Independent public transport, cycling and walking news & comment. Supporting all forms of moving towards a more environmentally sound NZ

Thursday, January 30, 2020

Labour Fails South Island voters


In an appalling dump on South Island voters, Labour is to spend $159 million on Canterbury transport projects of a total spend of $6.8 billion. The rest of the South Island gets even less

As the South Island represents about 23% of New Zealand's population and presumably the equivalent amount in fuel and general taxes, this is a huge milking of the South Island. Labour appears to be even more aggressive than National in this respect 

Nor does this massive spend-up do anything to build a public transport alternative to cars in the South. 

Christchurch in the post-earthquake rebuild has opted to create a few on-street bus lanes and no form of dedicated rapid transit corridors capable of attracting and carrying large numbers of passengers, ignoring the success of these corridors in other similar cities and countries.(see footnote)

The latest farce appears to be the planned dumping thousands of extra cars and buses onto Bealey Avenue in rush hour.  

Christchurch lacks an integrated network where buses kriss cross with each other in a constant pattern ensuring access to workplaces, shopping centres and community facilities is virtually on a no-wait, two or more route option basis. It is little more than a rehash of public transport failure from 40 years ago!! 

Long distance travel - whether from peripheral urban settlements, tofro the Christchurch airport, or between the main urban centres Christchurch and Dunedin - is yet again forgone. 

Despite universities at both cities;  major crowd-pull summer and winter sports events and music concerts in each city; the potential to link "rail & bike" to access popular cycle trails in the South; or drive on car transporters to allow business people to work "online on line"  there still is no north-south passenger rail service options for the three-quarters of a million people along the eastern seaboard or visitors. 

Instead, the citizens of Dunedin, Oamaru, Timaru and Christchurch etc are asked to fund increased commuter rail services and systems for the citizens of the Wairarapa! (serving smaller commuter catchment population than a rail service just to Selwyn and Ashburton alone, let alone catchment area that would logically include Timaru).

This sucks Labour, what a joke.