Welcome back, suckers! Welcome back to a new year of living it large at the cosiest wee campus-based university that Aotearoa has to offer. Now that I once again have you all by the balls of editorial control, here’s my pitch: make North Dunedin a City of Spokes.
In a move almost as nostalgic as that one student’s dad who revisited Castle Street during Flo Week (read about it), I got a bike this summer. My bike is gorgeous. She’s sexy. She’s sustainable. She takes me places no other ride has before. She’s also very vulnerable to broken glass, you pricks.
My love story with bikes began when I was ten. As a kid, I would join my best friend and her family on their annual summer camping trips to the small Taranaki beach town called Urenui. They were part of a larger collective who would set up a commune of tents beside the river.
The Urenui campsite was the first proper taste of being a Community Citizen for us kids. All the essentials of a village were simplified and condensed into a kid-friendly playground where we tried being a Real Person on for size. Like Mums and Dads, but we were given actual responsibilities rather than drinking pretend cups of tea and repeating gripes to each other we had no understanding of: “Did you throw a red sock in with the whites again?”
The connective glue that held it all together were the bikes we rode. With baskets strapped to the front and only mildly pot-holed dirt roads, we were unstoppable. We boomeranged between the Tent City, dairy, and communal kitchens – collecting dinner ingredients, carting dishes, and spending our chore-earned pennies on carefully curated lolly mixes. I don’t think I’ve been happier than when we pooled our money for a $10 whopper mix.
I learned the key ingredients for a happy community and how to play my part at that campsite. And I see all those ingredients in North Dunedin, the heart of student culture at Otago Uni. Like Urenui, North D is a condensed playground for fledgling adults. Instead of tents, there are the open-door flats (many with the insulation of a gore-tex). Rather than learning the rules of chess from a mate’s great uncle in his beat-up campervan, there are lessons on moral theory or organic chemistry offered in similarly beat-up lecture theatres. Though I’ve not tried, I imagine the fishing prospects in the Leith would yield similar results: a stray chip packet or limp sock at best.
My vision is for North Dunedin to become the new Urenui. Otago University is the closest knit student community you’ll find in Aotearoa. Most students live within about a 2km square radius of one another and the street parties make the student quarter borderline pedestrianised anyway. Why not bite the bullet? Imagine how much happier and communal North Dunedin would be if breathas were zooming around on bikes, full of community spirit and whimsy, and getting some fresh air in their lungs rather than bong smoke.
Other perks would include: less student drink driving (but maybe drink biking), healthier for your rave-ruined knees, better for the environment (and your climate anxiety), cost-effective (free after the initial koha donation for a Te Oraka bike grab), and handy-fucking-dandy basket attachments to carry your piss, midnight Maccas meal, or your laptop if you’re too cool for backpacks and discover the awkward lean that comes with biking with a heavy tote bag.
This totally isn’t to justify keeping my new baby safe from broken glass (once a cyclist, you become rather passionate about ridding the streets of it) or validate a yearning to feel young again (if Greg the Castle Dad can do it, so can I). Now get outside and have a bake sale or something, I don’t know.