Wellington – and its RoNS
Well I’m in Wellington for most of this week, at the New Zealand Planning Institute conference for the next three days and then staying on at the weekend to check out the city a bit. It should give me the opportunity to ride a suburban Wellington train on the weekend, which I haven’t ever done before (I wonder if I can try to catch one of the new Matangi trains).…
34 Comments Message to ARTA: please just get the basics right
As I noted a couple of days ago it has been a pretty horrific year for Auckland’s train system so far, with signalling failures, points failures and train failures seemingly occurring on a daily basis (quite literally actually). In that previous post I questioned whether the $11 million cutback to the rail contract was behind many of these problems (the train breakdowns, the daily signal and points failures are KiwiRail’s fault).…
What’s with Auckland’s Rail?
There are two urban rail systems in New Zealand: Auckland’s and Wellington’s. The two systems are quite different in many senses, but they provide some useful comparisons.
Auckland:
1) Diesel trains
2) Three lines
3) No inter-city services (beyond Pukekohe and apart form the Overlander)
4) Patronage of around 8 million passengers a year
5) Public subsidies of around $7 per rail trip
Wellington:
1) Electric trains (except for Wairarapa, Capital Connection & Overlander)
2) Three main lines, plus the small Melling Line
3) Regular inter-city services to Masterton
4) Patronage of around 11 million passengers a year
5) Public subsidies of around $2 per rail trip
Another significant difference is the way in which the two systems are run.…
Beware the God of time savings
Here is a look at part of the Wellington Urban Motorway: So why am I showing a relatively boring part of the Wellington Urban Motorway? Well where this section of motorway is used to be 3,700 graves. They were dug up in the 1960s to make way because the time savings were too great to pass up.…
Good ideas from around NZ
Here are a couple of good ideas that add to urban livability and sustainability that I saw during my recent travels that I haven’t seen in Auckland and cannot see why we don’t have them.
Firstly Bicycle Cops: Come on, even the yanks have these.…
Auckland: NZ’s least walkable city
The title I’m sure is not a suprise to regular readers but after my New Year travels I think we can make it official. Here are some images from around NZ showing how far behind Auckland is, we really should be ashamed.…
How everything went wrong for Auckland
Strangely enough, while today Auckland is a highly auto-dependent city (notwithstanding recent improvements to the public transport system and the upswing in patronage), this has not always been the case – and certainly this outcome was not completely inevitable. An excellent journal article by transport expert Chris Harris, called “Slow Train Coming“, explores how it all went wrong for Auckland in the mid-20th century.…
Wellington’s Public Transport – what Auckland can learn
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).…
The Overlander
So on Monday Leila and I made our way to Wellington via the Overlander train. I had caught the train along a portion of its length back in 1999 for a 7th form geography field trip to Waitomo Caves, but that was only to Otorohanga.…
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