Wow – that escalated quickly! After blogging about trains only a few days ago, Government has now announced funding for Christchurch passenger rail.
I was very much caught by surprise by this. It completely contradicts everything else this government has been doing for the last three years in the transport space. We’ve had three years of Christopher Luxon telling Councils to stop spending money, cut-back their programmes and reduce their rates. We’ve had Simeon Brown bleeding public transport services dry to fund his motorways habit, and even the more balanced Chris Bishop told us just 10 days ago that he won’t fund even a single extra bus to relieve overcrowding in Christchurch.
So Winton Peters’ weekend announcement was a big surprise to me. But not a bad one.
Heavy rail has the potential to be amazing for the city, but the way they’ve handled it hasn’t exactly set it up for success. A few concerns on my mind are:
- It’s not actually funding – it’s a loan that has to be paid back.
- They’ve only allocated $3.4m. This seems way too small – for context the city spends about $150m operating buses every year. It’s quite hard to figure out the numbers just from the media coverage, as there are a few different ones flying around. This RNZ article talks about operating costs of $6.8m. Whatever the exact figure is, they all look too small, and they only seem to talk about operational expenditure, I can’t find any mention of funding for infrastructure.
- Given the state of our train stations, I’m nervous about this seeming lack of infrastructure funding. Another minor complication Winston won’t be aware of is that the Rolleston Station is supposed to be a construction site over the period of the trial while the new Rolleston flyover is being built. I’m not sure it will even be useable.
- One of the articles talks about an expectation that fares would cover half the operating costs. That’s a very high farebox recovery rate – I’d be surprised if this trial got anywhere near 50% in its first year of operation.
- The article also talks about councils needing to contribute half the costs, although it gets a bit unclear as to whether that’s talking about the Southerner service or the Christchurch service. Either way, it contradicts other government orders for councils to reduce spending, cap rates, and increase farebox recovery rates. I’m not sure it will be possible for councils to obey Winston without disobeying Luxon. I feel like this could cause some fireworks between the coalition partners, if they survive the weekend.
- The trains will compete with bus services doing the same thing. I’m not sure how ECan will handle that – cancel the bus services to Rolleston and Rangiora? I’m not sure that would be a great outcome for commuters.
- It’s only for 12 months, which is short. For comparison the Te Huia trial was for 5 years.
There’s obviously a lot to work through but, for now, I wanted to put all that to one side and just think about what needs to happen to make sure this 12 month trial is successful. I’m quite concerned that this trial will be implemented in a shambolic way with little thought put into it, such that it ends up a miserable failure and no one ends up using it. This would be a disaster for the city.
So how do we make sure people this trial service is actually useful to people? I’ve listed out a few of my ideas below. I’d love to hear yours.
- Central City access is critical and I genuinely don’t know what the best arrangement would be. To me, there are three realistic options for the trial:
- Use Addington Station, 2-3km walk to the city centre. The only option with an operational station, but the worst location.
- Use Pilgrim Place, the site of the old Christchurch Station. This is a gravel yard now owned by a church who are yet to build on it. The church kindly allowed the Crusaders Express to use it twice for boarding/alighting via an aluminum wheeled ramp. I’ve no idea if they’re likely to be amenable to a similar arrangement for another 12 months. It’s a 0.5-1.5km walk from the central city, and also on a high-frequency bus route (Colombo Street) with a bus heading into the city every 7-8 minutes. The trial could continue to use the aluminium ramp, or government/kiwirail/council could try to acquire land from the church to build a more permanent platform/station. I’m not sure it’s realistic to think this could be done in the timeframes though.
- Try to set up a similar arrangement but at Riccarton Road. This is 1.5-2.5km from the central city, but on a much busier corridor where there’s a bus into the city every 1-2 minutes.
- Rolleston and Rangiora stations need to work. I can’t see how the trial could work if Rolleston Station is not usable, so someone needs to sort that out somehow. Even at its best the station is still not that accessible – crossing State Highway 1 from Rolleston isn’t easy on foot, bike or car.
- It would help greatly if we could get a few more stations along the route. E.g. Hornby, Kaiapoi, Belfast, Papanui. I can’t see $3.4m paying for any of these, but I wonder if there’s any potential to use the aluminium ramps to let people on and off at these locations. It would massively increase the potential usage of the service. For context, more Rolleston residents work in Hornby than the central city. It would also increase the potential for two-way travel e.g. people boarding in the central city and commuting to Hornby for the day. Two-way travel is important if you’re trying to maximise farebox recovery rates.
- Access to stations needs to be easy, whether on foot, bike, scooter, bus, or car. Given our low densities and lack of development around stations, most passengers will have to travel for a bit at each end of their trip. Making it as easy as possible to walk, cycle and scooter will be important. I also think park-n-ride sites are worth looking at, particularly at the Rolleston end. I think they should allow people to bring bikes on board the train too.
- Keep fares low.
This is really tricky if they’re expecting fares to cover half the cost of the operations. I think they can probably get away with charging a slight premium over the equivalent bus trip, but I’d hate to see it get too high. This article talked about them being comparable to Te Huia and the Capital Connection, but again it’s not obvious if that’s talking about the Southerner or Christchurch rail. Either way, high fares have the potential to suppress demand and ruin the trial. - Some kind of long-term plan. Everything I’ve talked about above is just about maximising the first 12 months. We also need to get all the partners to agree on the longer-term plan for rail in Christchurch so we can give passengers some assurance that it’s not going to disappear just as they’re starting to get used to it.
Anything else you think the trial needs to include?
