Well I was only in Wellington for a couple of days, but even during that time I found myself rather impressed by their public transport system, which in many ways put Auckland’s to shame. And that was even without me catching a suburban train along any of their lines (Wellington’s train service is vastly superior to Auckland’s, and carries about 40% more passengers a year even though Wellington is barely a third the size of Auckland).
My first impressions were of the commuter train service, even though we weren’t actually on it we did pass quite a few trains heading northbound while we were heading southbound on the Overlander. The trains seemed reasonably well patroned, even though it is still the holiday period. There were buses waiting at some of the main stations (like Paraparaumu) waiting for the train to arrive so they could pick passengers up and take them closer to their homes. Park n Ride facilities were also available at most of the larger stations too. Of course, the one area where Wellington shows its superiority to Auckland is that the system is electrified, and also that there are a huge number of tracks leading into Wellington station (I think we arrived at platform 9), which means that the horrific problems that Auckland faces with its 2-track tunnel into Britomart are unlikely to be faced by Wellington any time particularly soon. Also, it seems like Wellington stores most of its trains right next to the central station, which must make life quite a bit easier in terms of operating the network.
From Wellington train station, which is a mighty impressive building by the way, we just had a short walk to where we were staying. After dumping our bags we then went out in search of dinner. Somewhat unfortunately, we were at the wrong end of town to most of Wellington’s nightlife (though it was about 8.30pm on a Monday night, hardly the most happening time for any city I would think) so we slowly made our way further south towards Courtenay Place. We could have caught a bus, as I worked out later, but Wellington’s CBD is actually reasonably small and is also quite linear along a north-south axis, so it was reasonably easy for us to find where we needed to go. Bringing this back to public transport, I did find myself impressed that even on a Monday evening it seemed like there were an awful lot of buses zipping past us as we walked along. I was also mightily impressed that, unlike Auckland, Wellington has had the guts to put bus lanes along its main street – Lambton Quay. In fact, Wellington seems to have gone even further than that in some areas and has made particular stretches of streets bus only. Eventually we made it to Courtenay Place and had a nice dinner in a really funky cafe.
As the walk from our hotel to Courtenay Place had been a little longer than anticipated, we decided to catch the bus back. It’s always a bit of guess work catching a bus in a new city – as I had no idea about what the fares would be and had to be pretty careful to ensure that I caught the right route. But once again Wellington made this all exceptionally easy. As this metlink map shows just about every bus route in Wellington seems to pass through the Courtenay Place to Wellington station corridor. All the buses from the north don’t terminate at the train station, but instead continue right through to Courtenay Place, while all the buses from the south continue right through to the train station (or beyond in the case of the number 3 bus). This means that you end up with a huge number of buses travelling both ways through the central bit, making life incredibly easy to get around central Wellington. This is definitely something that Auckland could work on – making more routes run through the city. I know that the Auckland situation is a bit different, with most buses arriving from the south of the city and not really being able to run all the way through it (as there’s a harbour in the way), but there is certainly some potential to improve this.
I give a few examples:
- A good percentage of buses from the North Shore should not terminate in the city, but rather continue along the Central Connector (once it’s finished of course) to Newmarket.
- More Midtown buses should also service the downtown area.
- Buses from the east (that enter the city via Parnell Road or Tamaki Drive) should continue to the west of the city, perhaps to Ponsonby.
Now I know that Auckland has its Link Bus, which does help significantly in getting people around the very inner-suburbs and also linking places such as Newmarket and Ponsonby, but it doesn’t really help much if you’re trying to get from Takapuna to Newmarket, or from Remuera to Ponsonby. It also messes with the city enormously to have a huge number of buses hanging around waiting to begin their journeys. So much of the city’s road-sides are taken up with hugely long bus stops, necessary so that bus companies have somewhere to store their buses while they wait for the afternoon peak.
I also found the trolley buses in Wellington made a nicely positive difference to the city, due to their quietness and the lack of diesel fumes. I thought that I’d find the overhead wires ugly and annoying, but often they just added a bit of character to the place – reminding me somewhat of San Francisco at times. And finally, while Auckland waits even longer for a Smartcard ticketing system, Wellington is actually getting ahead and doing it with their Snapper Card. While I don’t necessarily want to see the Snapper Card just introduced in Auckland, as it only operates on GoWellington buses and would take us back a step from integrated ticketing, it is certainly a good model for what we should end up with in Auckland when it comes to the smart-card integrated ticketing system that we’ve been promised will be happening by the end of next year.
So yeah, in terms of having excellent ‘through the city’ buses, actually having bus lanes on Lambton Quay, having electrified trains and having smart-card ticketing, Wellington really is a long way ahead of Auckland when it comes to public transport.
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