Manners Mall bus plan the best idea in years to improve Wellington CBD bus service

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Wellington City Council is considering turning Manners Mall into a road for buses, to give buses a quicker route through the central business district. This would be the single best thing that could be done to improve bus services in the CBD as it would reinstate the direct route that trams used until their demise in 1964, after which the replacement buses were diverted on increasingly slower, longer routes along side streets.

Under the proposal, the entire length of Manners St from Taranaki St to Willis St would become two-way again and the mall between Cuba St and Victoria St abolished. Buses would go directly along Manners St it in both directions, rather than their current diversion via Mercer, Wakefield and Cuba St southbound and Dixon and Victoria St northbound. Numerous traffic lights would be avoided, including the awful bottleneck northbound at Dixon and Victoria. Cars and taxis and service vehicles would enjoy bus-free traffic in many streets as a result.

When light rail (modern trams) eventually graces our streets, it would follow the same route. The proposal envisiages buses (and eventually light rail cars) being the only vehicles allowed (at slow speeds) through the existing Manners Mall, meaning it would continue to have a solid pedestrian focus. There are many examples of city centre roads elsewhere in the world where public transport vehicles are the only vehicles with access. The Bourke St mall in Melbourne (which has tram tracks through it) and a similar mall in Geneva (used by trams and trolley buses) are but two long-standing, successful examples.

I commend the council for considering what at first seems a bold move but which in reality is a very sound one with many benefits. One of the worst aspects of our city’s very good bus service is the awfully long time it takes buses to thread their way through the CBD between Courtenay Place and Lambton Interchange (the Railway Station). On many routes (for example Island Bay from the south or Karori Park in the north-west), it can take as long to traverse this “golden mile” (as it used to be known) as it does to get from the outer terminus to the fringe of the CBD.

A number of other measures could also be taken to speed up CBD bus services:

• Buses should be fitted with transponders that turn the traffic lights green as they approach, or keep a green light on till the bus gets through. This is common practice overseas and even in central Auckland. Too often, buses are delayed at every set of lights because of just missing the green light.

• There should be rigorously enforced bus lanes the full length of Lambton Quay in both directions. The existing northbound bus lane along the quay is virtually unusable by buses for much of its length because of service vehicles parking in it.
• The siting of bus stops throughout the CBD should be reviewed to ensure they are evenly spaced and positioned to take best advantage of bus lanes and traffic lights. At present, some stops are too close together to allow buses to get a decent run, and so close to the nearside traffic lights that the bus invariably is stopped by a red after picking up passengers at a stop. Siting a stop on the far side of a traffic light will often be better than having one just before the lights – and this applies to bus stops in the suburbs, too, not just in the CBD.

On a slightly related note, three more new trolley buses, 342, 343 and 344, arrived from bus-builder Designline of Ashburton this week. This makes 14 fabulous three-axle low-floor trolley buses of the 59 on order. There are also the three earlier two-axle Designline prototypes, making a total now of 17 modern low-floor trolleys. Once about 25 are in service, weekend trolley bus services (dieseaselised in 2000) will resume.

A direct bus route along Manners St will be better for trolley buses as they will enjoy a straight section of road with fewer of the sharp corners that slow them down because of the problem of their poles coming off the wires. On the other hand, if the overhead wires hadn’t been let deliberately to fall into such a sad state, the problem of poles coming off wouldn’t be the issue it has become. The poles hardly ever come off the wires on trolley buses in cities in countries like Switzerland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Austria, the United States, Canada, China and elsewhere where trolley buses are often the pride of the cities they run in and the wires are kept in good repair.

Trolley bus poles usually come off the wires because of the state of the the wires, not because of any inherent problem with trolley buses.

So badly has Wellington’s trolley bus wire infrastructure been run down since 1991, it would cost tens of millions of dollars to bring it to European standards – especially as most of the “high-speed” Swiss wiring installed in the mid-1980s has been either removed or allowed to fall into disrepair. Maintenance has been minimal since 1991 and upgrading non-existent. This was because, when the buses were privatised in 1991, the overhead wires were inherited by a city council company, Wellington Cable Car Ltd, whose anti-trolley manager was so convinced that trolley buses would soon be replaced with diesels, he ran the wiring into disrepair. The multiple owners of the power supply system haven’t helped either.

We are very lucky still even to have trolley buses, let alone to be getting a fleet of new ones. The chances of their overhead wires being given the millions of dollars needed to bring them up to international standards are less than zero. At best we can hope for is enough continued minimal maintenance to keep them safe and usable. Better slow trolley buses than no trolley buses, I suppose.

Arnhem in the Netherlands is so proud of its trolley buses that is calls itself the trolley bus city (“trolley stad” in Dutch). If only Wellington would boast similarly, yet we have hardly any acknowledgement officially that we even have trolley buses. They seem to be our clean little secret. Maybe next year’s 60th anniversary of continuous trolley bus operation in the capital will give a chance to promote this wonderful transport mode.

• Updates: The always-helpful city council spokesman Richard MacLean has posted more details of the Manners Mall proposal, including a press statement, in the comments section of this article. Thanks Richard. Earlier, the DomPost put the text of a story it had in Saturday’s paper online. And now (Monday) the council news release is on its website.

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Filed under Transport, Wellington

Tags: bus lanes, Manners Mall, trolley buses