NZ In Tranzit

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...

Is the earthquake being used as a diversion from other factors in old bus debacle? My spurious attempt to drag Brian Souter in as the woo-er of CBS, for the sake of a corny pun and to raise awareness of Souter Holdings buying into public transport in NZ appears to been in the best/worst traditions of journalism - floating speculative leads merely to incite greater public interest. A bit more research (which I should have done first)also reveals Souter Holdings is indeed the private arm of Brian Souter, apparently quite separate from Stagecoach. In this case it appears utterly without foundation - all the goss I've heard seems to back "The Press" suggestion that Waikato and Central North Island emerging giant Go Bus is the company most keen to take over Christchurch Bus Services, and this is not necessarily a new thing. Indeed the possibility exists that the Christchurch Bus services came in low enough to under-cut Redbus in the last tender round deliberately to get suff...

I am critical of the failure of Metro to deliver faster (more direct) and more comprehensive services to North-East Christchurch linking various communities and facilities better. I am super critical of the absurdity of offering no bus service AT ALL from any suburb south of the Avon to or past QEII the eastside’s always busy premier pool complex and sports training facility. However kudos are certainly due Metro for new scheduling patterns of direct access tofro New Brighton by the two most direct routes No 5 Southshore – Hornby and No 40 Parkside-Wainoni. As an integrated pattern avoiding duplication and maximising options it is, for the most part, excellent. This situation is an example of bus routes having a considerable degree of overlap or adjacency (residents living between routes and within easy walking distance of either). Having departure times scheduled in an integrated pattern to avoid duplication of services and as far as possible consistently and evenly spread acr...

Studying transport and comparing one system with another is very very difficult - there are so many variables. However back about 2004 I read a speech by US transport critic Wendell Cox made in Wellington in 2001, in which he pooh-poohed comparisons of NZ with Europe and suggested there was greater affinity of key demographic factors between Canada, Australia, NZ and USA - he called them "the four colonies". Of course there were many many other colonies "Rhodesia" [ now Zimbabwe], Malawi, Samoa, South Africa etc. but I imagine Cox is referring to the places where the white man (and woman) became the majority population, where populations per land area remain small [even in the vast USA], where urban density for most part is low, and most larger cities developed and spread after car use became widespread. And there is no huge impoverished underclass totally dependent on public transport. Settler based colonies. I am quite aware Cox is a neo-conservative and associate...

Aging buses brought back into timetable work Every picture tells a story - literally on this white-washed MAN SL202 Bananarama ! Metro credibility is taking a hammering on the eastern routes. Like so many other aspects of life in Christchurch supply of buses has been hit by the earthquake. In the eastern suburb some fairly historic buses most of which have probably not done timetable work for decades have bubbled out of the ground! This unfashionable parade of mish-mash liveries is apparently the result of simultaneous diasters in opposite hemispheres of the globes. Flooding in China has interrupted production of Zhong Tong buses for supply to Christchurch Bus Services; an earthquake in New Zealand - a collapsed wall in the at Designline's bus factory in Rolleston - has interrupted production of 23 buses for Leopard. All very much act of God stuff and getting by as best can do. Underlying this, judging by recent comments,is a deeper bewilderment amongst many eastside people th...