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River City bus stop blues

Whanganui residents took as many as 3.5 million public transport trips a year in the 1940s. Now, fewer than 100,000 trips are made annually. Jono Galuszka finds out what happened, why it matters and how a musician is working to turn it around.

Stockmarket mayhem, car doors with ashtrays, anything-butjudicious application of hairspray – the 1980s are remembered for various reasons.

For Francine Borthwick, thoughts of the 1980s bring back memories of catching the bus in Whanganui.

The regular services, the seats to rest weary legs while waiting at stops, the range of people you could talk to while taking a relaxing trip across town. It sounds rather lovely.

The past always looks better through rose-tinted glasses, but after sitting with Borthwick at Whanganui’s central bus hub in 2021, it is obvious her view is crystal clear.

Traffic roars past, cold metal seats are an uncomfortable experience and the wait for the next bus is as long as an hour. But what is most striking is the lack of people.

She is the only person waiting for a bus, despite every route in the city going past the hub.

You can hardly blame people for picking a car instead of waiting in the soulless hub.

The waiting continues after you catch a bus, as there is a good chance you’ll have to take a long winding trip through various suburbs before getting to the stop near your destination.

Oh, and that stop will most likely be nothing more than a pole stuck in the ground – no seat, no shelter.

Catching the bus in Whanganui? Well, it sucks.

It sucks in multiple regional cities and towns for similar reasons: long waits, inefficient routes, rubbish bus stops.

Like anything in life, if something sucks it does not pull people in.

Horizons Regional Council figures show Whanganui passenger numbers have consistently fallen, hitting 92,736 in the 2020-21 financial year.

While the coronavirus pandemic must be taken into account, the trend is similar in small cities and regional towns across the country.

At the same time, more and more cars head into those towns and cities, creating congestion unimaginable even a decade ago.

Congestion in the Tasman town of Richmond grew more than 15 per cent between 2014 and 2018, with Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency putting the blame solely on cars – almost always with only one person inside – making more journeys.

Whanganui has its issues too, especially at the Dublin St bridge.

Designed and built in the 1910s for horses, trams and pedestrians, cars travelling across it now regularly come to a stop as traffic at the roundabouts controlling each entry clog up.

Whanganui musician Anthonie Tonnon is arguably one of New Zealand’s most passionate public transport advocates. He even created a one-man show, Rail Land, about the country’s passenger railway history.

He also runs the 102-year-old Durie Hill elevator, New Zealand’s only public underground elevator and arguably the country’s most unique piece of public transport infrastructure.

Of course he has a favourite era of Whanganui public transport: 1948, when the city had an interlinked tram, omnibus and elevator timetable.

‘‘It’s how we saw the whole thing as a multi-modal system.’’

Someone could catch the tram into work from 6.45am, make use of the 15-minute frequencies to head into a suburb for an appointment during a lunch break, head home to get changed before heading to Castlecliff Beach for dinner and a swim, catching a tram or omnibus home before the last trip at 10.30pm.

The trams were replaced by buses in the 1950s, which led to the average Whanganui resident taking about 70 trips on public transport a year.

One timetable from the height of public transport use in the city boasts of 3.5 million passenger trips every year.

Now, the average Whanganui resident takes just three trips a year on the city’s bus service.

It is a startling decline, especially when the importance of using private cars less to reduce carbon emissions is as obvious as ever.

According to the Ministry of Transport, 21 per cent of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions come from transport, with 70 per cent of those from cars, SUVs, utes, vans and light trucks.

Tonnon says the Labour-led restructure of local government in the late 1980s, which made it essentially illegal for councils to own buses and pay drivers, was the big killer for regional public transport.

‘‘The idea of the reforms was to stop monopolies,’’ he says. Instead, it gutted the public transport system.

Newly created regional councils ended up taking responsibility for public transport, but they have been unable to get the passenger numbers of the past.

Instead of the fast and direct options of the past, Whanganui now has what Tonnon calls a ‘‘coverage model’’, designed to traverse as much of the city as possible.

While a coverage model nobly tries to get buses to everyone, it creates massive timing issues.

Tonnon, who represents Whanganui on Horizons’ regional passenger transport committee, says he knows of a woman who uses public transport to get to hospital. She needs to catch two buses to get there.

One gets her to the bus hub, where she has to wait up to two hours before she can get her second bus.

The hospital is a 20-minute walk from the hub, but that is not an option for her. So, she has to wait or try to find enough money for a taxi.

‘‘The system doesn’t even attempt to compete with the car,’’ Tonnon says. ‘‘This is a means of last resort.’’

Dr Imran Muhammad, an associate professor of urban planning and design at Massey University who has studied Auckland’s 1920s bus timetables, says big cities also have issues.

Aucklanders could catch a bus every 15 minutes as late as 11.45pm a century ago. The bus and train networks were so well aligned you could always get a bus five minutes after getting off a train. ‘‘You are thinking, ‘What happened?’’’

The rise of the personal car played a big part, but government policy prioritised infrastructure for cars over public transport.

That led to it being far easier to drive a car and pay for parking rather than taking the bus, with people naturally gravitating to the faster option.

‘‘It is a problem with investment and policy and politics, rather than people.’’

Making public transport free is a good move, but not a silver bullet, he says.

Palmerston North provides free buses for tertiary students, but the number of students using the bus has fallen recently.

The common complaint is the long waits for buses, Muhammad says. ‘‘It’s not a genuine choice for people.’’

Public transport is successful when buses run so frequently that people do not worry about timetables.

‘‘If you have frequency, you provide people with a real alternative to the car,’’ Muhammad says. ‘‘When they know it’s quicker and easier to use public transport, they will use it.’’

One city has proven that: Queenstown. The city previously had a coverage model that brought in about 600,000 passengers a year, while traffic continually worsened. It switched in 2017 to having 15-minute waits and running 6am until midnight almost every day of the year, with new direct routes covering key parts of the town and all fares costing $2. The Queenstown Lakes District Council used money from increased parking rates to cover its share of the cost. The improved service caused patronage to skyrocket, almost immediately hitting 1 million riders a year and going on to reach 1.5 million passengers in 2019.

Queenstown’s success is the model that Whanganui public transport advocates want to copy.

The plan is The Corridor – a route along the busiest parts of the city, running every 20 minutes, Monday to Saturday.

It would follow the old public transport lines the city was built along, which, given Whanganui’s population has not changed dramatically since the pre-local government reform years, most people still live near.

The Corridor would be funded by the Whanganui District Council, Horizons and Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency.

Horizons’ passenger transport committee has already voted to support the route, while the Whanganui District Council is scheduled to debate its support in December. The route is expected to start operating in February 2023.

Whanganui-based Horizons councillor Nicola Patrick says spending more on public transport makes sense on multiple fronts.

Having more people on buses meant saving money on road maintenance, but it was hard to push people onto buses when there was so much free parking near the city centre.

Palmerston North has a similar problem, with more than 100 free parking spaces with no time limit, located somewhat ironically adjacent to the Railway Land Reserve where the city’s train line used to travel.

The central business district is just one block over from the swathe of parks where commuters’ cars sit idle all day.

Having so many cars, most of them with one person inside, driving into city centres to simply sit still for most of the day is an inefficient use of space, Patrick says. The key to getting people out of cars is providing ‘‘lifestyle outcomes without lifestyle cost’’.

In other words, making things better without people feeling like they are paying for it with long waits or indirect routes.

Riding public transport can be far less stressful than driving, giving people the time to read books or converse, she says.

‘‘It’s a different way of being, not being stuck in your bubble.’’

But buses cost money, which is always hard for councils to find given their fundraising options are almost exclusively limited to rates.

That was part of the reason why she got 70 elected officials from district, city and regional councils across the country to sign an open letter in November addressed to Transport Minister Michael Wood.

The letter, in a nutshell, asked for increased funding and support from the Government to help improve public transport in smaller cities and towns.

The message in reply from him was for councils to be aspirational, noting Horizons had 92 per cent of its public transport funding requests granted as part of the latest National Land Transport Programme.

But people like Francine Borthwick are not looking for ambition. They just want what they used to have.

She left Whanganui to move to Auckland but returned in 2018.

The public transport service she found could not be any more different from what she had in the 1980s. ‘‘I used to catch the bus at 8.30pm,’’ she says. The latest bus now runs at 6.05pm.

While its traffic woes are nothing like Auckland’s, Whanganui was heading that same way.

‘‘You are getting the same thing as the Auckland Harbour bridge,’’ Borthwick says.

With ever-increasing numbers of young people trying to leave the woes of big city living by trekking to regional centres, those in power need to sort public transport sooner rather than later if places such as Whanganui are to avoid Auckland-like congestion, she says.

Weekend

en-nz

2021-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

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