Notes from Abroad: Hamburg, Bristol, Cardiff, & Zürich

This is a guest post by Warren Sanderson; regular reader, occasional poster, and seasoned traveller.

Hamburg, Bristol, Cardiff & Zurich

In August last year I wrote a guest post for Transport Blog commenting on my wife and my experiences utilising public transport in the cities of Gothenburg, Hanover and Hamburg. I don’t normally like to revisit the destination cities we explore a second time until some years have passed, but we came away from Hamburg thinking we hadn’t done everything we would like to do. It is a good base to make day visits by train to the architecturally appealing and adjacent north German towns of Luneburg, Bremen, Stade, Lubeck, Schwerin and Wismar.

So back to Hamburg we went, to our favourite boutique ‘Henri Hotel’ located in reasonable proximity to the Hamburg Main Railway Station.

The very busy Hamburg Hauptbahnhof can be a little confusing at first but the staff in the Tourist Information, the Regional Trains Office and the DB Bahn ticket office all speak English and I found them most helpful. The DB Bahn people will work out a programme for you, with departure time, train changes and gleis (platform) No’s clearly set out, all of which enabled us to easily visit those towns.

Transport Blog commentators last year had drawn our attention to and recommended visiting ‘Miniatur Wunderland’ which we had not visited previously. It is the largest model railway in the world; incorporating roads, towns, port facilities and so on. Furthermore, it has a model airport, which has aircraft taxiing along the runway and even taking off into the air.

Note as in real life, that on the elevated motorway, the road traffic has ground to a halt, but the trains still get through on their own dedicated tracks.

Miniatur Wunderland is located in Speicherstadt, the old dark brick warehouse district. It is very popular so allow plenty of time if you visit.

Monckebergstrasse is the city’s main shopping street. It is the Oxford Street of Hamburg rather than the Regent or Bond Street – see the picture below which is getting toward the bottom of the street and with the magnificent Rathaus in the background.

Monckebergstrasse is a very wide street with very wide pedestrian areas on each side and a busway lane in each direction in the middle which can also be accessed by taxis and cyclists but apparently not by private cars. The pale yellow cars on the left are taxis at their taxi stand. Pedestrians cross easily and dominate the whole street – not vehicles.

In my post last year, I referred to the booklet I had obtained from the Rathaus which was the approved vision for Hamburg, available in both German and English, entitled ‘Perspectives on Urban Development in Hamburg’. One of the proposals to improve urban quality was to roof over the A7 Motorway cuttings northwards to reconnect severed suburban parts of the city.

This year I noticed a few of these road signs (below) which obviously have relevance to the proposal but because I don’t understand German, I am not sure what the message is, so if there is a German reader out there who can translate the message please comment……….

BRISTOL

I have wanted to visit Bristol ever since I first read my father’s copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’ with its wonderful original engravings by Wal Paget:

And now I have walked on the same quay as illustrated and found the same Inn where Stevenson found inspiration for the story.

In terms of pedestrian friendliness Bristol did not disappoint. Although quite hilly generally the central old town is quite flat with the many walkers and cyclists able to get about easily away from major arterial roads.

The town is big on Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 – 1859), engineer extraordinary and designer of the SS Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge – both worth visiting. He also designed Temple Meads Station as terminus for the Great Western Railway and many other transport projects in London and elsewhere.

CARDIFF

During our week in Bristol we made a day trip to Cardiff. I had not visited Cardiff previously and was interested to find that the whole of the central shopping area was car-free. The streets, though often irregular, were quite wide, and busy. What I thought was important was that two larger modern type shopping malls were within and part of the central shopping area and could draw on the same public transport. Thus they contributed to the central areas vitality.

The obvious comparison is with our Hamilton where the Te Rapa development has resulted in the decline of the former ‘golden mile’ of Victoria Street and to me is an abject lesson in bad town planning.

ZURICH

Zurich was the last city we visited before departing for home – yes, wealthy Zurich where it is so easy to get to the airport. My little timetable shows that there are 158 trips from Zurich HB to Zurich Flughafen each day from 5.02 am to 11.17 pm. Sometimes they will be on a regional train and sometimes on an intercity with the latter continuing on to Winterthur and St Gallen. The journey to the airport takes about 11 minutes.

Zurich still has a tramway system which appeared to enjoy good patronage. I noted a couple of acute angled intersections where the plethora of intersecting rails could have been a bit of a hazard for crossing pedestrians but elsewhere the rails were straight and hazard free. I wouldn’t foresee any problems in this regard if a tram system for Auckland went straight up Queen Street and out the length of Dominion Road. And in Zurich the tram goes the length of the Bahnhofstrasse – one of the most elegant shopping streets in the world.

CONCLUSION

The whole point in writing this post is to indicate to readers that many cities are moving quite rapidly into the 21^st century by turning back the motor vehicle tide to make their cities more people friendly.

For instance, the extent of Cardiff’s pedestrian (and bicycle) emphasis really surprised me.

We only spent a short time in London on this occasion but we were close to Paddington so it was an opportunity to get some idea of the extent of the construction needed to incorporate Crossrail’s station requirements into Paddington Station. It was also announced that Britain’s Chancellor George Osbourne has earmarked more than 100 million pounds in his latest budget to develop the Crossrail 2 proposal for rail between Hertfordshire and Surrey.

All this underground rail activity is happening under the aegis of a Conservative government, so it is hard to understand why our ‘conservative’ government is so opposed in principle to investment in Auckland’s public transit, when usage is increasing so rapidly and all the evidence so clearly supports a move away from spending solely on roading.

To make this work Auckland really needs to have a clear vision as Hamburg does, together with a better say in the best way of using our share of the contribution Auckland makes to national taxation coffers. In transport matters Auckland is being poorly served by national government at present.

I am sure that Hamburg’s vision was not reached without much discussion but I believe the ‘Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg’ may have one advantage over Auckland and that is, that it is a ‘Land’ (i.e. Province – effectively a city state) with maybe less conflict than Auckland has with central government. It seems that our government are pursuing short term political goals which are to the detriment of a rational long-term plan for New Zealand’s largest city.

It is quite evident that New Zealand’s transport policies and spending pattern needs reforming and we can only hope that our current government is big enough to realise this and take appropriate action.

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