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Boo you locked my argument thread down 😂.
The next spicy take is why we shouldn't build local passenger rail in any new zealand cities. I've been doing research on this topic because i was trying so hard to justify some cool rail infrastructure in auckland. Now to wait for an article about the auckland light rail cancelation to be posted.
I'll take the bait (slightly).
We probably don't need to build rail in a lot of places; just use what is there which would limit it the cost to an investment in some railcars and staff.
Eg a feeder service from Waipukurau -> Napier airport (or even up to Esk Valley before heading back) could get passengers off the expressway which can get very congested at peak times and is probably cheaper than 4 laning it.
I'm not as familiar with where the rail goes down in Christchurch but a similar service running from Burnham through Chch to Rangiora could be worth investigating.
The problem is that rail costs a lot of money to build and a lot of money to maintain. This is ok when you have a metro city of 5 or 10million+ but a city like Napier would never be able to afford to maintain it.
The economically way to build rail is for freight rail to be built because they pay for its use and it's less of a burden on the government and then passenger rail forks off it.
Mostly for auckland I would like to see cycle expressways and better motorway and bus infrastructure. I'd also like to see them move driveways off the fucking main roads its dumb and causes so much traffic. Main popular roads should be footpath - bike - bus/t3 - car/ mirror
The rail is already there, and already maintained, so its not really a consideration. Both of those routes i've mentioned are already in use for a small number of daily freight runs and due to their weight in comparison require far more maintenance than some relatively lighter passenger carriages would. Road also costs a lot of money to build, and increasingly more money to maintain - both of those calculations increase the more lanes a road has too. I wouldn't expect the Hawkes Bay Regional Council to have to fund all of that themselves, especially as the idea is to mode shift vehicles off State Highway 2, which is central government funded.
More cycleways is always great; but a railcar set that can do >100km/h on a route like Waipukurau to Napier with capacity for say 100-120 commuters or shoppers is 100 vehicles worth of congestion and pollution off the road. Its also a distance that almost nobody is going to commute on a bicycle, particularly when the weather is wet and/or cold. If it proved popular enough you can expand the set to carry more people or add additional service times as well and the beauty of that stretch of rail is that originally there were a lot of small stations built which were closed in the 80s when the areas they served became less than villages. Some of those areas have subsequently become quite popular for lifestylers so over time considering opening the stations back up would be a possibility.
Its easy to make passenger rail look impossible if you try to make it so the passenger services have to fund the entirety of the rail infrastructure - but NZ has always run freight and passenger on the same rail and in the past used to run far more services than we do now. I'll concede building passenger rail is an overly expensive proposition for the population outside of Auckland, but my point is that in many places we don't need to the rail is already there and once its there you don't need 5 million people to make it thrive - see Wellington's commuter rail network.
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.