Public transport

Credit: Mark Mitchell / via NZ Herald

Question?  Do buses derail?

Answer:  Buses don’t derail and if there does happen to be a mishap involving a bus the whole route system doesn’t have to close down….how did Wellingtonians enjoy public transport this morning?

Hundreds of passengers are being evacuated from trains after one derailed near Wellington today, KiwiRail says.

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Cameron Brewer is like a dog with a bone and he has a big one at the moment after busting the sneaky and furtive council staff in hiding details regarding public transport use to attend the V8s.

Despite all the hype to catch the train or a bus to the V8s in Pukekohe last month, only about nine percent of attendees actually did, with Auckland Transport now refusing to release the cost to provide the public transport to Auckland Councillor Cameron Brewer.

“To think only 7.7% of attendees caught the train and less than 1.5% took the bus will raise a few eyebrows particularly given the huge cost to put on the special weekend services.”

Mr Brewer has been refused any information around the costs associated with the provision of public transport, which he points out are costs over and above the $10.6m ratepayers have already committed to the annual motorsport event over the next five years.

Why is Len’s council being sneaky and furtive over the costs…are they that bad?  Read more »

via showbus.com

Rodney Hide has another blinder.

In an attempt to look into the research done on Auckland’s transport options, he finds he’s being stonewalled at every turn.  But he discovers Tony Randle, who managed to extract the actual spreadsheet from Auckland Transport only to discover what appears to be systematic “errors” somehow all magically in favour of proving light rail is the best option.

My research led me to Wellingtonian Tony Randle, who spent months trying to get the analysis underpinning the 2010 Rail Business Case, succeeding only after a complaint to the Ombudsman.

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This is why you won’t catch me on public transport…feral scum. This donnybrook is making news in Australia.

Warning NSFW: Language

It started with racial abuse then continued with a tirade of explicit language and threatening gestures, and ended in an all-out brawl.

The shocking footage, taken by a passenger on a Transperth bus, shows a verbal altercation that spiralled into a violent punch-up between two women.

It appears the incident was sparked after one of the woman confronted the other over racial comments made toward another passenger.

Within minutes the argument became physical and a fight broke out.

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I see the Auckland public transport people are slashing their wrists because the use of the rail system is DROPPING. Their solution is to
subsidise it some more…

Auckland Transport have provided a multitude of excuses for the patronage dip over the past few months – some more plausible than others (they blamed the World Cup for some of the declines in August and November, even though the World Cup was only in September & October 2011).   Read more »

Why is nineteenth century technology so bloody expensive:

The first train line in Sydney to be paid for and built under the Rudd and Gillard governments opened on Monday, $700 million over budget and three years after it was promised to be finished.

The 36km Southern Sydney Freight Line will allow extra freight trains to run between Macarthur and Chullora in the city’s south west and will increase rail freight capacity along the entire Australian east coast.

But the project ended up being vastly more expensive to build than when it was first promised by the federal Transport Minister, Anthony Albanese, in 2009.  Read more »

The Green taliban hypocrites will be campaigning for this here soon…mark my words.

Here are some letters to the editor of The Telegraph:

They leave a large amount of discarded packaging and uneaten food. I nearly had an accident recently, slipping on a half-eaten burger on a bus.

Isn’t it about time that a campaign was launched to impose a ban on eating on public transport, to mirror such prohibitions in other major European cities?

Bill King
Dagenham, Essex

Read more »

Labour has said they have spoken to Len Brown about their vision for more affordable homes.

Len Brown wants more people living in shoe box apartments near rail corridors…so people can “live, work and play in the world’s most liveable city”.

Wr know this works elsewhere…and thanks tot he wonders of Youtube we can see Len Brown’s vision in action…where communities, relaxed urban planning rules and having commuters and businesses near rail corridors works well:

I knew it. Public transport is the greater evil not cars. Autonomous, self driving cars is the way of the future, not buses or trains.

[Consider] autos with but one passenger and compare them to transit vehicles in which every seat is full. (For example, see this.) But in the real world, this is emphatically not the case. At any given time, the average auto has somewhere around 1.6 passengers, and the average (typically 40-seat) bus has only about 10. Rail vehicles typically have more passengers (on average about 25), but then again they are also typically much larger. Thus their average load factor (percentage of seats filled) is also not high, at about 46 percent for heavy rail systems (think subways in major cities) and about 24 percent for light rail (think systems that mostly run at street level).

It is not clear that moving around large and largely empty vehicles is much of an improvement over moving around smaller ones. In fact, it may be worse. According to the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book, in 2010 transporting each passenger one mile by car required 3447 BTUs of energy. Transporting each passenger a mile by bus required 4118 BTUs, surprisingly making bus transit less green by this metric.