|
|
By admin, on January 10th, 2009 Well I was only in Wellington for a couple of days, but even during that time I found myself rather impressed by their public transport system, which in many ways put Auckland’s to shame. And that was even without me catching a suburban train along any of their lines (Wellington’s train service is vastly superior to Auckland’s, and carries about 40% more passengers a year even though Wellington is barely a third the size of Auckland).
My first impressions were of the commuter train service, even though we weren’t actually on it we did pass quite a few trains heading northbound while we were heading southbound on the Overlander. The trains seemed reasonably well patroned, even though it is still the holiday period. There were buses waiting at some of the main stations (like Paraparaumu) waiting for the train to arrive so they could pick passengers up and take them closer to their homes. Park n Ride facilities were also available at most of the larger stations too. Of course, the one area where Wellington shows its superiority to Auckland is that the system is electrified, and also that there are a huge number of tracks leading into Wellington station (I think we arrived at platform 9), which means that the horrific problems that Auckland faces with its 2-track tunnel into Britomart are unlikely to be faced by Wellington any time particularly soon. Also, it seems like Wellington stores most of its trains right next to the central station, which must make life quite a bit easier in terms of operating the network.
From Wellington train station, which is a mighty impressive building by the way, we just had a short walk to where we were staying. After dumping our bags we then went out in search of dinner. Somewhat unfortunately, we were at the wrong end of town to most of Wellington’s nightlife (though it was about 8.30pm on a Monday night, hardly the most happening time for any city I would think) so we slowly made our way further south towards Courtenay Place. We could have caught a bus, as I worked out later, but Wellington’s CBD is actually reasonably small and is also quite linear along a north-south axis, so it was reasonably easy for us to find where we needed to go. Bringing this back to public transport, I did find myself impressed that even on a Monday evening it seemed like there were an awful lot of buses zipping past us as we walked along. I was also mightily impressed that, unlike Auckland, Wellington has had the guts to put bus lanes along its main street – Lambton Quay. In fact, Wellington seems to have gone even further than that in some areas and has made particular stretches of streets bus only. Eventually we made it to Courtenay Place and had a nice dinner in a really funky cafe.
As the walk from our hotel to Courtenay Place had been a little longer than anticipated, we decided to catch the bus back. It’s always a bit of guess work catching a bus in a new city – as I had no idea about what the fares would be and had to be pretty careful to ensure that I caught the right route. But once again Wellington made this all exceptionally easy. As this metlink map shows just about every bus route in Wellington seems to pass through the Courtenay Place to Wellington station corridor. All the buses from the north don’t terminate at the train station, but instead continue right through to Courtenay Place, while all the buses from the south continue right through to the train station (or beyond in the case of the number 3 bus). This means that you end up with a huge number of buses travelling both ways through the central bit, making life incredibly easy to get around central Wellington. This is definitely something that Auckland could work on – making more routes run through the city. I know that the Auckland situation is a bit different, with most buses arriving from the south of the city and not really being able to run all the way through it (as there’s a harbour in the way), but there is certainly some potential to improve this.
I give a few examples:
- A good percentage of buses from the North Shore should not terminate in the city, but rather continue along the Central Connector (once it’s finished of course) to Newmarket.
- More Midtown buses should also service the downtown area.
- Buses from the east (that enter the city via Parnell Road or Tamaki Drive) should continue to the west of the city, perhaps to Ponsonby.
Now I know that Auckland has its Link Bus, which does help significantly in getting people around the very inner-suburbs and also linking places such as Newmarket and Ponsonby, but it doesn’t really help much if you’re trying to get from Takapuna to Newmarket, or from Remuera to Ponsonby. It also messes with the city enormously to have a huge number of buses hanging around waiting to begin their journeys. So much of the city’s road-sides are taken up with hugely long bus stops, necessary so that bus companies have somewhere to store their buses while they wait for the afternoon peak.
I also found the trolley buses in Wellington made a nicely positive difference to the city, due to their quietness and the lack of diesel fumes. I thought that I’d find the overhead wires ugly and annoying, but often they just added a bit of character to the place – reminding me somewhat of San Francisco at times. And finally, while Auckland waits even longer for a Smartcard ticketing system, Wellington is actually getting ahead and doing it with their Snapper Card. While I don’t necessarily want to see the Snapper Card just introduced in Auckland, as it only operates on GoWellington buses and would take us back a step from integrated ticketing, it is certainly a good model for what we should end up with in Auckland when it comes to the smart-card integrated ticketing system that we’ve been promised will be happening by the end of next year.
So yeah, in terms of having excellent ‘through the city’ buses, actually having bus lanes on Lambton Quay, having electrified trains and having smart-card ticketing, Wellington really is a long way ahead of Auckland when it comes to public transport.
By admin, on January 9th, 2009 So on Monday Leila and I made our way to Wellington via the Overlander train. I had caught the train along a portion of its length back in 1999 for a 7th form geography field trip to Waitomo Caves, but that was only to Otorohanga. I had been a little freaked out beforehand that our trip might be complicated by the rail upgrade works that have been going on throughout Auckland in the past few weeks (I’ll attempt to give some updates on those in the next few days), but fortunately everything was back to normal on the Eastern Line, which is the one the the Overlander runs along. As it was the ONLY train line running in Auckland on Monday, every single service from the south was headed along that particular way to get to Britomart – which meant that I counted about 8 trains between Britomart and Papakura, where most of the services heading south terminate (a few continue on to Pukekohe).
The early part of the journey, through Auckland, seemed to take forever. I guess it really showed how far Auckland sprawls to the south, but also how slow the train has to go to make sure it doesn’t catch up to other suburban trains that it slots between. I felt a bit confused that we seemed to be going, on average, slower than what I’m used to on suburban trains, but then I guess because we only stopped in a couple of locations, if we’d travelling at the same speed as those trains we would have caught up to them when they stopped at station. I guess that’s a problem that will only ever be solved by creating a third, express, track along the course of the main trunk line throughout Auckland. Anyway, we weren’t in a particular hurry (considering we had 12 hours of the trip ahead of us) I guess it just felt frustrating to be putting along so slowly, and reinforced to me that for a Hamilton to Auckland commuter service to ever become viable some serious work will need to be done to allow express trains to pass the all-stopping services that inevitably slow them down and make the whole ‘express’ name pretty meaningless. After Papakura things sped up a little bit, although not really as much as I would have expected. The scenery was pretty typical of the Franklin District, and then later on the Waikato Region: farmland, with a few more interesting areas of swamp and of course the Waikato River occasionally showing itself to us. The train was really comfortable, with heaps of leg space that I really did appreciate. If I’m to spend 12 hours on any form of transportation then a train is certainly my pick of the bunch. I had expected to spend much of the trip reading, but it was actually just so pleasant to sit staring out the window at the passing scenery, while listening to my iPod that I ended up doing just that for most of the trip. The photo below is pretty typical of the scenery between Papakura and Hamilton:
After Hamilton, as we headed into the King Country the terrain began to get hillier and windier. It felt like we were getting thrown around a bit in the carriages, as walking between carriages to get to a toilet or to check out the outdoor viewing platform was a bit of a mission – I guess a result of the carriages being really really old and also from the very curvy nature of the track as we wound our way towards the Central Volcanic Plateau. Eventually, after heading through Te Kuiti and Taumaranui, with the scenery progressively getting better and better, we made our way to the world-famous Raurimu Spiral. The spiral is a response to one of the trickiest engineering obstacles that the builders of the North Island Main Trunk line had to contend with: basically that it was necessary to get the track up about 200m on to the Volcanic Plateau, but in a straight-line distance of only about 5km, far too steep at a grade of 1:25 than what is possible. So the response was to make the track loop back on itself and then spiral up the hill through a series of tunnels, where the track actually ends up passing over itself creating a spiral. It was pretty cool to travel through, as we got some good commentary. However, it was difficult to photograph, and probably the best one I got was looking back through one of the tunnels that form part of the spiral:
After the Raurimu spiral is was just a short ride on to National Park, where we stopped for lunch. Unfortunately there were a pile of clouds covering Mt Ruapehu, so there weren’t many good photos of the mountain to be taken. I did take a couple of good ones of the train and the line though:
After National Park there were a series of awesome viaducts that we travelled over: first on the Volcanic Plateau itself and then over the Rangitikei River. The Hapawhenua Viaduct was particularly impressive, as due to its curve you’re able to get pretty good photos it while on the train:
After the viaducts the track straighened out a lot, particularly across the plains around Palmerston North. It felt like we were finally getting up to the kind of speeds that the train should be running at – keeping up with cars travelling on the open road next to us. In fact, the closer we got to Wellington the better the standard of the track got. I guess it shows which city values its trains more out of Auckland and Wellington.
After Paraparaumu we linked up with the Wellington commuter service, which I found interesting. I was impressed at the length of the Papaparaumu Line, and also some of the scenery between Paekakariki and Pukerua Bay was particularly amazing. Eventually, 12 hours after leaving Auckland and after heading through a couple of impressively long tunnels, we arrived at Wellington station.
It was a very nice trip, and I’m certainly glad that I did it. However, 12 hours is a heck of a long time and I don’t really know whether I’m in a huge hurry to do it again any time soon.
By admin, on January 8th, 2009 OK so I’m already venturing outside the topics that I said I’d write about in my previous post, but there is a reason for that. In general, I think a lot of those posts will require photographs that I don’t currently have, so I shall write about something that doesn’t need any photos in it.
When I look back at 2008 as a whole, I guess it’s a year that will probably always be dominated by the trip to Europe that Leila and I took in May and June. The trip really did feel like a dream at the time and I remember at one point, I think in Venice, waking up at night from a dream but then feeling like the reality I was in actually felt like a sort of over-arching dream itself. Being so detached from the normality of life in Auckland was at times a bit stressful (like when we couldn’t find the Art Gallery that I’d gone to so much trouble to book a time to go through) but overall, totally awesome. I felt like I learned so much during those four weeks and it has really affected me since returning to New Zealand. I am much more interested in train systems these days, I am much more concerned about ensuring that Auckland develops its public transport system than I was before, I am far more certain that Auckland would benefit from increasing its urban densities and encouraging mixed use development, and I am far more concerned about our obsession with driving cars everywhere and how that really does seem to ruin the city. I also have a far greater appreciation of art than before, both traditional and modern art. I also feel way more confident about future holidays, knowing that we pulled off something pretty damn complicated, pretty much without a hitch.
The year wasn’t just Europe though, although it definitely did dominate things – made most obvious by a pretty depressing couple of months after we returned to New Zealand, which felt boring as hell after Europe. I guess the extremely wet winter didn’t help at all either. But the rest of the year certainly wasn’t all bad: there was a nice trip to the Coromandel, generally my work got a lot better as the year went on and I started acting as the planner for the Historic Places Trust, Amalia really enjoyed kindergarten, I learned more and more about transport and also generally read a lot more books (both fiction and non-fiction) than I have in previous years. Of course things weren’t all good: there was the depressing time in winter, there was the election which totally sucked and stress-outs just before the Europe trip. But overall it did feel like a generally positive year.
2009 doesn’t quite seem necessarily as exciting at the moment. There isn’t a holiday likely to happen any time soon, although it is reasonably likely that we might move house some time this year. There are a few potentially exciting happenings in 2010, but it seems as though this year might be largely about saving up money for those things and also ensuring that I finally build up some annual leave. I’m sure it won’t be all boredom though, and that interesting things will pop up too.
By admin, on January 7th, 2009 So it’s back to work tomorrow – and hopefully I will also end up back in the habit of blogging as I’ve taken a fairly long break in the last week or so.
I did start to write a blog entry a few days ago, but it got eaten by the computer for some reason (rather annoying after typing for 15 minutes or so actually). I do have a lot to write about, in fact almost so much that it feels a little bit overwhelming and I’m not quite sure where to start. I think that I’ll break things up into a number of different entries, which may end up being back-dated earlier than this one. Eventually though, the aim is to get back on track within a few days. There are a few things I need to write about, which should help me form a useful guide for entries in the next while.
Write about New Year’s. I had started writing this entry when it got eaten. I have a few cool photos that I can put into it.
Write in general about the holidays.
Write about Overlander trip down to Wellington on Monday
Write about time in Wellington
Write about impressions of Wellington’s public transport
Write about the Snapper Card!
There will probably be other things that come up too, after all it is a New Year and 2009 promises some interesting transport possibilities. The big transport story in the last few days has been about the future viability of Auckland’s Harbour Bridge, so I guess I should write a bit about that too.
At some point.
|
Recent Comments