Transport
Setting
Related pages:
What we did
We tried to minimise our transport impact through choice of location. When Andrew got tenure at the university at
which he was then working (Deakin), we decided to move from Ascot Vale (west of Melbourne's CBD) to somewhere
closer. The two
criteria that narrowed down the candidate locations we looked at were that they be:
- within walking distance of a train line (both for us, and for our children as they got older and wanted
transport independence)
- within a 30 minute cycling radius of the campus Andrew worked at
We managed to succeed with the former of these, but only partially succeed with the latter. Andrew has managed
to ride to work in 30 minutes on a few occasions, but only then on days with little traffic and with the help of a
tailwind. A
more normal commute time was around 40 minutes (for a total distance of 15 km) until 2015 when his work office
shifted from one campus of Monash University to another. This pushed the distance out to 20km and the commute time
to 60 minutes. He
has now been riding to work since 1987. The estimated total distance covered (mix of estimate and actual) to date is
191,000 km (all on the same bicycle until 2011 when he upgraded to something with better brakes, after a series of
interesting
near-misses). His goal is to get past 200,000 km before retiring.
What we should have done
Probably the same - we can't think of any shortfalls in our decision. As Andrew gets older it might be nice
to live a little closer to work, but then having to exercise a bit harder is a good thing also and so far he is
coping.
What we are considering now
No changes for Andrew, but we changed our ICE car for an electric vehicle for Dawn. We can charge this at home
from our rooftop solar, and the possibilities for using the car battery as a grid leveller are also attractive
once the prices for V2H/V2G come down a bit. The car we bought already supports this - we just need a
bi-directional wall-charger that doesn't cost a fortune.