Why would you?


It doesn’t take much to bring traffic to a standstill these days.  My commute, as mentioned before, is about twelve and a half miles each way.  On days other than school holidays when the traffic is at its worst, I would generally be filtering between stationary traffic for about four of those miles.  Bad rain or an accident makes the traffic back up even more.

Take this morning for example, I got about a mile from home before encountering stationary traffic.  The queue of virtually stationary cars continued for about 8 miles to the far side of Holywood, where a VW golf must have met another car trying to cross the dual carriageway.  By the look of the wreckage, the impact would have been enough to spoil anyone’s day. 

On the few occasions when I have had to bring a car to work, I have taken a push bike with me, parked a few miles out of the town centre, and then cycled the last few miles.  It is either that or queue for horrendously overpriced parking closer to town that may not even be available because there simply aren’t enough spaces.  The last few miles of such a commute, whether walked or cycled may be good for exercise, but they are not in pleasant surroundings, and if it rains you are guaranteed to get the worst of it either directly from the heavens, or thrown up by passing cars.

Yet I have often been asked how I can put up with the wonderful Irish weather while commuting on a motorcycle?  When on my Suzuki, I am geared up from door to door, and the bike itself was specifically chosen because of its good weather protection.  I am guaranteed to arrive at work dry and warm.  Also on the bike I get free parking in the city centre, use of the bus lanes to bypass queues of cars, and can filter when, like today, the cars are going nowhere.  OK, the journey took longer today because of the accident, but it was still a fraction of what it would have been had I been in a car!  Public transport is little better than a car commute.  The quoted journey times for our local trains are station to station; thus they ignore the additional journey from home to station, and from station to work.  As I have written before, most people would still need their own car just to get to one of the stations.  The bike wins on any type of sensible analysis.

This is not to downplay the potential dangers of commuting on a motorcycle.  A high level of built in paranoia about those you share the road with is a necessary prerequisite for any such journey, but then that is true for car drivers as well, as the owner of that VW Golf found out today.  I passed only one other motorcyclist today; a guy on a large BMW trail bike.  He was having trouble getting a bike of this size through some of the gaps (he had panniers on), but thankfully was keeping a good eye behind him, and pulled over to let my much narrower bike past.  Thanks mate.

The burning questions of the day then are:

  1. Why does anyone bother commuting by car unless they actually need the car once they get to work?
  2. Why do so few people, even those who own a bike, see the advantages of using it for commuting?

Comments

Post a Comment

Feel free to leave a comment: I don't use or sell your data, and you will not receive any spam mail as a result.

Popular posts from this blog

Local History of the worst possible kind! The story of Carnage Hill.

This post was shamelessly copied from a local history book, now out of print, that used to be available in pdf format on line.     It is only one section of a much larger and more broadly based book.  All credit is then due to the book's author, and to the team who originally published it.  Trinity College, Dublin have now scanned an published a host of records from the 1641 rebellion.  More details relating to the numerous massacres and other events from the this rebellion can be seen here: https://1641.tcd.ie/ Those who have travelled the main road between Bangor and Belfast will know the corner known as ‘the Devil’s Elbow’, which is located just before the junction leading to Seahill/ Rockport.   On the left side of the road when travelling from Bangor there is a small road leading up into the Holywood hills.   It is now called Carney Hill, but according to this article that name derives from Carnage Hill.   To see where it got this name read on.   Many thanks are due t
Read more

Welcome

Image
Welcome to Old Ireland.   My initial idea for this site was to cover only classic vehicles, but since classicireland.ie was already taken and the best alternative I could find was this one, my thoughts for the site began to broaden.   A lot of the inspiration for this comes from the few magazines for which I have written articles.   Let’s get these mentioned early, because you should not be surprised to see a little of their influence here.   Real Classic is subscription only in print, but also has an excellent site at https://www.real-classic.co.uk/ , where Frank, Rowena and a host of writers entertain and inspire.   Then there is Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly, formerly in print monthly, but now only on line at http://mnmotorcycle.com / (unfortunately now obsolete.  You will need to use the Wayback machine to find it).   MMM’s archives could keep you reading happily for months, and the like it or not truths told by Thomas Day (Geezer with a grudge: see his own site at http://geez
Read more

And then what?

 If you have been reading these ramblings for a while, you may have read here:  The Burning Question of Our Times. (oldandireland.blogspot.com , that my conscience is giving me grief for my many years of burning petrol for fun.  You may even have seen this, posted way back in September 2019:  Old Ireland, new technology. The search for reliable solar water heating. (oldandireland.blogspot.com) , where I was looking for a good alternative for a solar thermal system that we had fitted on our roof. The tubes for it were made by a local company called Thermomax, and supposedly had a twenty year guarantee when we bought them.  They broke repeatedly and eventually catastrophically which meant that they were never likely to pay for themselves, and the guarantee turned out to be worth nothing because Thermomax went bankrupt.  Great. Because of my experience with those thermal tubes, there was no way that I was going to fit anything similar any time soon.  Still, I needed something to assuage t
Read more

Two Wrongs…….

 This has been bugging me ever since Hamas were stupid/ callous enough to raid Israel on the 7 th October. What did they expect would happen with the current right-wing government that is in power in Israel?  There is a lot of truth in what Israel are saying about Hamas using their own peoples lives for propaganda. However, and this is a very big however, there is, or at least there should be, a huge difference between the terrorist organisation Hamas and a legitimate state like Israel.   I’ll give you a couple of rough, home grown definitions that might hopefully illustrate the point.   We have a lot of experience in dealing with terrorists here in Northern Ireland.   What Israel is doing categorically will not work.   They will not get rid of Hamas, in fact heavy handed tactics like they are applying will only drive more volunteers into the ranks of Hamas. 1)       A terrorist organisation does not follow the rule of law, that's why they are an illegal organisation.   Th
Read more

Tilly.

Image
  In January 2010 I was idly browsing through the ads for pet dogs on Gumtree when I spotted a very poor quality picture of a mainly white dog with some black markings.   The dog was sitting looking up at someone just out of shot, as if obedient to them, (Knowing Tilly now, I suspect treats may have been involved).   The description in the ad was somewhat less than detailed.   She was described as being a mix between a Bearded Collie and an Irish Wolf Hound, and the people that had her, wanted rid of her for free.   That, and a contact number was about it.   Even in the blurry shot on the ad she looked like a beautiful dog, and I was intrigued.   It had been around ten years since our last dog had died (aged 17), but at the time, my wife was nursing her elderly mother, and with a Wolf Hound in the mix I presumed that this would be a very large dog, so I didn’t mention it, thinking that someone would soon take on a dog like that.   Shortly after, the ad disappeared, so I thought tha
Read more

Information overload.

Image
  HED Map Viewer 2024 (arcgis.com) The map showing archaeological sites here in Northern Ireland that I used in my last piece is well worth a mention in its own right (see the link at the top of this page).  It is a government site, but is open to the public, so there are no issues in using it.  There are many layers, from ones showing shipwrecks and aircraft crashes, to historic maps, battle sites, and even lidar surveys in some areas.   Pick on  a link that interests you, and click in.  There are often further links to other sites and even back to the original archaeological reports on many of them.  To those who don't live in Northern Ireland, sorry, you will have to find something similar for your own locality.  But here, there is a real warren of interesting information and links that will keep anyone with an interest occupied for hours. Many of the sites local to me I knew about, but there are a few that are new to me, including an intriguing liner stone feature that is under
Read more

On eating out.

  I’ve mentioned before that we were building an extension.   Because of it we lost our kitchen for a few months and were living on what we could either microwave or air fry in the house.   That is a pretty boring diet, so we also had more carry outs than we have had in years and have been doing the rounds of local pub grub establishments and restaurants. I have to say that for a town the size of Bangor, the restaurants despite not being cheap to dine in are almost universally pretty poor.   Buying wine in a restaurant costs a lot, but what you get in return for your hard earned cash has frequently been not much more than vinegar.   Why is it that £6 to £7 quid can get you a pretty decent wine in a supermarket, yet three or four times that amount in a restaurant buys something only fit to put on chips? Restaurants here have been complaining for years about people not eating out as much as they used to yet provide a not very enjoyable eating experience when you do go out with medioc
Read more

Island life.

Image
OK, Islay has nothing to do with Ireland, but it is only twenty five miles off our coast, and the scenery and culture would be familiar to anyone who lives here in Ireland.  This story was originally published way back in 2008 in Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly, a great magazine in its time.  I thought this was sufficiently far removed from the current Covid crisis to give us all a small reminder of better times. Enjoy. __________ My home in Northern Ireland provides scope for many good scenic runs on a bike.  One familiar and rightly popular local run follows the coast north through County Antrim from the narrow confines of the Irish Sea to the open Atlantic.  The two waters meet off Ballycastle, a harbour sheltered by the rugged cliffs of Rathlin Island 3 miles offshore.  Look west from here on a good day, and the coast winds off toward Donegal and the open ocean, look north and off Scotland’s coast, the horizon is broken by Islay, the first of the Hebrides islands, and by the hi
Read more

MOT prep for modern cars.

Image
  My wife's car (MX5) was up for MOT  recently so, well  in advance,  I checked it over.  The only usual wear and tear mechanical items that needed replaced were the rear brake pads.  There is nothing unusual in this, and it is an easy job but from previous experience it tends to have side effects in these cars (see later).  At the front there was a problem that I was not expecting. These cars come with Bilstein suspension as standard.  The rubber boots on the front ones had broken up, exposing the damper shafts to all the vile salt and corrosion that our winter roads provide.  In my humble opinion this should not happen on a ten year old car.  For example, the boots protecting the front suspension on my 47 year old BMW bike are still the original parts, and are still fine.  It is all down to the specification of the rubber in these parts as set by the factory.  But the boots had to be changed, especially given the price of replacement Bilstein suspension! This is not a particularl
Read more