Jeremy Tindall: A cure-all for traffic problems is within your grasp

In an Auckland of the future, home-schooled children could take a break from their studies to visit the shopping mall by water taxi. File photo / Jim Eagles

COMMENT:

The solution to the traffic problem lies in mass homeschooling. We can clear the air, the streets, the bullying, the cliques, the coolness and the pyschosocial hierarchy all at once. No more smog. No more screeching brakes. Just hermetic peace. In other words, parents need to become teachers.

Our traffic at this moment is a killer, a strength-sapper. The city of Auckland is very, very carsick. And it is primarily caused by to-ing and fro-ing our sons and daughters between the home and the school.

To prove this all you need to do is watch from a busy junction to see how rapidly the traffic subsides once the kiddies are ensconced in school.

Abolish the institution of the school. It is a dangerous environment, for one thing. And homeschool your progeny. School teaches us slavery, quashes our naïveté and trains us to be obsequious taxpayers. It is where our souls are issued with the forlorn trammel of housing felonious and baloney-ous government after government for the rest of our lives through learning how to be employable. Employable equates to taxable. Taxable means being locked up. Locked up in traffic and locked up in schools.

What's the word I'm looking for? Agrarian, let's make things agrarian. No taxes, no vehicles, just horses and homeschooling. Travel be damned. As Taoist master Lao Tzu will tell you, "The further one goes, the less one knows".

Flash cars are funereal at best. They plug the roads up like bread in your digestive system. Humanity is never-present on the roads - its loser take all. The oncoming traffic is as unrelenting, mean, nasty and potent as an onslaught of onshore winds and 10 foot swells at Piha. Traffic ruined Los Angeles. We don't want that!

Jeremy Tindall. Photo / Supplied

Which is why I propose compulsory horse and ferry travel. We're boat people, so it's a natural evolutionary step. Auckland is encased in waters - it needs this. We can then convert the motorway system into an elaborate canal system for ferries and gondolas. We can source the waters from the Pacific, beauty.

And to those who say "the traffic on the weekend is just as bad", I propose something awfully simple. Those who hate Jesus (65 per cent of people) can have their school lessons on a Sunday as well, necessitating a weekend on Tuesday and Wednesday. Then they can go fishing or to the food market midweek, no-traffic-no trouble. Beauty.

• Jeremy Tindall is a North Shore writer and singer