Canterbury passenger rail: workshop

Monday, 25 February 2019, 6.00 to 7.30pm

Tūranga (central library) in the Tautoru / TSB Space on level 1 (link to Facebook event)

Note – this is a different room than initially advertised – there is a lot of interest in this workshop

You are invited to a CHAT Club (Canterbury Housing and Transport) public workshop on passenger rail for Canterbury, and how that relates to future housing. We are a mixture of transport and housing professionals or enthusiasts, and we blog about these topics, invite discussion via various mediums (blog and social media), and hold speaker evenings.

There are two parts to this meeting. We start off by a series of short presentations:

• 2 min: Welcome (Chris Morahan)
• 10 min: Brief history of passenger rail in Canterbury (Axel Wilke)
• 10 min: Light rail options for the city (Glen Koorey)
• 10 min: Relationship between rail and housing (Brendon Harre)

The purpose of these presentations is to equip attendees with some basic facts. What have we had in terms of rail-based passenger transport? The heavy rail lines don’t go near the city centre where many people want to go – is that something that rules out the use of the existing heavy rail lines in the future? And are housing and transport somehow interlinked? (spoiler-alert – yes, they are; here’s some useful background reading)

These presentations will then the followed by a workshop. Based on what you’ve learned in the presentations (or have known all along), where should rail and housing go? Bring your ideas. We are keen to capture various inputs.

We can subsequently map those ideas and inputs and consult the wider public whether we, as the Canterbury community, should have a discussion on passenger rail. And if so, that should inform where future housing goes. If there’s public support for such initiatives, it gives our elected members (city, adjacent districts, region) a mandate to ask for financial support from central government.