Trams Make Waterfront Comeback
Incredibly, our campaign for a waterfront tram has been adopted by the ARC and the Sea+City development team. The Campaign for Better Transport and MOTAT pitched the idea to the ARC in 2008, and Mike Lee and Sea+City have well and truly picked up the ball and run with it.
The Herald reports:
Trams are being prepared for a comeback on Auckland’s waterfront, in time for next year’s Rugby World Cup.
More than 50 years since trams disappeared from city streets, the Auckland Regional Council has approved the first stage of a proposal which could ultimately be part of the region’s wider public transport network.
The initial stage will focus on the Tank Farm redevelopment by ARC group subsidiary Sea+City, which will receive $6.3 million to $7.4 million from Auckland Regional Holdings to develop a 1.5km tram circuit by July next year.
Future developments, such as an extension to Britomart across a future Viaduct Harbour bridge, will be left to the new Super City council.
Sea+City expects to initially use two heritage trams from the Museum of Transport and Technology (Motat), although the regional council is also discussing with Victorian state government officials a possible long-term loan of some Melbourne trams as the service grows.
When in Europe I used a tram-train system which operated like a tram in the central city streets, stopping at all the intersections, it then left the road onto the rail system and operated like a suburban metro, stopping at stations. It then lowered its connector to the overhead wires and started its diesel motor, continuing out beyond the city servicing the smaller towns like a regional train before arriving at the next city over a 100Km away. It was quick, efficient and integrated – tram, metro, train all rolled into one, and all because the inner-city tram tracks were the same gauge as the railway tracks. (search Wikipedia for Tram-train)
?I hope Auckland will think carefully about the track gauge for any trams making them the same as the railway gauge, and surely a integrated system using all the same infrastructure is more economical to run than separate systems.
I am glad that they adopted it, but it really only goes a few blocks! I hope that it’s worth the trouble, and not used in politics against the yea-sayers as a project that did little to alleviate transportation woes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Streetcar
http://vintagetrolleys.com/
Apologies for harping on about Portland, but…