NZ In Tranzit

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 ...

Mayor Bob Parker and two executives have gone to San Francisco, Portland Oregon, Seattle and Vancouver to "study" (it is hard to take this word seriously!) amongst other things light rail.  One has to be immediately suspicious of anyone examining a specific mode of transport before they have assessed the over-all needs of a situation, as each mode is going to suit different situations. It reeks faintly of the Mayor of Wesport going to "study" container cranes. Second point -  so obvious I am almost embarrassed to raise it - is that public transport is so clearly linked to city size and density and rises exponentially as cities get bigger.  London at about 8 million people is only twice the population of New Zealand in total but its public transport systems carries over 3 billion people a year. If public transport stats related directly to population pro-rata, one would expect New Zealand transit systems to carry 1.5 billion a year, rather than the 115 millio...

In my ongoing trip to CANZUS (the cities 300,000-1 million metropolitan area - the area defined in the US census as easy commuting distance) in Canada, Australia, NZ and USA, I tried catching the bus, light rail and commuter rail in the cities along the way. It is not uncommon to hear Christchurch people say, in casual conversation, or in letters to The Editor, that we need a commuter rail system from Rangiora or Rolleston. Environment Canterbury commisioned a couple of studies of commuter rail potential for Greater Christchurch, in 2005, and more recently. Both came up nil match in cost effective terms. Rail is tremendously expensive to build and operate. Looking through the data base on "The Transport Politic" [see profile] which is very consistently updated, or the commuter rail listings on the APTA (American Public Transport Association) website, small cities under a million don't even feature. I haven't consistently read all the lengthy strategic plans of CANZ...