For the next two weeks, New Zealand’s biggest city is blissfully traffic-free. And it is mine.
Cars stretched bumper to bumper-to-bumper down the northwestern motorway, neat little rows lined up as far as the eye could see. Brake lights flashed like the blinking eyes of lost souls looking for a place to rest. Those eyes wished for a gap, a moment of clarity, a small clearing to let them go somewhere, anywhere, as long as it wasn’t here.
For me, that place was home. In my way was a man driving a giant Ford Ranger. He passed the time vaping, puffing huge clouds of smoke out his window. Occasionally, his fist would emerge through the fog, shaking with rage at anyone daring to skip the queue and slip in front of him on this bleak, frazzled, Auckland night.
It was a fist that talked in loud, ugly tones. It was gruff and curt. It urged violence. What did it say? “Screw Auckland. Screw Aucklanders. And screw this bloody traffic.”
I understood. At that time of night, the trip from Albany to West Auckland takes about 20 minutes. No one expects to get stuck in a traffic jam nearing midnight on a Thursday. But that’s exactly what happened. My trip was nearly over when the traffic began. It took two hours to complete a snail’s-paced crawl from Lincoln Road to my Te Atatu home, a distance of just a few kilometres.
No podcasts are built to survive that kind of traffic. No tempers are either. I arrived home, frayed and dismayed, well after midnight. I very nearly cried. About the goddamn traffic.
When it comes to Auckland’s clogged arterial roads, we’ve been taught to expect the unexpected. Jams form instantly for the sketchiest of reasons. A rogue sheet of plywood scattered across the Manukau motorway can have a butterfly effect on North Shore gridlock. I have missed drinks, movies, dinners, medical appointments, kids’ sports events, airport pickups and drop-offs and, on one incredibly depressing evening, a Vince Staples concert, because of Auckland’s car woes.
Everyone has stories like this, swapped like war wounds, the price we pay for living in a city that wants to build more roads to fix the problem. Even if we all get electric vehicles, we know that won’t save us from traffic hell.
Over time, the city’s drivers have reacted to population growth, the lack of public transport infrastructure and the increasing frequency of delays in a variety of ways. They’ve become increasingly desperate to escape their four-wheeled prisons. It’s fascinating to watch our collective mindsets evolve. Driving in Auckland is no longer a chance to get from A to B. It’s an exercise in survival, a real-life rat race with no clear winners and aggression at every turn.
We block intersections, cut corners, rat race through back roads, and hustle through orange lights to get where we’re going just a few seconds faster. In Mt Albert, impromptu roads are forged down the grass berms of one rammed Mt Albert Street. Undertaking, an exercise frowned upon and even illegal in many other countries, is an acceptable method of forcing your way through motorway traffic. Anger, frustration and resentment sits there, idling at every red light – especially those at motorway on-ramps that encourage drag racing as part of everyday life on the road.
Fences, light posts and traffic lights sit bent, warped and crumpled, ruined monuments to our failure at dealing with the growing frustrations of Auckland’s increasingly dire car problem. Tempers are frayed, always. When the horn doesn’t work, we turn to passive-aggressive notes. It’s been three years, yet I cannot stop thinking about one pinned to the windshield of a friend’s car, left by the furious driver of an urban tractor when she dared park her two-door Alfa Romeo Mito within the defined lines of her allotted space.
Imagine the kind of mindstate you must be in to write a line like, Scum like you should be shot with a bag of your own shit, in biro, in capital letters, on lined, A4 paper, then fold it up and place it gently under a windscreen wiper. That surely could only come from someone who has sat in an awful lot of traffic.
No more. For the next two weeks, Aucklanders are leaving this cursed city in their droves. It’s holiday season. They’re going and they’re taking their traffic problems with them. Across the summer holidays jams are coming to Whangamata, Mount Maunganui, Taupo, Gisborne, the Coromandel, the Bay of Plenty, up north and down south. Anywhere you can find sun, bachs and sandy beaches, you’ll find Aucklanders and their cars.
Except in Auckland. That’s where you can find me, flagging the roadtrips to beachside locales to enjoy two blissful weeks of a car-free city. Auckland is at its best when everyone leaves it. It suddenly becomes the world’s best city. Everything is open, the roads and parks are free, and no one’s here to enjoy it except me and a few others in the know. For a brief moment, every Aucklander who stays put gets to enjoy the blissful joy of a wonky city with no people in it. Finally, for all the wrong reasons, our city works.