Illustration: Patrick McDonald

Punctuating grey, sinuous city streets, the intersection is a great equalizer for cyclists. While a rude inconvenience to those wielding automobiles, to the pedal powered a red light can be a small consolation for the multitude of fuming exhausts, close passes and errant doors.

It should come as little surprise that navigating the city streets of Aotearoa can be demanding, exhilarating nearly always; but sometimes you can have a touch too much of that. As such it is the most modest yet equivocal of pleasures having battled through the city to see a line of traffic, foiled by indifferent orange and red LEDS, stretching out before you.

Cyclists can overtake cars infrequently so to coast past scores of frustrated drivers, each apparently affronted at a system of vast utility designed for their benefit, is satisfying. Having silently gloated to the front of the queue there’s then the opportunity to display overt contempt with a trackstand, an act of gravity defying arrogance so brazen it’s sure to incense the mildest of motorists.

But is it enough? Surely weathering the multitude of road hazards, all highlighting the poor structural integrity of the human body, entitles some leeway in areas of traffic management. Maybe those lights are less authoritative than they appear? And so, with a couple of crank revolutions, a brief glance for cars and a disdainful shift of gears you nip through and across the Rubicon.

Then you’re alone. Adrift between two bodies of traffic. It’s quiet, the road is unusually spacious. Each open lane presents a welcome and hard-won freedom and you no longer need to nervously check your periphery for turn signals or pedestrians eager to rush into a sea of machinery. However ahead, again is another red light, another mass of seething motorists. This time as you roll your way past each static vehicle, their occupants draw your attention. The children screaming inaudibly at one another through glass, mother’s knuckles white on the steering wheel. The sagging office worker, encumbered with shopping, standing amid a full bus. A taxi driver with pursed lips, his passenger gesturing directions with a cuff-linked arm while berating someone through a phone.

Your brakes squeal.