Why pay for Auckland Trains?
Having been up in Auckland for a training course I took the oppurtunity to have a look at the massively expensive rail network that my petrol taxes are paying for. (Name one Hutt Valley road project that has started in the past 5 years!)
So, after all day stuck in an office on to catch a train from Britomart to Newmarket and walk back.
Like the Wellington services, trains departed every 10 minutes on each line. But unlike Wellington services, there was no crush to get on the carraige, no racing to grab a seat, and nobody standing - in fact everyone got their own pair of seats to themselves as there were 16 people on my carraige when it left Britomart. (There were four carraiges, so that would be about 64 people on board - about enough to fill one carraige to seating capacity.)
All that energy used to haul such a small amount of passengers in a heavy train is more polluting that if all the passengers drove their own cars. A decade on from the 'if you build it, they will come' arguement, rail has failed in Auckland.
As an aside, there are so few passengers on the train the guards can sell ten trip and monthly tickets on board. If this was tried in Wellington the guards would only be able to check the tickets of half the passengers as they would spend so long selling tickets.
There is no Wellington service that departs at 5.30pm that isn't packed beyond capacity - even getting on some services around this time is an excercise in gymnastics - and most have six or eight carraiges that would carry at least 80 people in each, sometimes up to 120 passengers can be crammed in. So an average peak time Wellington train would have ten times the passengers of an Auckland train.
If the Government was serious about upgrading passenger rail, it would urgently replace the English Electric units (aka the "Red Rattlers"). If they need to find some carraiges, there are plenty of under utilised units in Auckland.
So, after all day stuck in an office on to catch a train from Britomart to Newmarket and walk back.
Like the Wellington services, trains departed every 10 minutes on each line. But unlike Wellington services, there was no crush to get on the carraige, no racing to grab a seat, and nobody standing - in fact everyone got their own pair of seats to themselves as there were 16 people on my carraige when it left Britomart. (There were four carraiges, so that would be about 64 people on board - about enough to fill one carraige to seating capacity.)
All that energy used to haul such a small amount of passengers in a heavy train is more polluting that if all the passengers drove their own cars. A decade on from the 'if you build it, they will come' arguement, rail has failed in Auckland.
As an aside, there are so few passengers on the train the guards can sell ten trip and monthly tickets on board. If this was tried in Wellington the guards would only be able to check the tickets of half the passengers as they would spend so long selling tickets.
There is no Wellington service that departs at 5.30pm that isn't packed beyond capacity - even getting on some services around this time is an excercise in gymnastics - and most have six or eight carraiges that would carry at least 80 people in each, sometimes up to 120 passengers can be crammed in. So an average peak time Wellington train would have ten times the passengers of an Auckland train.
If the Government was serious about upgrading passenger rail, it would urgently replace the English Electric units (aka the "Red Rattlers"). If they need to find some carraiges, there are plenty of under utilised units in Auckland.
posted by Michael at
8:33 AM
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