of their family stability and prison becomes understood as somewhere that Māori go to for a time.
There are also those who argue that the problem is not with Māori but with the criminal justice system. That the over-representation of Māori in our youth system and in our adult jails is a result of institutional bias, i.e. racist cops, prejudiced judges and practices that have a bigger impact on Māori when compared with non-Māori.
We know that there is more than a grain of truth to each of these theories, but we don’t yet have enough research to confirm or refute their claims. So, they are routinely dismissed as radical ideas thrown around by disgruntled Māori and floaty academic types.
But what we also know is that if the coalition government holds onto Bill English’s social investment vision the youth court trends are only going to get worse. Social investment won’t result in a reduction in ‘adverse outcomes’ for young Māori, only more surveillance, more contact with criminal justice agents, and in the end, more young Māori in youth court than ever before.
How do we know this? Well, the kind of social investment approach that English banged on about is informed by the very same ‘risk factor prevention paradigm’ (RFPP) that has underpinned preventative youth crime policies among Western countries for the last 25 years. The very same RFPP that social scientists have debunked as a methodologically flawed “mishmash of ideas”. The very same RFPP that can’t predict who is going to commit a crime when they grow up any more than I can predict the weather for next weekend. The same RFPP that holds young people responsible for problems that are outside of their control—like household poverty and whether mum did okay in secondary school. Incidentally, the determinism of the RFPP undermines the free will foundation of our criminal law.
The bottom line is that disproportionately more young Māori will qualify for social ‘investment’, simply because Māori are disproportionately represented across all indicators of social disadvantage.
This means they will be disproportionately subject to state intrusion into their lives with early interventions and having information about them shared between agencies. Their normal childhood bumps and bruises will be disproportionately scrutinised for any indication of abuse and those among them who do suffer harm will be disproportionately subject to suspicions they will offend one day. Lots of criminal kids once suffered harm, so isn’t it just logic that harmed kids will be one day be criminal? Right?
Last but not least, early intervention recipients who do go on to offend sometime in the future, for whatever reason, will not only be held accountable for their offending but also for turning out to be a bad investment. There is no free will for someone who once received an intervention. One must respond well to it or else feel the full weight of the law.
If the coalition government is serious about reducing the numbers of rangatahi Māori in the youth justice system (and about trimming the Māori prison muster), then it needs to get rid of the social investment approach. So far, Minister Sepuloni has only tinkered with it, and commentators seem adamant that it is not going anywhere fast.
More Reading
But a better investment would be one that sought the answers for why young Māori are over-represented in our justice statistics.
One that began, perhaps, by asking them.
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