Trains, Tolls and Te Kaha

After a period where it’s felt like not much is happening in the Christchurch transport scene, in the last few weeks there’ s been an explosion of very interesting proposals, many of which seemed to pop out of nowhere. I’m going to briefly highlight a few of them here.

Trains to Te Kaha

A local entrepreneur has bought Auckland’s old passenger trains and transported them down to Christchurch with the hope of running event-based services to and from the new Te Kaha stadium. He has a decent track record, already running several tourist services all over the South Island. Trains have certainly gotten a head of steam up recently: this announcement follows the high demand for the limited Southerner trial and subsequent announcement to extend that, and ECan’s repeated calls to bring back regional rail. Some sort of regional heavy rail could nicely complement the planned MRT spine and improved PT citywide system in the longer-term.

The only problem is, in our classic kiwi short-sighted-ness, we’ve gone and ripped out most of our stations now, including the central city one. This means we’d have to whip up some sort of temporary platform instead. There are lots of options for cheap temporary boarding solutions. For example these step ladders that used to be used in Lyttelton, these timber platforms used temporary at Pukekohe, or these concrete block platforms used temporarily at Newmarket. Also found a half-built scaffolding-based platform used overseas. I’m not sure any of hese would be suitable but it seems there at least might be some kind of solution that could be worked up.

Private operator starting up Rolleston bus service
In a similar vein, a different local entrepreneur is wanting to start a private bus service to whisk commuters between Rolleston and the central city. You could see this as a beautiful private-public partnership and model of a new way of doing things, or you could see it as a damning indictment of central government’s failure to fund additional buses on the existing public bus service even when the demand clearly justifies it. I’ll leave it up to you to pick your viewpoint.

Tolling the Woodend Bypass
Waka Kotahi have just opened consultation on tolling their new motorway north of Christchurch. Central government are talking a big game on toll roads right now but it wasn’t that clear to me that they would follow through with it. It looks like they are, so kudos to them for that. In principle I’m a big fan of toll roads: as a society it doesn’t do us any good for taxpayers to be subsidising people to drive around more than they need to be – if people want to drive they should pay the full cost of it. We used to use them a lot more but currently only have three in the entire country.

However the jury is out for me on this particular application of it. Ideally it would have been part of a broader strategy for the region rather than just one short stretch right at the extremity of our motorway network. From a fairness perspective I would’ve liked to see a more comprehensive tolling plan that included the whole motorway network including the southern one too. This one seems to be very much driven by cost recovery rather than any strategic transport considerations, but even then it is only estimated to cover something like 10-20% of the cost of building the road. The proposed $2.50 toll really needs to be an order of magnitude higher if that’s the justification for it.
Still, for all its flaws, it is exciting that as a country we are taking these steps towards a more comprehensive tolling system. I hope this first step will grow into a more mature citywide network one day. Maybe we could even bring back this one as part of it (Dyers Pass, circa 1930):

Lincoln Road bus lanes
Christchurch City Council recently voted to build the Lincoln Road bus lanes, which is now scheduled to be completed over the next couple of years. They completed the section immediately downstream in 2021, and were supposed to move onto the next section in 2022 to coincide with Waka Kotahi building the section immediately upstream. It unfortunately got delayed for various reasons so it was looking like we were going to have a strange situation of bus lanes upstream and downstream but nothing through the middle. It’s great to see that reversed.

Complete overhaul of the transport funding system
The Minister of Transport Chris Bishop recently announced that over the next few years they’ll start weaning motorists off fuel excise duties and onto Road User Charges instead. This has been talked about for years and was always going to be needed regardless of who was in power, due to the shift to EV’s and hybrids. The transition could be really good, could be really bad or could be no real change: it all depends on the detail of how they implement it, none of which has been developed yet. It’s one to keep an eye on as they bring out more detail. I hope they do take the opportunity to make a few other badly needed changes to the transport funding system.

So all of a sudden there seems to be a lot happening in the Christchurch transport scene – hopefully at least some of this translates into on-the-ground action!