Greetings to the Wellington light rail email list.

(Seeing this heads-up for the first time? Probably because of recent contact we made re light rail, urbanism, Lets Get Wellington Moving, Congestion Free Wellington, etc – but email me back if you don’t want to get any more.)

These more-or-less fortnightly newsletters appear personally from me, Brent Efford, in my role as the NZ Agent for the Light Rail Transit Association (LRTA). No one else is to blame. The amount of content depends on the time I have for research and writing. A return to a graphic, formatted KiwiTram newsletter is in the offing … soonish!

Black and red type is my composition, green is copied.

What is the LRTA?: SEE 5 BELOW!

1 Reminder: TRAX lunch: this Friday, 14 September

Our regular lunch get-togethers are on the 2nd and 4th Friday of the month, at TRAX, Wellington Railway Station, 12.00. Our next TRAX lunch is this Friday, 14 September.

Due to increasing numbers, we now use a reserved table in the western (Featherston St) side of the cafe/bar area. All welcome!

2 Wellington Civic Trust seminar this Saturday
Wellington after Paris - Zero Carbon Capital City

WHEN: Saturday 15 September, 8:30am-3pm
WHERE: Ranchhod House (beside Preservatorium Café) 39 Webb Street, Te Aro, Wellington

Wellington can continue to be a vibrant place, while responding to the need to reduce emissions and adapt to a changing climate and rising sea levels. The “Wellington after Paris” Civic Trust forum offers a unique insight into the wellbeing, employment and resiliency benefits on offer when we make the transition to a zero carbon city.

Session 1: Economic Transformation - Carbon Neutrality
Session 2: Natural & Cultural Heritage - What will our city be like?
Session 3: Social/Community Implications - Shaping the city in the way we want

Speakers include:
Professor Arthur Grimes
Dr Russell Tregonning
Professor Jonathan Boston
Isabella Cawthorn
Kevin Hackwell
Tom Bennion
Catherine Leining
Danielle Shanahan

Register directly at eventbrite link https://bit.ly/2KysZ9p https://bbox.blackbaudhosting.com/webforms/linkredirect?url=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2f2KysZ9p&srcid=9562320&srctid=1&erid=726981193&trid=b544274c-b02a-430a-acb3-bd8457a7237f&linkid=112690303&isbbox=1 Attendance is free with morning tea provided, but koha welcome.
Lunch available at $15 a head
More information at http://www.wellingtoncivictrust.org/ https://bbox.blackbaudhosting.com/webforms/linkredirect?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wellingtoncivictrust.org%2f&srcid=9562320&srctid=1&erid=726981193&trid=b544274c-b02a-430a-acb3-bd8457a7237f&linkid=112690304&isbbox=1

3 Allison Arieff – Wednesday 19 Sept

Allison Arieff, the respected American writer on design and architecture will present this year's Sir Ian Athfield Memorial Lecture
Wednesday 19 September: The Embassy Theatre, 6:00pm
Free tickets from https://nzia.co.nz/festival-of-architecture/allison-arieff-sir-ian-athfield-memorial-lecture-2018 https://nzia.co.nz/festival-of-architecture/allison-arieff-sir-ian-athfield-memorial-lecture-2018
Allison is a California-based writer, advocate and teacher who is currently editorial director off The Urbanist, the magazine of the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), an urban planning and policy think tank that aims “to bring people together from across the political spectrum to develop solutions to the big problems our cities face”.
Since 2006, Allison has also written the architecture and design blog “By Design https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/allison-arieff” for The New York Times. Earlier in her career she held editorial positions at Random House, Oxford University Press and Chronicle Books. In 2000, she helped found the influential architecture and design magazine Dwell and in 2002 became the publication’s editor-in-chief.
Allison is the author of the books Prefab and Trailer Travel: A Visual History of Mobile America and has contributed to and/or edited numerous books on architecture, design and sustainability including Airstream: The History of the Land Yacht, Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York and Urban Farms. She teaches in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley.
You can hear her on RNZ at https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018662008/self-driving-cars-not-solution-to-traffic-woes https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018662008/self-driving-cars-not-solution-to-traffic-woes
For the past century, the car has dominated our cities, shaping the streets, roads and urban spaces that surround them. Enter the AV or automated vehicle. But according to design guru, Allison Arieff AVs won't be enough to fix these problems - and could even make them worse.
She says that's because we need to be designing for people not cars. She talks to Kathryn Ryan about how good design can change all our lives.

4 Bustastrophe – a decade in the making

http://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=112023

It started out as just a comment on another essay, but Wellington Scoop made it a separate item:

September 4, 2018
by Brent Efford

The roots of the bustastrophe go back over a decade, when Cr Fran Wilde took over the GWRC and the transport chair, and the visionary transport manager Dr David Watson was, essentially, fired (and replaced by a succession of dreary managerialists with neither passion nor much understanding of public transport.)

Building the Transmission Gully Motorway and implementing the National Government’s RoNS road building programme became the central focus. (Even now, ‘four lanes to the planes’ excites most regional councillors far more than creating the electric public transport network that a sustainable Wellington needs.)

The light rail extension of the rail network into the Wellington and Lower Hutt CBDs, planned in the 1999 Regional Land Transport Strategy for implementation in 2004-19, was forgotten.

To spin this change of direction, it was necessary to create the belief that a complete regional rail spine was unnecessary and that ‘bus rapid transit’ could be ‘just like light rail but cheaper’.

The NZTA imported a Norwegian transport network expert, a Professor Neilson, to spread the story that bus-only networks could work as long as there were trunk, hub and spoke routes. This was in spite of copious evidence, including many decades of Wellington suburban rail system experience covering most of the region, that the trunks need to be rail with regular services operating utterly reliably with only one train at a time meeting a very small number of feeder buses operating only in congestion-free suburban streets.

The ill-conceived and incompetent Public Transport Spine Study of 2012-13 sealed in this bus-only myth, and until the change of central Government the Let’s Get Wellington Moving exercise seemed likely to go the same way. This envisaged Wellington remaining just about the only metropolis in the world with a main regional rail transit system which stops at the edge of the CBD (while Transmission Gully is bound to increase the amount of road traffic into the CBD!)

Trying to pretend that mode doesn’t matter and that buses = trains (or trams) started this debacle – and then GWRC hubris, and the determination to conform to the ideology of privatisation and cost-cutting via PTOM – has completed it.

As has been suggested by comments on Wellington.Scoop, a priority now is to create a proper Regional Transit Authority to plan and run PT and get the ‘roads first’ mob out of it.

It attracted 28 comments – the first being:

100% right Brent! Wellington had a transport system others were envious of but now it’s simply awful. All due to unskilled bureaucrats and no-idea councillors. We need a one stop Public Transport Authority that does everything and is responsible for everything to do with buses and trains. None of this convoluted legal contracting quagmire… And it must have management who have demonstrable experience and qualifications in transport and have real passion for the task. And we need it NOW!
Roy Kutel

And the last ending:

… The flawed bus Hub and Spoke design is a backward step. Brent Efford is absolutely right that a seamless extension of our truncated rail network should be a key component of this network, both from the Station across town to the airport and from Melling into the Lower Hutt CBD and on service more of the western Hutt.
Glen Smith

5 What is the LRTA?

The Light Rail Transit Association was formed in the UK in 1937 and … “ is the world’s leading organisation concerned with the achievement of better public transport through light rail, tramway and metro systems in towns and cities world–wide.” (http://www.lrta.org/ http://www.lrta.org/).
The Association is a partnership between civil society advocates (such as myself) and professionals within the public transport industry.

The main activities of the LRTA are:

· Information provision and advocacy

· Publication of the monthly light rail industry journal Tramways and Urban Transport; T&UT is available online, by subscription online (via the above website), and also retail in some magazine outlets like Magnetix in Wellington.

· Sponsorship of major UK light rail industry events such as the annual Light Rail Awards and a separate annual industry conference.

Although remaining UK-based, the LRTA has a world-wide reach, including agents in a number of countries. One of its most notable achievements was the provision of information about modern tramways which informed and led to the establishment of light rail in San Diego, opening in 1981 – the first new-generation LRT system in the United States and the progenitor of several dozen new systems now operating there.

(The LRTA, by the way, is considering changing its name – to TramForward! Ill-advisedly in my view – but the decision will be made in London.)

Brent Efford
NZ Agent, Light Rail Transit Assn