Weekend trolley bus operations will not resume, despite Wellington ratepayers and taxpayers paying $9 million a year to run these expensive buses seven days a week from first bus to last. Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Greater Wellington Regional Council claims it is too expensive to use the trolley buses at weekends, but it will look at the issue again in 2011. Yeah, right.
As the long-suffering readers of this blog well know, I have been banging on since December 2007 about the failure to operate trolley buses on weeknights, weekends and on most routes at most times on weekdays, despite contracts requiring trolley buses to be operated on the wired routes.
Instead, the majority of weekday daytime services are run by ancient diesel buses. Coffins and SL202s are the models. The drivers and the bus company actually prefer using them to modern trolley buses, so the trolleys are only used as a last resort, if a diesel bus is not available.
After I complained repeatedly to GWRC about trolleys being taken off the roads after the evening peak hour despite Go Wellington being contracted to run them, GWRC finally stirred, and, in the past month, trolley buses have actually stayed on the streets after the evening peaks on one night, sometimes two nights, a week.
But now it is officially confirmed that weekend trolley services will remain diesel operated.
The reason is that the clever clogs at GWRC (which pays the $9 million subsidies not to have trolley buses) and Wellington Cable Car Ltd (a city council quango which owns the overhead wires) completely overlooked the contractual requirement to operate weekend trolleys when maintenanace of the overhead was taken from Go Wellington last year and given to Transfield.
The geniuses agreed to a contract that provided only for weekday operation. When GWRC finally asked meekly why the trolleys remained in their depots at weekends, they found Transfield demanding more money to cover the costs of having crews on hand to fix the wires if they somehow fell down at the weekend.
Ergo, no weekend trolley buses.
The most ominous sentence in the piece of pap issued by GWRC announcing this decision is this: “By this time [2011] several trolley bus-specific and wider public transport reviews will have been carried out, giving us a clearer indication of the role and financial implications of trolley buses in our public transport network.”
The only way to read this is that come 2011, it will be decided trolley buses are too expensive to run at any time, despite the many millions of dollars ratepayers and taxpayers have spent these past two years to renew the trolley fleet and upgrade the overhead wires.
I give up.
10 Comments
June 22, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Hi Poneke
Welcome back. Missed your insights and thoughts.
Paul
June 23, 2009 at 11:55 am
Seconding Paul, welcome back Poneke, you’ve been gone too long.
I thought you might have posted about the Air France A330 that went down over the Atlantic? (you seem to have as much interest in commercial aviation accidents as in trolley buses).
June 23, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Week night dieselisations must be approved by the regional council. The reason why there have only been 1 or 2 nights each week that trollies have run recently is due to roadworking / overhead workings / bad weather issues which have been approved by GWRC from what I can gather from contacts.
June 23, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Oh, and welcome back Poneke. I’ve been missing the trolley blogs!
June 23, 2009 at 3:07 pm
GWRC did not even know that weeknight trolleys had been diseaselised by Go Wellington until I told them…. last December.
They hardly moved all year to have them reinstated… the occasional use on weeknights began only a month ago.
Where are all these roadworks that stop trolleys being used at night? Nowhere to be seen, that’s where.
It is all one huge farce costing us $9 million.
June 24, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Please don’t give up!
Didn’t you threaten to complain to the Auditor-General once before? Maybe coincidentally but wasn’t that also about when you finally got some movement out of GWRC?
June 25, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I did say roadworkings, overhead workings and weather conditions did I not???
June 30, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Regrettably, some of us were sceptical from the start.
July 7, 2009 at 10:06 pm
It really, really bugs me how short term thinking can mess up local transport. Edinburgh is one of those cities where the typical, car is king, rip up the tramways were made. We’re now paying a not small fortune to put down one single tram line 50 years later. (It’s getting a bit like the “Monorail!” episode of the simpsons here, only, er it seemed to get built quite quickly)
Whereas you have all these post soviet republics such as Latvia, with perfectly serviceable tramways basically because they hung onto the lines and tracks all those years. Sure they’re old, but they work and get you most places.
Once the lines come down, they cost helluva lot to put back up, and it’s a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
July 7, 2009 at 11:17 pm
The wires are ugly, the constant working on them slows down traffic, the buses break down all the time, they are more expensive than diesel buses.
Getting rid of them is a no-brainer. Maybe one day there will be nice quiet, modern electric buses all over the show, but it ain’t now.