Two major matters caused the demise of Wellington’s trolley buses:

• A change at the top of the Greater Wellington Regional Council transport
department, where the pro-trolley manager departed and was replaced with a
duo of anti-trolley managers supported by the GWRC chair and the transport
committee chair (who was himself a former Wellington bus driver who hated
trolleys).

• The absence of any champion for the trolleys in the public realm
including in the media. At two previous occasions where the trolleys were
threatened, I worked as a daily newspaper reporter who was able to promote
the benefits of the trolleys and help to sway political opinion; so well
in the second occasion that I was personally invited to the signing in 2007
of the contract for the fleet of Designline trolleys that replaced the
Volvo trolleys bought in 1979 at the time of my first attempt at
campaigning. This final time, the contraction (and slow death) of the media
had forced me into other work, where I remain.

It's simply not true that the overhead wires were run down. After the
Designline contract was signed, a separate contract was signed between the
regional council and the city council agency that owned the overhead
network (WCCL) for a major upgrade of the network over multiple years.
From 2009 to 2016, millions of dollars of ratepayers’ money were spent each
year replacing the older OB wires that predominated along suburban roads
with the latest K&M equipment. The overhead gang was sent to Switzerland at
the start of this process for training in erecting K&M equipment. The
overhead along most sections of all the routes was replaced as a result,
including the entire length of the long and busy Karori Park and Island Bay
routes and most of the Seatoun, Miramar, Lyall Bay and Kingston routes.
Even the short Aro Street route received lengths of K&M overhead. The
upgrading included replacing old-style coast-through section isolators with
power-through isolators, making driving the trolleys that much easier.

This replacement of the suburban overhead network complemented the
inner-city network which had been similarly upgraded after the Volvos
arrived in the 1980s.

Having this core and quite extensive network of modern and upgraded
overhead wires should have allowed GWRC to promote the use of
battery-trolleys on routes beyond the overhead wires, as was already
becoming popular in various European cities at the time GWRC decided in
2014 to close the trolleys on the day in 2017 that the 10-year operating
contract with NZ Bus to run them ended. But GWRC had no interest in this
despite the Designline trolleys already being equipped with batteries that
allowed off-wire running up to 4km or so, a feature that was often deployed
to get around road closures and other problems. Instead, GWRC allowed NZ
Bus to replace the trolleys with second-hand diesels brought in from
Auckland, then from 2018 it ordered service providers (chiefly NZ Bus and
Tranzit at the time) to spend millions on heavy, expensive full-battery
buses and the charging equipment they needed, when cheaper and quite
practical battery-trolleys like the BOBs in Solingen and the latest Hess
models in Salzburg (both of which I have visited in the past year) could
have been bought and charged while running under the existing wires. Both
Solingen and Salzburg are using these trolleys to replace route-by-route
their diesel bus routes because the battery-trolley buses are cheaper and
more efficient than purely battery buses.

I was so shocked that a modern, much-upgraded trolleybus system as
Wellington;s could be destroyed on a management/political whim after more
than $100 million of public money had just been spent on it that I gave up.
I just don’t give a damn about Wellington any more. The city is falling to
pieces. As well as trashing what was the country’s best transport network
(of which the trolleys were just one key part), the city’s leaders have
neglected other infrastructure to such an extent that the roads are falling
apart and the city’s water supply loses 45pc of its piped supplies from
more than 4000 (and growing) leaks. Shops and offices are closed and
boarded up all over the city. The pedestrian count is well down, not just
because people want to avoid the slippery footpaths with their pools of
leaked water and slime. Businesses have voted to move out. I’ve moved out
myself to a more enlightened outer municipality where the roads get fixed
and the pipes don’t leak. Given that one of the biggest opponents of public
transport – trains as well as trolley buses – is now on the Wellington City
Council and supposed gunzels have been prominent bad-mouthing Wellington’s
trolleys, including here, I can no longer bring myself even to care.

On Friday, April 5, 2024 at 11:03:20 AM UTC+13 TP wrote:

A modern battery trolleybus service in operation - a video coverage of
operations on the first of Prague's new trolleybus services, 58, between
the major tram and metro interchange at Palmovka, near the city centre, and
the rural village of Miškovice on the outskirts of Prague.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjAk-usd62k