I can't take the pressure

[mrsbrown]

It seems like a good idea, but I feel a bit intimidated. It takes me twice the time they say it is reasonable for me to take.

http://www.noexcusezone.com.au/noexcuse_australia_melbourne

Maybe they should draw another map for slightly overweight, unfit, over 40's women - then I'd feel like I really had no excuse.

I'm progressively working on some of what stops me from riding to work: I now have nice lights, a reflective jacket and a basket on the back of my bike for my back pack.

It's taken me so long this summer to get myself re-organised that now I have to find gloves/mittens and ear warmth so I can avoid the skull pain I get from the temperature difference between the inside of my head and the cold earlobes as I ride in the morning.

Every morning I find a new excuse/reason to avoid riding, this morning it was because i still haven't really gotten over my cold from last week.

Comments

[montjoye.livejournal.com]

Good luck. I keep finding excuses for not taking the train. This morning was a case of the monthly blerghs. As it turned out I got stuck at work- so driving home should have been good, except the traffic was still horrid even at 6:45 or so.

[quatrefoil.livejournal.com]

I can't say I have a lot of faith in these people and their timings - I've just looked at their site for Sydney. Aside from the fact that Sydney has a 'no excuse zone' and Canberra doesn't, despite the fact that Canberra has fabulous bike paths everywhere and I think 'you're going to die' is an acceptable excuse for Sydney, their times are completely unrealistic. No way are you going to be able to get from Burwood to the city in half an hour on a bike, even if you are an Olympic athlete.

[quatrefoil.livejournal.com]

And I base this on the fact that you can't do it in a car at three o'clock in the morning on a weeknight because I can't get to Ashfield from the city in that time and it's further in.

[elefianora.livejournal.com]

Well, shall we start with their map?

The dot that appears to be labelled Caulfield is in fact at Elsternwick, and the one labelled Malvern is at Tooronga, (where you have a fairly easy ride along the bike path) and since when is Kew to the east of Ivanhoe?

The train from Caulfield takes nearly 30 mins, so you have to be moving pretty fast to equal it, particularly as it only stops at stations not traffic lights.
Anyone trying to ride along Dandy Rd is suicidal.

Looking at the areas of map that I'm familiar with, I suspect that they have either ridden them on a Sunday afternoon, or not ridden them at all and just based their times on distance. Once you get into the inner suburbs, you can't ride as fast, as you are dodging pedestrians, traffic all over the place, etc.

[omnot.livejournal.com]

Googlemaps says that Sunshine is a 28 minute drive from the CBD, which must put riding a bike on a par with driving. Hmm.

Possibly

[doushkasmum.livejournal.com]

Google maps says it is a 31min drive to the city from our house, and I would agree with that. Sacred_chao says it usually takes him 30-35 min to ride to work in the city, the train takes 30 min. So his ride, the train and driving are comparable. I would say that in peak hour driving would be much slower too.

This would imply that the people making the map are riders as fit as sacred_chao, which they probably are. They have failed to take account of the fact that people making excuses are probably not as fit as they are.

Re: Possibly

[sjkasabi.livejournal.com]

Yes, they're more or less right for me. We're pretty much where they put the thirty minute line, and it takes me 30 mins, or a bit less if I'm lucky with traffic lights, to get to work on a "normal" day. Really really hurrying, ie working quite noticeably hard the whole way, might shave off another four minutes or so. Often the time you make up on the ride you lose quite a lot of stuck behind a slower cyclist on the non-divided bit of St G's road, where you can't overtake because the traffic is bumper to bumper and won't let you into a car lane to do so; or at the lights where the cycle is favouring car traffic and making you wait a lot ie the intersections of Alexandra Parade and Elgin St with Canning Street. So I'm guessing the guys who put this together are really fit, normally do it in my "hurrying" time, and then allowed an extra five minutes for "normal" people...

Quite seriously, it's the same issue as at work, where we're expected to tow the party line about how good all the facilities for cyclists in the building are. How very health promoting of us. The problem is, they're decent facilities for people who were ALREADY COMMITTED TO CYCLING AND PREPARED TO PUT UP WITH WORSE. If you were, say, a visibly overweight 40 year old woman at the body-shy end of the NORMAL spectrum of people's willingness to be seen partly-dressed in single sex locker room situations, who had never ridden as a commuter before, and never had to think about the practicalities of having clothes and stuff at work before... then there are, quite honestly, about 20 barriers I can think of (including issues around winter weather) in your way - 20 little places where you've got a chance of having your "too hard first thing in the morning" button pushed.

Someone really needs to put together an "I have no interest in bikes or bike-riding per se, but I think I need to cycle to work for money/health/sustainability reasons" handbook. And, sadly, Bicycle Victoria is not the organisation to do it. They've all forgotten what that felt like.

Real Reasons

[sjkasabi.livejournal.com]

* indicates I have not ridden on a morning for this reason myself (at some stage - not necessarily under current arrangements). All the others other people have told me, at least once.

Some of these would be ridiculously easy to fix or avoid if the people with the power to do so ever bothered to think about it.

*I have to ride on an actual road with peak-hours cars for a chunk of the way. They have metal shells and I don't. Plus there are TRAMS.
*It's freezing when you start so you dress warmly but know you'll be sweaty and hot and uncomfortable within 10 minutes
*It's comfortably warm when you start but you know it'll be boiling bloody hot within 5 mins AND unspeakably hot getting home after work.
*Can't find my gloves. Hands will fall off. Or just go numb and I'll run off the track cos they don't respond properly when trying to steer. Don't laugh. I've done that.
*Need to wear an outfit that requires a crisp ironed shirt for laundry or meeting-headology reasons - while I have developed low-wrinkle risk transportation approaches, there are no ironing facilities at work if something goes wrong.
*My only working pannier does not quite fit all the things I need to transport today
*If I leave clothes in my locker so I don't have to transport them each day, they end up smelling of that sewage leak they've spent a year mysteriously not being able to fix, cos hey, that's where the bike cage is
*I need to go shopping on the way home or we won't eat this week, and the pannier is a bugger to carry around, and then even with a basket or a backpack, it can be hard to transport lots of cans, or a big box of catfood, or whatever, in addition to work-related stuff.
*I rode to work yesterday and saw a car hit a cyclist who could have been me.
Where would I leave all my bike stuff (=there are no lockers)
*I couldn't find any information on how you got access to those lockers I've seen around
Or someone told me, but they just put me on a waiting list with no idea of how long it would be.
The lockers are a bit of a walk from the bathrooms so juggling all the stuff getting there makes me look stupid
AND you have to walk through the space the cars zoom through without expecting pedestrians to get between the bike cage and the bathroom
And at night it's super creepy in that unattended car park way
In summer the bike cage is full and they have sent messages out telling you the streets around work are the highest-bike-theft areas in the CBD
I can't find the showers
*There aren't enough showers so I hang around for ages waiting to get in or I have to go to my desk smelly because I run out of time
The shower cubicles are small enough that I can't take my clothes into them without them getting wet, so I have to been seen at least semi naked in public while I finish dressing.
There is no where to plug in a hair dryer or an electric shaver
*there is only one communal air dryer thingy and I need to wash my hair to look work-respectable, so I may have to queue for an unknown amount of time to dry it
There are no mirrors in the showers where I can put my makeup on.
There is nowhere to leave my towel for it to dry.
Or if there is, it's a distance from the bathroom and not on my way to the office so it effectively adds ten minutes to the commute
The building management people are mean to the cyclists and keep putting up notices telling them to do unsafe things (like walk down a slippery sloping ramp in modern cleats rather than ride down it) or risk having the privilege of entering the building with a bike revoked.
*If I get wet through riding through the rain, and the work clothes in my backpack or pannier get wet, there is nowhere they can hang freely to dry out... even if I have some emergency stuff on hand in a locker (which I do now) I risk letting good clothes get damaged.
*My ride into the city is really quite nice, but once I get into the CBD I have to cross it AND THERE ARE NO BIKE LANES! AND THE CARS TRY TO KILL YOU!
*I don't have lights/am out of batteries and I'm likely to work back late enough I'll need them to get home.
*I got a flat tyre yesterday and it's either money+time to walk it to a bike shop or time+grovelling with grease in your work clothes to fix it so I can ride the bike home

[hnpcc]

since when is Kew to the east of Ivanhoe?

According to the Melways it's marginally to the east, but really they're pretty much north-south. It kind of depends on where you take the centre of each place to be (I think it used to be the post office, but I've no idea if that's still correct.)

Having said that, I wouldn't ride on their proposed route from Ivanhoe - Heidelberg Rd has a 'suggested' bike lane from the Chandler to Ivanhoe, which is only a 'wider than normal' road. If they ever connect the Darebin Creek path to the Yarra trail I'd consider that (although I'd still have to get to the Darebin path - ergh).

The Coburg timing was pretty accurate though, it used to take me 20-30 minutes from Coburg to East Melbourne.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

I do exactly the same thing :-/

(she says, replying very late)

Actually, I stopped by to offer you a Dreamwidth invite, if you'd like one.

[mrsbrown.livejournal.com]

Yes please