NZ In Tranzit

It is good to see Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker making a case for a more sophisticated public transport system ( The Press 26 Dec 2009 ) . He is a keen advocate of light rail. Anyone who has read previous postings on my webblog NZ in Tranzit will realise I am extremely dubious about Christchurch have the metropolitan population density and sympathetic footprint necessary to carry light rail. However, I am very aware of the huge infrastructure costs being met for rail and busway corridors in Auckland, and to a lesser extent Wellington, and believe Christchurch is long overdue to receive funding at least remotely comparable. This will not happen without an identified long term strategy and without specific projects to fund. I think any possibility to get the city moving towards a better "mass rapid transit" strategy should be open to debate. A good starting point is to gain some perspective is looking at comparable cities. We have a small and low density population, nati...

"If it bleeds it leads" is the newspaper publishing ethic (ahem) and the dwatted wabit realises he is currently only scoring a "D" for yellow-shade journalism. Sure, his webblog is fill of lots of local bodies, even a few local body politicians with knives in their back, but not really the gore one would expect to keep readers titillated and coming back for more.That is until I got on the old investigative trail again, cleverly disguised in best film noir fashion with a trilby hat, and my garbedine trench coat collar pulled up. I take an early Saturday misty-morning bus ride up to the top Grimseys Road - not visited since my bus driving days back in the eighties. Here is the rabbit remembering the time a Christchurch Transport Board Bristol bus - painted like Cadbury's Chocolate box - had a bite taken out of it by a major collision at Prestons Road intersection. Typically he is no longer able remember who was driving. It seems every lamp post will tell you a st...

Yesterday I had a letter published in the local newspaper, The Press . No big deal, I write three or four a year, usually on public transport topics. This one was in response to a photo in the paper on Wednesday of the derelict Edgeware Swiming Pool, and a text saying the Council was advertising it for sale, including on "Trade Me". My letter began with a reference to this and ended with a comment about the Council trading away its bests assets. The pool is surrounded by mostly older housing stock, some appearing to be rental, and is close to two council housing complexes and a tennis club . All of this sits right on the alignment of the simplest and most obvious rapid transit corridor between Northlands Mall and Edgeware Village. Unlike Auckland where the AMETI scheme is expected to take 329 properties, or even Wellington where the widening of Adelaide Road for bus lanes requires the acquisition of all or part of some 47 properties, or local Mall expansion which gobb...

An interesting trend is guided busways, where the bus driver does not even need to steer (small guide wheels which face outward towards an enclosing curb do the steering for the driver). The advantage of these is that very high speeds can be obtained with very smooth passage, and precise docking at entry level platforms. In this way they can deliver much the quality of a rail journey without the jolts or lurches, without the greater safety problems and constant track checking required of rail. They also avoid the messy business of needing big car parks at stations or (as recently reported in both Melbourne and Auckland) the irritation of residents close to suburban stations having car doors slamming from 6am onwards, and otherwise quiet cul de sacs becoming all day carparks. The same buses that have guidewheels, can in most systems run off the guided busway onto normal streets, the de facto equivalent of a trains carriages all heading off in different directions to drop peopl...

The successful development and growth of public transport, as it is evolving around the world, seems very tied to corridors and land use. All over the world, regardless of whether the mode is light rail or quality bus systems, the big push seems to be towards getting public transport as much exclusive corridor space as possible. This means taking buses, trams or larger light vehicles out of the mixed traffic situation as far as possible, and giving them much of the "clear run" advantages that previously only commuter railway enjoyed.(check out   http://www.humantransit.org/  for a good discussion going on this and related topics)  In this respect the advocacy of light rail by Mayor Bob Parker is fairly typical of public thinking, which always lags behind technological changes. The core investment is not the mode but the corridor and Christchurch does not do corridors well. It fact it barely does corridors at all! It has taken an inordinately long time to develop pa...

In my long experience, members of the public making submissions to reviews (let alone random unsolicited suggestions) to large bureaucracies is about as effective as a mosquito trying to bite the bum of a hippopotamus! About a year ago I received a rather off-hand response from Metro to to a concept I developed called NICERide (running all evening and weekend services to the same integrated pattern, with the pattern itself designed to achieve optimum spread and even flow of services through each area and to and from the city). To prove it was possible, I spent several months, entangled in a huge sudoko, ratcheting current running times back and forward to arrive at the optimum, symmetrical and logical pattern. This took months, because each route interacts with about five others, and also I was trying to get arrival and departure times from weekend employment zones to work well. Although there were logistical problems in this concept, none of them seemed insurmountable....

One of the very big network shifts in the recent Metro route changes has probably gone unnoticed by the general bus user, but I suspect over time will become very popular with the many who will benefit. This is the large number of city areas now linked to Addington. From the east comes 21 Ilam route Mount Pleasant, Linwood Avenue, Gloucester Street, and all of Colombo St down to Moorhouse. This also, of course, links Ilam and the University transfer point to Addington, a service also offered by The Orbiter, which connects many areas of the southern Spreydon-Cashmere-St Martins area of the city as well. Links from the northeast - Parklands, the Burwood area and The Palms - are achieved through 70 route, now combined as a 15 minute through route with the main Lincoln Road route, 7 Halswell. This is complemented by the vastly increased services to Kennedys Bush, running along much of the same route, but leaving the Bus Exchange via the former 7 route (Colombo Street/Moorhouse Avenue) - ...

One of the most interesting public transport web blogs is "Human Transit", operated byJarrett Walker, an international consultant in public transport who has led numerous major planning projects in North America, Australia and New Zealand. Walker also has a doctrate in literature and the arts, and writes on botany and Shakespearean drama , an interesting character by any standards. OK, OK, the Wabbit just can't resist this - a varied life but seemingly over obsessed with one essental question - (Route) 2B or nor 2B/ two bee or not two bee/ to be or not to be. (That is the question) Back to normality! One of the things I most like about Jarrett Walker's postings is that treats the nitty gritty details of public transport with the committed interest and respect due, things like transfer patterns or timing of services, or the psychology of bus use, or prerequisites in urban development for different modes to be appropriate. When I tell people my main interest in life,...

As a regular bus user, at all times, it has long been a source of great annoyance that so many services aren't integrated better. Too often several buses run along a shared corridor close together in time leaving a long gap to the next set - an obvious waste of resources especially after hours when service levels are reduced. For people who depend upon buses it can waste hours of their life and impair their freedom and social mobility. Ineffectively timed services are hardly likely to meet Environment Canterbury goals of attracting people away from car use. Scanning the planned Metro route and timetable changes for 2nd November 2009 to the (mainly, north-south axis) bus services I was at first hugely impressed. The Airport-city connection, for example,served by three routes (some No. 3 route services and all No.10 and No.29 route services) now runs every 10 minutes, with the three different half hourly services departing in alternating sequence, to get a virtually no wait service t...

The Papanui Road bus lanes appear to be working, not least the vastly improved safety zone implicit in the cycle lanes. Despite some publicly expressed worries, and the vaguely confusing, vaguely zig zag quality of the road corridor itself the underlying concept seems simple and sensible. The lanes precede queue points at traffic lights, in both directions (according to the time of day) and to achieve this the centre line permanently shifts along the course of Papanui Road to accommodate both a lane of in and outbound motor traffic and a combination of bike and bus lane heading into the sticking point. The saga of bus lanes in Christchurch is a sad one, bordering frankly on the pathetic. Some decades after other small cities began building bus lanes (by way of an example I recently came across the first bus lane in Gatineau, Canada, a city two-thirds the size of Christchurch was created in 1971) attempts were made to bus lane Riccarton Road in 1997. So fierce was the shopkeeper oppo...

Nope, the rabbit hasn't got one foot nailed to the floor, he is just trying to be logical (not his best suit). When people - local politicians, people writing letters to the paper, local residents in casual conversation - talk of public transport growth in Christchurch the words Rolleston and Rangiora slip easily from their tongue. Lazy thinking flows along the easiest path, which is to transpose the situation in Wellington on to Christchurch. Sure, the outer areas are growing rapidly. Rolleston is one day expected to be 14,000 and the Waimakariri District expects to reach 46,000 by 2016.  For all that, pretty small bickies, no massive urban sprawl. My thinking is that we have to be very careful of not talking this situation up, out of proportion. By and large Christchurch a fairly compact radial city. One contiguous housing area radiating out from Cathedral Square is home to the vast majority of our population. In contrast, Greater Wellington has almost...

Who could fail to be impressed by the superb new level of bus services to Chrisrtchurch Airport, being implemented by Metro, beginning November 2nd? Firstly, Metro has placed the Avonhead -Airport extension on as consistent and reliable base, a thirty minute service  - every second daytime bus service, and every evening bus service, to Avonhead continues on to airport. In a geographic sense this gives an added wing - three separate routes approaching the airport from different directions - the most direct 29 route  via Fendalton and Memorial Avenue, the body of the bird, with one wing to the south, 3 route via Riccarton Road, University, Avonhead and Sheffield Park, and another wing to the north, 10 route via Papanui Road, Harewood Road. The latter two routes are the main tourist motel, hotel strips into the city, and 3 route also serve the university/prime student accommodation area. But the most impressive thing - albeit it...

Metro has released details of route changes and timetable changes, to begin on November 2nd 2009. These mainly include (but are not limited to) North-South axis routes. As someone who  enjoys Christchurch's reasonably good (by 20th century standards!) evening and weekend services hundreds of times a year, but is also sometimes victim of its anomalies and uneven spread of services it will be interesting to evaluate how much improved they really are. In the past the it has sometime seemed no checking against a set of baseline service criteria has been applied at all. Maintaining evening social visits to friends in the Spreydon area, for one example, was always a bit dicey - four services an hour from Barrington to city, but all in a 16 minute window of time, leaving an often inconvenient 44 minutes to fill, whether at a hosts, or at cold and exposed bus stop.   For rabbits who hop ...