NZ In Tranzit

City bus routes don't get more spectacular than the alpine style road to Governors Bay (in distance) ....but does the new Metro bus route starting in January join up all the dots to best advantage - the wabbit thinks not. Photo NZ in Tranzit In 2003 I wrote a social history of the CTB - appropriately called "CTB" Called what?? Anyone outside Christchurch or indeed any local resident under 35 years of age probably has no idea to what these three letters refer. So the cover of "CTB" also carried a by-line "A brief social history of the Christchrch Transport Board 1903-1989 (until 1951 - Christchurch Tramway Board"). It was written as a social history of the people, politics and flavour of the times because the physical and technical history - of the trams and routes etc had already been written in great depth in a series of publications the CTB itself had commissioned in the 1980s using a Government employment scheme to help fund research co...

Open topped tram (in Hobart!) circa 1940 Wikipedia Photo. Light rail of a little faster and more comfortable style is back on the agenda for some Tasmanian advocates Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, is struggling to emerge as the next Australasian city to develop light rail. A major stimulant has been greatly reduced freight traffic on a rail line heading through suburbs north of the city, freeing up the line for potential commuter use. Hobart, with a metropop of 215,000 is the smallest of 24 CANZ cities between 200,000-800,000 monitored by NZ in Tranzit as a "best match" sister city to Christchurch. Hobart, Australia's second oldest city - a bit like Wellington NZ, has developed around a central port area. With modern slab wharves needed for bulk products and container yards, this port has become far to cramped, a largely obsolete technology. As a result much of the export/import rail freight currently channelled through Hobart is to be redirected through a major new t...

Like 1,900 other people, I imagine*, I received a very nice publication in the mail yesterday. It is the "greater Christchurch Metro Strategy 2010-2016" presented in an attractive, accessible, format. As I have said in some past postings , to me this strategy has more grunt than the last couple of updates. On the one hand this strategy opened up to wider possibilities, on the other it targeted some aspects far more specifically. It is hugely impressive that so many people make submissions and suggestions, really impressive. We certainly love our buses in Christchurch. I say this even though I am very suspect about the accuracy of using "feed-back" surveys. For instance on Page 7 it says "84% of respondents told us more money should be invested in public transport". To paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies' famous comment [ from the famous Profumo call girl scandal involving British and Russian government officials in the 1960s ] "Well they would, wouldn...

Articulated bus in Bath UK - the sort of clean attractive vehicles a BRT would use I have finally got round to making a Google "My Maps" map of the Northern Busway that I have been suggesting for over seven years to various Mayors and Councillors and Ecan planners and Councillors!! It is a pretty crude map - "My Maps" is a hard art to master without going insane, especially off road bits, and I have a long way to go on this learning curve but NZ in Tranzit readers (especially locals) can hopefully get a broad idea, particularly the simplicity, directness and use of bare land combined with secondary feeder streets. As creating bus or rail (or indeed new roading) alignments through existing built up areas go it seems to me about as minimally socially disruptive in building and operation as is possible whilst sill serving major existing and planned population areas and high traffic generating facilities. It includes some embankment and ramping, a bridge over...

Sun glare (predictably) bouncing off contoured angled upwards plastic or glass mantle No sun direct glare flashing but still unreadable destination sign in daylight Normally I wouldn't use an out-of-focus photo but this photo [taken only 10 seconds after the one immediately above] accents this situation. Even if you have had one too many drinks, or have a partial sight disability, you will still usually still manage to read a Designline destination, bright sun or not. Yesterday I flagged down a bus that wasn't going where I wanted to go. I had no choice. It was a new CBS Zhongtong with its stylish curved front and mantle above the driving window. I had to flag it down (at Westfield) because I could not read its destination sign. Indeed I could not even SEE its destination sign. In the bright New Zealand daylight where the destination should be was just a black rectangle. I had to pull the bus into the curb, have it pull to a stop beside me, just so I could read the destinatio...

The photo shows pile driving beside the existing motorway overbridge in Wrights Road (between Lincoln Road and Blenheim Road area) in Christchurch. As well as adding an overbridge at Barrington Street and extending the southern motorway southwards past Hornby current government and city plans are to double the width adding two more lanes and piles being driven here will be part of future pillars. A major feature of the proposed new motorway - presumably a deliberate choice - is not to take the opportunity to give public transport added supportive infrastructure by adding a bus only underpass (beside the cycleway underpass). This leaves future bus services to fight traffic and queue with all the other cars using the relatively few underpasses planned for north-south traffic across the alignment of the southern motorway and/or trying to access the congested Birmingham Drive-Parkhouse industrial enclaves. Indeed Metro gave up running buses to the latter areas, I was told by a high placed...

Here's a guilty secret, a confession. Many years ago I was party to an act of deceit and betrayal of trust. In 1973 I lived in Dunedin with a partner and about that time it was decided to do away with the city's trolley bus system. The trolley buses were mostly sold to China (at that stage still in the Maoist communist era). Or maybe that was a bit later when most of the buses went off to China but one was definitely removed from service in the mid 1970s. One very rainy night my partner and I were bussing home to our flat in North East Valley on a trolley bus. George Street, Dunedin, with all its beautiful old gold-rush style Victorian turreted mansions sticking up through the trees on the hilly west side of the road, George Street with its distinctive orange sodium vapour street lights, its rain-drop diamond coated trolley wire catenary overhead and withi its shiny wet asphalt underfoot looked really attractive. But there were'nt too many people around to enjoy...

Given the millions of kilometres driven each year by the thousands of New Zealand bus drivers without accidents it is staggering that three pedestrians have been hit by buses crossing the bus lane's installed through Wellington Manners Street mall in less than a week! Some clue as to how such a crazy situation could arise is hinted at in this newspaper article from Monday's Dominion Post . I admire one of the bus drivers involved, going public, being open and honest. I also feel for him - after 17 years driving a bus what a shit house thing to happen! It sounds to me he is a victim too - of poor design. The newspaper reports " He was travelling at about 15kmh, and stopped scanning the area for "a split second" to focus on another bus coming toward him down the narrow roadway". It has always amazed me the same situation does not arise in here Christchurch. The redesign of Cathedral Square left these absurdly tight lanes where buses often have to stop just to...

In Christchurch we have the farcial situation of a Mayor - with absolutely no background in the science and technology of public transport planning - advocating rail and light rail. It is perhaps ironic that someone who who studies what works and doesn't work in public transport, and can relate the cost to benefit ratio, Professor David Hensher, director of the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at Sydney University, should consider much denser Auckland (almost four times Christchurch's metropop) poorly suited to rail. Professor Hensher told Friday's NZ Herald ; "When you look at Auckland, which is fairly low density, I'm absolutely amazed that you'd even consider heavy rail." "For every kilometre of heavy rail you build in Auckland you could do at least 27km to 50km of bus rapid transit on dedicated roads," he said at the airport, before being driven to Hamilton for the launch of Waikato University's new Institute for Business Re...

The Ecan-Christchurch City Council joint strategy on bus lanes seems to be very orientated to grand productions - route by route, bus laning all the relevant sections of a particular route (which also often benefits other routes using the same piece of road). Perhaps the grand production with full trumpet introduction was needed in the early stages, but if future if lanes are built from this approach seems rather ponderous. Some routes will not be bus laned until 2019 according to the strategy adjustments made after the National Government came to power and Transport Agency NZ cut the minimal funding allocated to Christchurch (ignoring tens of millions still in the process of being spent in Auckland and Wellington). It is my belief significant gains can be achieved by "hot-spotting" - identifying sections of road where a significant number of bus services are delayed, and widening or adding a "queue jumper" lane for buses travel straight to the front of the queue at...

No not the Opera House (couldn't find a good free image) but on the way towards the same architectural grandeur. Tyne Street, in the heritage area of Oamaru, a slice of old metropolitan Europe in a small country town. Now home to a network of cafes, galleries, a historic pubs, old fashion radio station, traditional craft shops, livery stables, stone carvers, quality book shops, a bike museum, car museum, rusty train wheel museum, ther iconic live music Penguin club (20th birthday this month!), and the corsets and ray guns of Steampunk. Further afield are the magnificent old banks and public buildings up on the main shopping thoroughfare. Photo wikimedia Commons One of the really magnificent buildings in Oamaru, outside and in, is the Opera House. An opera house in Oamaru? 13,000 residents, you've got to be kidding. Nope. It's a classy town. The whole south end of town [missed by most drive through-travellers heading twixt Christchurch and Dunedin] is full of classic styl...

Candidate for Mayor for the left leaning 2021 ticket in the last election was Jim Anderton, long serving Labour/Progressive member of Parliament. The early polls gave him an huge lead over sitting Mayor Bob Parker. However it would not surprise me if everybody over 40 years old, whether for or agin Anderton, thought exactly as I did "Oh yeah? We'll see! A week is a long time in politics!". Nothing is less certain in politics than a certain win. And so it proved. Bob the re-Builder** swept to power, if not in a landslide or tidal wave , at least in an upswelling liquidification of resident's gratitude for being there when they needed a figurehead; the profound and needed reassurance of a concerned and committed leader dressed as an orange. It wasn't just the earthquake, I believe, that put Parker back in power. Anderton and the 2021 team never really did their homework on public transport and failed to develop the cohesive vibrant public transport policy (includin...