Buses, trains, ferries.The anger is palpable. Commuters have had a gutsful of the mayhem playing out in the capital.
Like the city’s underground pipes, decades of under investment in basic infrastructure is at the heart of the problem, and the chickens have come home to roost.
The result? A domino effect of delays, cancellations, re-scheduling, non-sailings, and frustration after frustration for the thousands of us who use public transport to get around.
It’s led to increasing numbers of people reverting to private car use – exactly the opposite of what our transport planners had planned.
Paul Callister is a spokesperson for Save Our Trains and a senior associate at the Institute of Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. His current research centres on climate change policy, with a focus on sustainable transport, including long distance bus and rail networks.
As we’ve built more roads and imported cheaper cars, demand for public transport has taken a back seat, It’s not unique to New Zealand, he says. But unlike in other countries – such as Switzerland and Norway – successive governments here have under invested in rail and bus networks and thrown cash at making it faster and easier to travel by road.
