Rush hour …

Money, as per usual, is pretty tight in this household. And it doesn’t help that it costs me $45 in petrol costs every time I have to travel up to Sydney. Actually that’s $45 when petrol’s around the $1.20 mark – at the moment it’s nearer $1.28 and so my commute works out at an even $50. So I was trying to think of ways of bringing that cost down, as you would. The government are offering rebates on most of the installation costs of getting your car converted to LPG. So that’s an option. Another option is to sell the Kluger. We bought it at a time when the furthest I had to commute was Broughton, 10km down the road, but now I have to travel 130km into Sydney and back and the Klug’s turned into a bottomless pit for cash. I did look at traveling by train, but there isn’t a massive difference in the cost and it takes about two hours longer each way – so bugger that for a game of soldiers.

The third option, which is the one I’ve settled on for now, is to drive Liz’s car. She’s got a little white Mazda Astina (that’s a 323 folks) with a little 1.6 engine and a far more frugal appetite for non-renewable fossil fuels. Now thus far I’ve resisted this option because I really hate being down low in a car and your arse practically scrapes the tarmac in an Astina. Also its engine is literally half the size of the Kluger’s and I do like cars with a bit of poke. But needs must when the devil shits in your kettle, so a couple of weeks ago I did an experiment. I filled it up and then did my usual commute to Sydney. The next morning I went to my usual petrol station and filled it up again to get a proper comparison of costs. Instead of costing me $50, it cost me $34. That’s some saving. $50 a week or nearly $2500 a year. So now I commute to the city and back in the Astina. It’s a very uncomfortable car compared to the Kluger, it has no cup holders, the stereo is shit, the brakes aren’t terrific and pretty much every car on the road feels they can bully you – but you can’t argue with annual savings of $2500, so there you go.

I am, it must be said, at ease with my commute now. I know where the slow bits are, I know which lane to be in at which moments, I know which rat-runs actually work and I know that the difference between driving like an escaped convict and driving like Miss Daisy is about 20 minutes. So I don’t stress too much these days and traveling is far more enjoyable when you’re not stressed. I tend to listen to the Danny Baker show on BBC Radio London during my commute – it gets recorded by a Mac application called Radioshift. There is, however, something surreal about the traffic reports for inner London when you’re driving through Botany Bay towards the airport tunnel that goes underneath the main runway at Sydney airport. Listening to the weather reports always raises a chuckle too.

In order to keep some more of our hard-earned cash out of the hands of the government I have installed an app called Trapster on my iPhone. Very good it is too. It’s basically a wide area police surveillance network that leverages the power of the mobile phone network, the iPhone and the eyes of thousands of commuters to keep tabs on all the police traps. It overlays live information about the police, red light cameras, static cameras, congested areas, tricky corners and school zones on a Google Map. As you travel it’s constantly updated by other Trapster users who have logged a checkpoint ahead of you. I’ve logged a few traps myself on my journey.