Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
Yeah I agree in the case where there is already freight rail adding Passenger rail definitely makes sense. In the case of Auckland we have freight rail which is used by passenger rail services and its good but it does not always reach the same places that people want to travel leaving AT to look at building their own rail networks of which the costs are huge. I wonder if we have the population to justify using rail as a solution compared to other transport solutions.
A successful mass transit system almost necessitates being mostly separated from private vehicles; there are plenty of cities around the world that are 500k or smaller which have metro systems so there really isn’t much of an excuse for Auckland to not have one.
I think the smallest I can find on a quick google today is Lausanne which is only 150k people but has a separated rubber tired metro of some kind. Ghent is another small one with a mostly separated tram system, Rennes has a mostly underground system and is for an urban area of around 360k.
But we don’t even need to look overseas, Wellington Region has 4 1/2 lines for only 550k or so people. 2 of those are fully dedicated to passengers, and one of the others is almost entirely passenger as well. Mixed Freight & Passenger works in NZ, we’ve been doing it for decades.