The Campaign For Better Transport

The ARC is supporting the idea of a waterfront tram, however the City transport chairman Ken Baguley prefers “some form of electric shuttle buses”. This is disappointing, but unsurprising. Auckland City steadfastly refused to endorse trams or light rail when we presented the concept to them last year. Despite light rail being specifically mentioned in Auckland City’s own Waterfront Vision 2040 document, council officers reported back that this was “merely aspirational”. In the end the Auckland City commitee endorsed an “innovative transport solution” for the waterfront. Whatever that is. It is only the Auckland Regional Council that is keeping the hope of a waterfront tram alive at this point.

And it seems hypocritical convenient of Mr Baguley to say “any major decisions should be left to the new Auckland Council to be elected in October, 2010″, having just endorsed the Government’s ill-conceived above ground motorway at Waterview.

Mathew Dearnaley reports in this article in the Herald:

Moves to open Queens Wharf in Auckland to the public are heightening regional council interest in running light railcars or trams along the waterfront to Wynyard Quarter.

Auckland Regional Council transport committee chief Christine Rose said yesterday that the addition of the wharf to the public domain would increase the need for convenient travel between waterfront attractions.

She expected opportunities presented by the transformation of Queens Wharf, which the council and the Government have bought from Ports of Auckland for $40 million for public use and the development of a cruise ship terminal, to be included in a light-rail feasibility study.

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There’s a fantastically interesting post over at Human Transit on comparing the benefits of buses and streetcars (trams), and how it is easy to get blinded by the romance of streetcars rather than looking at the transit problem we are trying to solve and then going about the best way to fix it. Jarrett Walker, a well respected transport consultant who writes this excellent blog, outlines his observation (after making a seriously large number of disclaimers):

Streetcars that replace bus lines are not a mobility improvement. If you replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, nobody will be able to get anywhere any faster than they could before. This makes streetcars quite different from most of the other transit investments being discussed today. Where a streetcar is faster or more reliable than the bus route it replaced, this is because other improvements were made at the same time — improvements that could just as well have been made for the bus route. These improvements may have been politically packaged as part of the streetcar project, but they were logically independent, so their benefits are not really benefits of the streetcar as compared to the bus. Read the rest of this entry »