A man attempting to get from Hawthorn to a meeting in Docklands during Thursday evening peak hour confidently opted to drive rather than take public transport, a decision he now regards as "the fastest mistake I've ever made, timeline-wise."
The plan, formed with what he describes as "complete and unearned confidence," was to take Bridge Road onto Wellington Parade, follow it around to Flinders Street, then cut through to Spencer Street and along Collins Street into Docklands. "I had the whole route mapped out in my head," he said. "It looked efficient. On paper, genuinely efficient."
The efficiency began deteriorating within the first block of Bridge Road, where he found himself matching pace, entirely by accident, with an elderly pedestrian on the footpath for the better part of two hundred metres. "We were level the whole way," he said. "I'd inch forward, she'd catch up at the lights. This went on for what felt like a very long time for both of us."
More demoralising still was a woman on a bicycle, wearing a high-vis vest over what was unmistakably office clothing, who overtook him on Wellington Parade, was overtaken back briefly at a red light, then overtook him again on Flinders Street, and a third time on Spencer Street, each pass delivered, he said, "without any visible increase in effort on her part."
"I saw her a fourth time near Collins Street," he said. "At that point I stopped acknowledging it. It felt personal."
The trip, budgeted mentally at twenty minutes, ultimately took fifty-five, the final fifteen of which were spent circling Docklands searching for parking that did not, in any practical sense, exist. He arrived to his meeting seven minutes late, parked four hundred metres further from the office than the nearest tram stop would have placed him, and paid, by his own reluctant admission, "more for parking than the tram would have cost, round trip."
Asked whether this had changed his approach going forward, he was quiet for a moment.
"I still think driving felt like the right call at the time," he said. "I understand that's not the same as it being the right call."