Car Free Day in China
Have I mentioned it’s Car Free Day soon? Oh I have. Well, China has thrown out quite a big “I dare you“:
China plans to ban cars from streets in 108 cities in its first “No Car Day” on Sept. 22, part of an effort to promote environmental protection and ease congestion in the world’s second-largest auto market. Streets in areas of Beijing, Shanghai and other cities will be open only to pedestrians, bicycles, taxis and buses from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., according to the Ministry of Construction. Sept. 22 is World Carfree Day, a United Nations-backed global campaign. About 4.37 million new vehicles began using China’s roads in the first half as economic growth makes cars and trucks affordable to more people. Growth in traffic helped China surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest carbon-dioxide emitter last year. ‘No Car Day’ will cut 3,000 tons of emissions and save 33 million liters of gasoline.
China’s approach is to ban cars but it need not be ours. Let’s see what New Zealand can achieve by giving travellers more freedom to choose other healther alternatives.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:33 am
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September 14th, 2008 at 10:34 am
I just made the shortest comment ever!
September 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am
- “giving travellers more freedom to choose other healthier alternatives.”
Read: “Override travellers’ freedom by forcibly taxing them to subsidise other alternatives”
September 14th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Sour Grapes Wat - automobiles are the most heavily subsidised form of transport around. Our whole urban design code is designed to make our cities as car friendly as possible, and this is paid for by developers and then rent payers. The Economic Evaluation Moel, which decides whether a road project is ‘economic’ to build, is entirely skewed in support of roads over other forms of transport.
Don’t bitch about subsidising public transport until you count the hidden costs of cars paid for by the taxpayer.
September 14th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Public transport needs roads, frog.
September 14th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
“automobiles are the most heavily subsidised form of transport around”
Prove it - where are the statistics?
September 14th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Public transport may require a basic road but not the type of road you want to build. Making the excuse that buses need roads as a reason to build a motorway with 3 lanes each way is absurd. A bus doesn’t need anything more than a basic 2 lane road as buses are only good for short trips or small amounts of people. Anywhere which requires the transport of large amounts should use a railway. Buses need only to go on small residential streets to get to either a relatively nearby destination or to a railway station for transfer for longer distances.
September 14th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Certainly buses need roads. The question is, do buses need increased roading capacity? in most cases, they do not.
September 14th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
We need roads for the cars.
The car will remain the vehicle of choice for the rest of our lifetimes. Public transport will only ever be suitable for niche applications. Therefore, our roading network and infrastructure should plan with this in mind.
>>to get to either a relatively nearby destination or to a railway station for transfer for longer distances.
Tuis, anyone? Try doing it a 10pm at night with two kids and a dog.
We don’t have the population, or the density, for a public transport service that would get *anywhere near* the utility of the car. Forget it. It’s just not going to happen.
Please get over this utterly ridiculous, totally unfounded notion that the cars days are numbered.
September 14th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
BluePeter Says:
September 14th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
> We need roads for the cars.
> The car will remain the vehicle of choice for the rest of our lifetimes.
It will probably remain the transport mode of choice, but people’s opportunities to choose it are likely to decline. There may well be electric cars, and biofuel cars, and petroleum cars running on the remaining oil, which will be in shorter supply and therefore more expensive than now. And they will probably all be more efficient than now. But the supply of all those energy sources put together is unlikely to be enough to support as much driving as we currently do. Therefore the demand for roadspace from cars will decline.
September 14th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
“Please get over this utterly ridiculous, totally unfounded notion that the cars days are numbered.”
Yet another straw man. I don’t know anyone who thinks cars are going away. I do know plenty of people who say we should raise the priority of PT projects compared with building new roads. Getting thousands of people to work in the morning is not a niche activity, and there is heaps of growth yet before we exhaust the opportunities PT presents us with. As has been said, there is a built in funding bias towards new roads and this will not serve NZ as well as a more balanced approach.
September 14th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
>>But the supply of all those energy sources put together is unlikely to be enough to support as much driving as we currently do.
Unsubstantiated nonsense.
>>Getting thousands of people to work in the morning is not a niche activity,
Yes it is. It is also limited to cities.
>>this will not serve NZ as well as a more balanced approach.
Public transport will be used where it makes sense to use public transport.
There is no need for a “balanced approach” if the problem is already solved by existing modes.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
>>Getting thousands of people to work in the morning is not a niche activity,
“Yes it is. It is also limited to cities. ”
Where most of the population live.
“There is no need for a “balanced approachâ€? if the problem is already solved by existing modes.”
The ‘if’ points to why you are wrong.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Valis said “there is a built in funding bias towards new roads”. Yep that bias is quite extraordinary. Of the $3.5b spent on land transport last year (excluding individual motor vehicle ownership and operating costs), $0.5b was provided by PT travellers, $650m was provided by ratepayers ($250m for PT in 21 cities & $400m to main 70,000km of local roads), and the remaining $2.45b was provided by motor vehicle operators. Only one third of that $2.45b was spent on “new” roads, another third was spent on “old” roads and the remaining third was spent on “off” roads, ie road safety, LTF admin and PT/ATR subsidies. Once a universal Land Transport RFID system is introduced that bias should disappear as all modes of travel (except walking) can pay as they go using a single cashless system. Then someone living in Devonport will be able to travel to the airport using a combination of cycle/ferry/train/bus without any of the current hassles of buying seperate tickets. I’m sure cyclists won’t object to paying a modest amount to ensure that councils can afford to sweep glass from the gutters to make cycling safer and more reliable.
The only real question is whether PT can ever match the energy efficiency of private cars across the whole spectrum of travel requirements. There is no question that PT easily trounces SOV commuting, but it is questionable whether PT trounces 2OV commuting, or SOV commuting in hybrids or diesel hatchbacks. That is what PT is gong to be going head to head with as peak oil starts to really bite.
A more interesting question, to my mind, is whether the shift from quarter acre single use zoning to infill housing, apartments and now transition towns is going to eliminate enough of the necessity for car travel that was created by the aforementioned posr-WWII town planning lunacy to make walking and cycling the dominant modes of travel that they were in the pre-WWII decades?
September 14th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Valis,
PT will only ever be a niche application.
It may be ideal between certain times, in high-density areas, where a single commuter is traveling to or from work, and the journey isn’t complex.
For most other transport problems in New Zealand, a car is the most suitable solution.
September 14th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
“A more interesting question, to my mind, is whether the shift from quarter acre single use zoning to infill housing, apartments and now transition towns is going to eliminate enough of the necessity for car travel that was created by the aforementioned posr-WWII town planning lunacy to make walking and cycling the dominant modes of travel that they were in the pre-WWII decades?”
Kevyn, as I have said here countless times, the quarter-acre section has been the dominant section size since the 1920s; you had successful public transport systems operating in major New Zealand cities at the time. After World War II, of course, you had the infighting between various government ministries, between local and central government, mixed in with a little flip-flopping from Auckland Mayor Luxton and the realisation that New Zealand’s roading network was extremely bad.
September 15th, 2008 at 12:03 am
The motorways in auckland are clogged mostly with traffic caused by people who commute to work, not by anything else. Most of those people could use public transport, if it were available. If auckland had a proper pubic transport network it would eliminate the need for motorways. Other traffic that isn’t from commuting is due to idiotic city planning, by having the suburbs built in such a way that forces people to drive. A combination of correctly planned cities and proper public transport would completely eliminate the need for motorways anywhere. A 2 lane road would be enough to carry traffic that cannot be done by public transport.
September 15th, 2008 at 12:57 am
“If auckland had a proper pubic transport network it would eliminate the need for motorways.”
For starters, I lol at your typo. Secondly, Brisbane has a proper public transport network and it still has need for motorways; Perth has a proper public transport network and it still has need for motorways; Toronto has a proper public transport network and it still has need for motorways; London, Paris, I could go on forever, all these cities have proper public transport networks and they still have a need for motorways. Why?
Well, perhaps you fail to consider some trips that require road access. Tradesmen for instance; I don’t think that you would expect your electrician or your plumber to take the bus to your house to add plugs, or fix your toilet. How about salesmen? I wouldn’t expect them to take the bus to go to a presentation. What about freight? Not all items of freight can be efficiently transported by rail, and neither is it desirable to attempt to get all items of freight onto rail.
Also, the suburbs were never built in a way that forces people to drive, in Auckland, people choose to drive. One could get around with the bus in Auckland without any major problems. Also when the suburbs were first built, there must have been a demand for them, so people must have chosen to live there.
“A 2 lane road would be enough to carry traffic that cannot be done by public transport.”
Toronto, which has one of the best public transport systems in the world, has a motorway that at one point is eighteen lanes wide.
September 15th, 2008 at 6:05 am
“Pubic transport”, it does make the mind boggle a little doesn’t it!
It would be popular though!
September 15th, 2008 at 8:08 am
>>A 2 lane road would be enough to carry traffic that cannot be done by public transport.
You are basing this on what study/analysis?
September 15th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Even if, as you say, commuting by car in a niche, it’s still the peak hours congestion (caused by commuting by car) that makes some people wanting more roads in cities.
September 15th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Sigh. This argument is getting tedious, PB, John-ston and wat.
Nobody thinks that cars will dissapear completely. Yes some journeys will always be more efficiently undertaken in a car. However, the current demand for car trips is totally inefficient — because parking and road use are underpriced and (99% of the time) not charged directly to the user.
Since we have designed our roads for peak hour demand when roads/parking are unpriced, it is a very safe bet that if we price them at their true underlying value, the demand for roads will be low enough that existing infrastructure will suffice for many decades to come.
This is good news, because it means we can prioritise spending on maintaining and improving existing roads and expanding infrastructure for other modes for the next decade or so. This will be necessary because when we start internalising the costs of private vehicle travel, demand for all the other modes (and land uses that make it more convenient to use them) will grow. Even if we don’t internalise all the costs, demand will grow because of oil prices rising.
You want the evidence that supports this view?
Here is a lovely little report that explains the transportation market distortions and why we must rectify them if we want the economy to be resilient as oil prices rise.
http://www.landtransport.govt.nz/research/reports/357.pdf
Finally– the idea that we’re all going to get plug electric vehicles is laughable. We have done the analysis: for the average person, assuming the price of an electric vehicle is a reasonable $40,000 retail, it would not be an economic choice until petrol is well over $10 a litre.
Don’t forget, as oil prices rise, the cost of manufacturing and transporting vehicles to NZ will increase, even if they are electric, and global demand for alternative mode vehicles is likely to be higher than supply. So I think $40,000 per car is very conservative for the next 10 years.
In the meantime– with transport costs skyrocketing, the economy will suffer if we don’t provide affordable substitutes to private cars. In particular, we need more energy- and land-efficient modes of transport. Investing in PT, walking and cycling is the economically rational transport policy, once we cut away the planning regulations and subsidies that currently make them uneconomic.
September 15th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Saying that cities that do have proper public transport networks still require motorways is ridiculous. There is likely no city in the world that has a proper public transport network because of the way the cities have been built since the 1950’s. Cities are built in a totally wrong way. A proper public transport network and a properly designed city will function far better than an endless unplanned sprawl of houses. A plumber should not have to drive all the way across Auckland to get somewhere, things like that should be local not requiring any motorway. Suburbs should resemble a village or town not just endless housing. You shouldn’t have to drive children to get to school somewhere far away. The problem is the entire way of thinking there is today. A motorway is only ‘required’ because the design of the city is non existent.
September 15th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
fdaszx,
That is the problem,
What are your answers?
One thing to find the problem, quite another to decide, plan, fund and onstruct the answers that the cities populace can afford.
September 15th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
The answer like anything is not simple. A good start would be the very obvious. Eliminate funding for new motorways, only spend on maintenance of existing ones. The only new spending should be on safety. Use money not being spent on new motorways to fund extensive public transport. Change laws about what type of housing developments can be built and where.
September 15th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
“Saying that cities that do have proper public transport networks still require motorways is ridiculous.”
Toronto has a proper public transport network, the likes of Mees hold it up as an example of what (in his case, Melbourne) should aspire to be.
“There is likely no city in the world that has a proper public transport network because of the way the cities have been built since the 1950’s.”
Please define your definition of proper public transport network. My definition is one that is well used and is easy to use for a wide variety of trips (i.e. you can replace a car with it).
“Cities are built in a totally wrong way.”
Oh really? In the Western world, we have been sprawling since the invention of the railway. So are you saying that we should go back to the days prior to suburbanisation? If you are, then welcome to early 19th Century London, a stinky, smelly overcrowded city where cholera and other nasty diseases spread easily.
“A proper public transport network and a properly designed city will function far better than an endless unplanned sprawl of houses.”
Of course a properly designed city will function far better than an endless unplanned one, however, you could be planning till the cows come home and still have issues. Paris may be a properly designed city, but it came at a terrible human cost in the 19th Century (the poor were forced out of the inner city to make way for Haussman’s schemes).
“A plumber should not have to drive all the way across Auckland to get somewhere, things like that should be local not requiring any motorway.”
Yes, but they do? Why? People move all over Auckland, and often prefer continuing to do business with the tradesmen they know for reasons such as being able to use credit, or the knowledge that they will do a good job and not attempt to rip you off. Things like that are local (they behave in a monopolistic competitive manner), but they still have a regional reach.
Furthermore, what about specialised people? You would have tradesmen who are experts in particular items, such as fixing AEG electrics, and it just isn’t viable to have specialists in Ellerslie, Mount Wellington, St Heliers, Orakei, Glen Innes and every other flaming suburb of Auckland.
“Suburbs should resemble a village or town not just endless housing.”
Yes, but does a village or town have specialised services? No they don’t; you are still going to need centralisation for specialised services, and those people are still going to need vehicles to get around.
“You shouldn’t have to drive children to get to school somewhere far away.”
And what happens if your local school is crap? I wouldn’t want my children to go to a school that was crap, I would want them to go to a good quality school so they will actually be taught something, succeed and carry on to a good life.
“A motorway is only ‘required’ because the design of the city is non existent.”
A motorway is only ‘required’ because people have a variety of reasons for using their car. If it is for a blue/white collar worker, who is working in one location for eight hours a day, five days a week, then, yes, encourage them to use the train or bus. However, not everyone is a blue/white collar worker working in one location for eight hours a day. We would still need a good roading system to complement the good public transport system.
Furthermore, how about intercity freight? Let us not forget that it is not desirable to attempt to get all freight on rail services. We would need a motorway, if only to facilitate grade separation of freight and allow them to travel at 100km/h, instead of being stuck on 50km/h roads.
“Change laws about what type of housing developments can be built and where.”
Those sort of laws make houses far more expensive than they should be. Housing is already far too expensive in New Zealand, thank you very much. An average house in Auckland should, IMO, cost no more than NZ$250,000.
September 15th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
The only acceptable form of suburbs are the railway/tram based ones. Everything within relatively easy walking distance of a tram stop, which today in the case of Wellington is a trolley bus stop. That is the only form of suburb which can survive a high oil price because it has existed before cars were widely used.
A modern apartment is hardly comparable to 19th century London. No one is going to do things like build an open sewer in the middle of Auckland.
A proper public transport network is one that can be used for a wide variety of trips as you say, but the problem is there are still far too many trips done by car which are unnecessary. Even just spending a little on Aucklands rail network has seen patronage jump from 1 million to 6 million a year. A much expanded and electrified network would be able to take a lot of cars off the road. Traffic congestion is not caused by a few specialists. I can just see 20,000 specialists all needing to drive from the north shore to manukau. Traffic congestion is mostly caused by people who work 9 to 5. If anything by having people not working the same hours is better as the morning and evening rush hours become non existent. Aucklands existing road network and associated suburban development should not be further expanded upon, any new development should be based around rail/bus and be higher density. The way Auckland is currently shaped means that the existing motorways will unfortunately have to be used for a while but building new ones will make an existing problem worse. It took 50 years to get to where we are now it will probably take at least as long to undo the damage.
Why would you want freight between cities to be trucked? Freight should be railed between cities and only trucked within. Traffic congestion is not caused by trucks in cities so building more roads would be unnecessary if there weren’t so many private cars.
If your local school sucks that’s not a transport issue, that’s something else to consider but not for this discussion.
September 15th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
john-ston, Quarter acre and half acre sections seem to have been the preferred section sizes in most towns and boroughs from the very beginning of colonial settlement. In Auckland and Wellington the inner city working class suburbs were commonly eighth acre. But there wasn’t the total seperation of commerce, industry and housing that happened under the post-WWII town planning regime. That was actually the biggest driver of traffic growth and declining walking and cycling.
Quarter acre sections were the norm along the tram lines but with much narrower road frontages than in the post-WWII quarter acre suburbs. That makes a huge difference to the number of homes located within comfortable walking distance of the tram stops. This difference stands out like a sore thumb to anyone who has spent a lot time working with deposited plans at DoSLI. Although some Googlemaps include the DP’s it’s not at a scale that makes it easy to see. I guess a comparison of sat maps of Grey Lynn and Te Atatu would show the difference very clearly.
The other thing that made the trams viable in the 1920s was that all the major shopping/entertainment venues were in the CBD, which gave the tramways a reliable off-peak demand.
The Roading Investigation Committee’s recommendation to reinstate full hypothecation of the petrol tax definitely stuffed up Auckland’s chances of getting urban rail improvements similar to those that had been recently completed in Wellington. But it shouldn’t have impacted on trams or buses as these were locally funded, although the scale of heavy vehicle fees and mileage tax recommended by the committee should have extended the life of the remaining tramways.
September 15th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Julie, I can see only one major problem with the case you put. PT is only slightly more energy efficient than motorcars and it is relatively easy to improve the motorcars energy intensity - fill the empty seats.
Unfortunately your second-to-last paragraph applies at least equally to electric PT vehicles, so we are going to need to develop that industry ourselves which will be a lot easier than starting an electric car industry. We already have a multiplicity of heavy transport design, manufacturing and assembly expertise in this country.
It isn’t clear from the LTNZ report why PT investment is given a supernumerary role but I suspect the authors understand how much society, lifestyles and urban forms have changed since they heyday of PT in the ’20s and they know they foundations for effective and efficient PT is missing today, hence the focus on land use factors.
Have you done the analysis of how fully internalising the costs of road use will impact on businesses? I can see why large manufacturers won’t be too concerned as they can always switch to railfreight but businesses that can’t use rail, such as farming, tradespeople, taxi’s and so forth are going to be king-hit by charging the full cost of road use. Although as the biggest uncosted aspects of roading are parking and peak capacity it may be possible to target commuters and shoppers without impacting legitimate economicly efficient road users. At what level of cost will the middle classes avoid eating out, going to movies and concerts and all those other activities that are widely percieved by the middle classes as being too dangerous to travel to by PT?
September 16th, 2008 at 12:08 am
“The only acceptable form of suburbs are the railway/tram based ones. Everything within relatively easy walking distance of a tram stop, which today in the case of Wellington is a trolley bus stop. That is the only form of suburb which can survive a high oil price because it has existed before cars were widely used.”
How high must the oil price go before it becomes the only suburb to survive it? Certainly, I can see our current way of life remaining viable with oil prices of US$400 a barrel - that is roughly what the British pay, once all your taxes and so on are included. It will be years before we see oil at US$400 a barrel, unless Bernanke screws up.
“A modern apartment is hardly comparable to 19th century London. No one is going to do things like build an open sewer in the middle of Auckland.”
How long before that modern apartment becomes a slum? Globally, everyone has said, modern apartments, modern apartments over the last half century, and all of them have become slums (and the worst ones have been levelled).
Of course, you fail to recognise that suburbs and sustainable living are possible. The suburb was a product of the railway, and was further cemented by the tramway. You can have quarter-acre sections, and an easy trip to the tram stop.
“A proper public transport network is one that can be used for a wide variety of trips as you say, but the problem is there are still far too many trips done by car which are unnecessary. Even just spending a little on Aucklands rail network has seen patronage jump from 1 million to 6 million a year. A much expanded and electrified network would be able to take a lot of cars off the road.”
Of course, the only issue is that it would cost a minimum of $10 billion to fix up Auckland’s system - not that I think it is a bad idea.
“Traffic congestion is not caused by a few specialists. I can just see 20,000 specialists all needing to drive from the north shore to manukau. Traffic congestion is mostly caused by people who work 9 to 5. If anything by having people not working the same hours is better as the morning and evening rush hours become non existent.”
I never said that traffic congestion was caused by a few specialists. I merely said that we still need roads for the specialists to get from place to place. Furthermore, how do you propose having people not working the same hours? 9 to 5 became the workday, because that is when the sun is up, and people tend to be more productive in the daytime than at night. The only thing you could do that would have an impact (on both roading, and public transport congestion) is shift the school day to start at let us say, 9:30 and end at let us say, 3:30 or 4:00
“Aucklands existing road network and associated suburban development should not be further expanded upon, any new development should be based around rail/bus and be higher density.”
Why must any new development be both based around rail/bus and be higher density? Why not just rail/bus. What is wrong with developing houses around Waimauku? Taupaki? Huntly? Meremere? They are all near old railway station sites (in the case of Waimauku, an active station site).
Indeed, a good example of development has been the Gold Coast. In the mid 1990s, a railway line was constructed to there, and today, thousands use it to commute from the Gold Coast to Brisbane; and thousands of tourists use it to get from Brisbane to the Gold Coast. You have bus feeders linking up the various places. Indeed, when Robina Station was opened in 1999, it was in the middle of a field - it ain’t anymore.
“The way Auckland is currently shaped means that the existing motorways will unfortunately have to be used for a while but building new ones will make an existing problem worse.”
I am of the view that while we should protect corridors for future motorways and railways, that the public transport improvements should come first - once overcrowding on rail/bus services has been dealt to, then we can look at roading solutions where they are necessary.
“Why would you want freight between cities to be trucked? Freight should be railed between cities and only trucked within. Traffic congestion is not caused by trucks in cities so building more roads would be unnecessary if there weren’t so many private cars.”
There is a simple reason why I would want freight between cities to be trucked. NZR tried the approach of shipping the freight of every Tom, Dick and Harry until the 1980s, and it was a monumental failure (it was such a bad idea that laws were needed to keep NZR free of any competitors). Indded, in the 1990s, when Tranz Rail did not need to accept the freight of every Tom, Dick and Harry, it recorded some of the highest tonnage ever in its history.
The issue is with double handling; you would need gigantic yards (do you even know how huge the Auckland Yards were?) to accomodate the freight handling facilities. These yards would be taking up hundreds of hectares of land for almost no benefit.
Furthermore, we would need grade separated roads in cities. A local road generally has a speed limit of 50km/h; a grade separated motorway generally has a speed limit of 100km/h. If every truck had to rumble along Great South Road, it would take three hours to get across Auckland, instead of the one with the Northern/Southern Motorways.
“That was actually the biggest driver of traffic growth and declining walking and cycling.”
That is correct. The primary issue is the dispersal of workplace locations, and not with the dispersal of housing. With Wellington, you have three major employment areas (CBD, Porirua, Lower Hutt), and so it makes providing public transport far easier; of course, much of that came with terrain advantages.
What screwed Auckland up I believe was the division of it into about half a million boroughs, counties, cities and goodness knows what other form of division. Each area wanted to get rates revenues and so you ended up with industrial facilities in Glenfield, Avondale, Penrose/Onehunga/Otahuhu, East Tamaki and Wiri. The separation would have occurred anyway, had the town planning laws dictated it or not.
“The Roading Investigation Committee’s recommendation to reinstate full hypothecation of the petrol tax definitely stuffed up Auckland’s chances of getting urban rail improvements similar to those that had been recently completed in Wellington. But it shouldn’t have impacted on trams or buses as these were locally funded, although the scale of heavy vehicle fees and mileage tax recommended by the committee should have extended the life of the remaining tramways.”
In terms of Auckland’s urban rail improvements, I believe that the following helped screw us up
- Over-ambition (especially in the 1970s)
- Infighting between councils (and a general lack of unity)
- Infighting between government departments
- Flip-flopping
The weird thing, however, is why did it stuff up Christchurch? Remember that Christchurch to Lyttleton was already electrified (and remained so until 1970), and so it should have been able to extend it easily and use the English Electric Units of Wellington.
In terms of the tram and bus systems, IIRC, there was a law that required tram systems to pay for the construction and maintenance of the section of road that they used up to the standards of the surrounding road, and it covered an area of about 45cm either side of their ROW. Of course, when you only have a few trams using Garnet Road, and heavy trucks and buses tearing the road to shreds (and you have to pay for it), then you would want to pull up the tram system.
Also, I suspect that in New Zealand, they were not built to the Australian standards and the lack of maintenance during World War II had an impact. Certainly, it wasn’t until the 1960s that Australian cities started getting rid of their trams. Melbourne of course kept theirs, and Brisbane would have probably kept theirs, had it not been for the Paddington Depot Fire and the destruction of 65 trams.
September 16th, 2008 at 7:08 am
John-ston,
A very interesting post.
“The weird thing, however, is why did it stuff up Christchurch?”
When I was a child Christchurch had a network of electric trams, including one to the top of Cashmere (hill).
They were replaced by diesel buses in the early 1950’s and I remember my parents anger at that decision because one of the City Councilors (who lived in our street) had obtained the “Import Licence” for the said deisel buses …
I think the Lyttelton passenger trains were abandoned because of the completed Road Tunnel, and “reforms” within the Railway system that downgraded the service. (The construction of the road tunnel was a source of night work for Engineering Student contempories of mine at University … 1959 and onwards.
September 16th, 2008 at 8:40 am
I wasn’t referring to the electric trams; I was referring to electric trains - you had an electrified railway line between Christchurch and Lyttleton from 1929 to 1970, with it being used by the Ec class locomotives. It could have easily been extended from Christchurch through to perhaps Rolleston and Rangiora (IIRC, they were the other suburban railway termini), and more easily than in Auckland, but for some reason, it wasn’t.
September 16th, 2008 at 8:52 am
julie - can you provide a link to the plug-in electric vehicle analysis that you mentioned?
Thanks,
Trevor.
September 16th, 2008 at 9:24 am
john-ston,
Yes! I understood that … however, as an interested observer, in my post I went off on a tangent that I thought relevant:
1. An example of the motivation of individual self interest by one person in power, unchecked by his colleagues, to the FUTURE detriment of the City’s options.
2. An example of the long term effects, on a system like our Railways, of the philosophy of the “Government of the day”.
Both are examples of the sort of motivations that, unchecked, have caused the demise of your (and many others’) sensible plans for the future …
(A few weeks ago, I gave the example of the railway line to Methven being closed and pulled out, co-incidentally, in the first year of Mount Hutt’s operation as an International Ski Area. (Local farmers, who were keen to have the wooden sleepers for use on their properties, were right behind this decision.)
We were part of a VERY small group, familiar with ski areas internationally, who opposed the removal of that line …
(Now is the time that a railway link to a potential cable-way system transporting skiers to the ski area, would have made the future of Mount Hutt more certain!)
eredwen
September 16th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Thanks for the comment about the Methven Line; personally, I am of the view that we should take the New South Welsh approach and ensure that lines are mothballed and not ripped up until a good period of time has passed; certainly Methven is not the only example, you had the Moutohora Line, which might have eventually been used for forestry had it not been ripped up after closure in the 1950s.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:59 am
I must read the ‘common key’ the yellow bike n car pland that are ewxperimenting in switzerland and paris… we should use cars like we breath common air.. then we save half of the gas because we travel back in available transport .. just use a car and leave it at the destination///