Transport Thoughts

I’ve just penned a few random thoughts on transport from around Otautahi over the last few weeks.

I jumped on a bus the other day and was pleasantly surprised to find on-board information screens showing the stops coming up. This is common in other cities and very helpful if you’re new to the city, taking a trip somewhere you don’t go much, or even just if it’s dark and hard to see outside.

They even read my mind and flashed over a second later to a link with more information. However the link is out of date being written in April 2024, saying the initial rollout was just to 4 buses and that the all buses would have screens by the end of the year. I don’t think that has ended up happening.

I’ve been seeing a lot more full buses around, and the numbers back this up. Although they don’t get published anywhere, ECan do keep records of full bus occurrences and they have been increasing of late. We desperately need to get some more vehicles out there!

A few more bus lanes would go a long way as well. Imagine how many more people would leave their cars at home if they had the option of zooming straight past all that traffic congestion.

TomTom recently released their annual congestion monitoring results and it showed significant deterioration in Christchurch. This isn’t a surprise to anyone given Christchurch’s population is growing relatively quickly, but it’s doing so without us investing barely anything into improving walking, cycling and public transport. As a result most people shifting here end up having to drive everywhere, which clogs up the roads and makes it slower for everyone.

I was interested in the “innovative solution” talking about more actively managing traffic heading into the city centre. I looked up the how much traffic heads into the city centre and was a little surprised to find it’s been remarkably flat for the last 8 years. If anything it actually seems to be reducing slightly. The graph below shows inbound traffic per month as recorded at 26 intersections around the central city since the start of 2017.

For context, there are now about 20,000 more central city employees than there were in 2017, and heaps more shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, anchor projects and general activity.

If the growth in people in the central city hasn’t come from cars, then it must have come from a combination of (a) more people living centrally (b) more people catching the bus in and (c) more people biking in. This tallies with other data that show big growth in all three of these. The other possibility is people car pooling more, but we don’t have great data on vehicle occupancy so not sure on that one.

Going back to the subject of newspaper clippings, I had a chuckle at this one. A classic media beat-up of a project which is actually a big success story. The headline screams out that the recent upgrade of a dangerous intersection is “unpopular”, but buried right near the end of the article is the statement that 90% of surveyed residents were in favour of the upgrade. That doesn’t sound “unpopular” to me.

It was good to see Te Waihanga Infrastructure Commission getting in behind Christchurch Mass Rapid Transit. Their independent experts assessed the business case and concluded that this project was (a) of national importance (b) good value for money and (c) practical to implement. All things that anyone in transport has known for some time now, but it’s good to get this recognised nationally and I’m hoping this understanding flows over into the public and political realms a bit more now.

I still see a lot of dangerous parking around the city. Not sure what this guy was thinking. Would be nice to somehow improve enforcement of this but not sure it’s that easy.

And finally saw a local entrepreneur trying to sell expired beer from her front yard with some great marketing. I love a bargain as much as anyone, but in this case I wasn’t brave enough to get any.