NZ In Tranzit

Bob Parker has certainly demolished any public confidence that the City Council under his governance could capably manage public transport after all the nonsense he is quoted as having said in this morning's edition of  "The Press ".** I can't imagine a more tragic situation for the citizens of Christchurch and particularly bus users relying upon a public transport administration led by a man who clearly thinks bus users are "losers" and buses "loser cruisers",  the last resort of  - I quote - "the young, the poor,  the elderly and drink drivers who have lost their license".   Parker is describing the USA bus system (with the odd exceptions of a handful of cities, arguably the least effective public bus systems in the developed world!) but that Parker bothers to bring this attitude into an article about Christchurch public transport says it all.  Where has this man been for the last twenty years??  He clearly does not catch or ...

Lyttelton,  Port of Canterbury - grossly unsuited for commuter rail?? Photo PhillipC - Wikipedia Commons A few weeks ago the Tony Marryatt, CEO of Christchurch City Council was instructed by a council motion to organise an investigation of light rail and commuter rail options for Christchurch. It is about time we had another study of rail, a perennial favourite in Christchurch, a city with only the loosest understanding of public transport parameters and options! Other public transport technologies and variants - of which there are dozens - appear to be precluded from the study by the wording of the motion. It will be five years ago next week since the release in The Press of a previous study of commuter rail options for the greater Christchurch area undertaken by Environment Canterbury [ECan]. This was not an intensive study but rather prelimary findings of a consultancy firm, based on standard costings for various infrastructure likely to be needed, drawing from over...

Even though I slag off at our local city and transit authorities I am ever mindful I live in a beautiful  wee city. Remarkably it is still full of a reasonably large number of heritage buildings and even a [re-created] circuit of tram tracks around the city central areas,  with beautifully  restored original trams from Christchurch itself, and other restored trams from Dunedin (350km south) and Melbourne, Australia.  In some cases these trams date back over 100 years.   Murphy's law applies here! I was trying to get a good photograph of one our iconic  1990s Designline gas/electric shuttle buses and a tram went past and I thought "Everyone photographs t he trams, how cliche!" [ and then remembering I had a digital camera so extra photos cost nothing/can be eliminated!] I thought what the hell".  As it turns out that I love this photo. Even so,  it is a little bit fake - we are only a provincial city with about a ...

I don't like blogging too often (it feels like ear bashing people even if they do control the OFF button!) but I am driven to post again,  the very next day, almost immediately on top of my last posting about rail in Victoria BC.  I have had a busy weekend but two events - both linked - stand out in my mind and indeed grieve the heart terribly. On Saturday afternoon I went to the EcoExpo at the Christchurch Convention Centre. Originally, when I first heard of it I thought " oh - oh cheesy greenwash. lots of marginally green enterprises jumping on the environmental  band wagon". But later with a chance to look at the line up of speakers, which included some very dedicated activists spanning years of unpaid, thankless (and sometimes abused) commitment, and after perusing the list of short movies, and  noting that the Christchurch City Council was a key sponsor and noting [not least!] the very reasonable entry fee (accessabilityto maximum range of...

VIA Rail diesel railcar unit at Qualicum Beach Station on Vancouver Island north of Victoria.  - Photo: Courtesy of Alasdair McLellan, Wikipedia Commons One of Christchurch's "true sister cities" [ see Pages section on sidebar ] would appear to be the city of Victoria in Canada. This city is at the tip of Vancouver Island,  the largest Island on the Pacific Coast of North America and about the size of Denmark. Despite the name-match the city of Vancouver itself (c 2 million population) is a ferry trip away on the mainland. Victoria is the capital city of the Province of British Columbia and at around 357,000  metropop has a population slightly smaller than that of greater Christchurch .  The city of Victoria  is one the most successful "stand alone" small city public transport systems in North America in patronage, its transit system carrying 22.4 million passengers a year at las...

Hop to it! Bus Rapid Transit Station in Santiago de Cali, Colombia - but it could be Burwood Hospital or Avonhead mall,  if we  took the unseen potential of  buses as seriously as  they do in South America, Africa, China, Canada  Photo courtesy of ITDP One thing I note with rail and light rail advocates is that they very rarely include capital costs in their descriptions of "successful rail projects". Hundreds of millions can be spent for systems that carry only a few million passenger trips a year, if that. That sort of patronage level is nothing in world terms. Allowing too that patronage is, often, mostly the same people making morning/evening (or after school commutes) each weekday, it can mean a lot of money is going down black hole of a rail tunnel to support relatively few commuters. Not surprisingly despite the huge investments in rail, in the same city the over-all proportion of people commuting to work by public transport barely alters. Not counti...

Arguments about capacity or journey quality offered by light rail or commuter rail systems versus bus have become largely irrelevant - especially for smaller cities - in the face of huge advances made in bus technology in the last decade -  Photo Go Transit Bus from Toronto (courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

      Both photos BRT station in Hangzhou China. Thanks to Karl Fjellstrom and ITDP Creating suburban bus stations is not quite as easy as it seems. Ideally you want all buses to feed through common points and in a logical pattern (services bound for the city at one platform, outbound at another; and possibly dividing these categories into broad segments - services to city via Southern area , via Northern area etc).  It is rare to find a situation where bus stations can be built that do not interrupt the natural flow of routes - route A and B work ok, but route C and D have to go around a block to be aligned the right way.... a tedious deviation if one wants to make journeys as straight and direct as possible. Or if off road, buses then have to pull out of the station typically crossing over busy roads. Generally modern suburban bus and rail stations (especially BRT stations) seem to be heading mostly towards the  " H"   principle, in wh...

"But the shift in balance should not be to increase bus speed slightly; the shift needs to turn buses into a substitute for rail, with rail-like speeds and rail-like reliability"   - Brian Kavanagh Assemblyman New York Generally I am not such a fan of carrying news about large cities, a million plus, because the dynamics of public transport are so closely and exponentially related to metropolitan population and density, and by implication also the taxpayer base. In New South Wales about 5% of tax goes to subsidizing Sydney's suburban train network - about $1.8 billion a year. Fares meet only about 25% of the operating cost. Obviously when a city gets to the size of Sydney there is no way hundreds of thousands of extra commuter's cars can be crammed into the city centre and busy areas each year, so taxpayers are more inclined to accept this. Christchurch is 10% the population of greater Sydney but I can't imagine Christchurch ratepayers happy to fork out (pro ra...

"Pegasus Post" - a well known flying horse that is also part of the stable of suburban giveaway newspapers managed by The [Christchurch] Star - has an an article in the  4th July 2010 issue (p3) saying Christchurch City Council is looking at moving New Brighton up the priority ranking for a suburban bus stations. Certainly some improved shelter, and re-organisation of stops and bus movement patterns is needed, even if funding for stations seems a bit sparse in the present climate.  In a previous pos t I have suggested amlagamating design for a  local bus station with the recently purchased Community Board room. Buses huddling in public carpark on the ramp at New Brighton ........or hunkering..  down beside the Esplanade Hotel, random parking to access public toilets and take recovery time Let's face it, New Brighton can be a bloody cold hole, more so I suspect for those that don't live there. Residents do seem to get many ...