Changing track

CONGESTION: Traffic returning to Christchurch on the Northern Motorway.

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An old Auckland friend was selling me on the advantages of Christchurch. It is the 10-minute city, he enthused. Straight roads, little traffic. Parking everywhere you go.

The other Saturday, his family drove out to do some mountain biking, then on a whim, crossed town to catch the one-day cricket. To round off the day, they circled back home, grabbed their togs and headed out to Taylors Mistake.

Living then on the outskirts of London, and contemplating which New Zealand town to come back to, I had the opposite tale.

On a Saturday, even the leafy suburbs were so gridlocked that if I had not got on the road to join the queue to get into the supermarket car park by 8.30am - ready for when the doors opened - I might as well write off the morning. A 10-minute distance was easily a half-hour crawl. Cars had killed the city and I wanted to leave.

Now that creeping yearly rise in traffic, which can suddenly hit the tipping point, becoming an ugly perma- jam, is threatening Christchurch too. Which is why, says Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker, it is time to bite the bullet and invest in light rail.

Light rail. A mayor's extravagant personal passion, or essential to a growing metropolis? In an election year, it is becoming a high-stakes question.

Sitting in a tub chair in the mayoral lounge, jacket tugged halfway up his arms to reveal the black sleeves of a turtleneck sweater, Parker mimics the inevitable taunts of his political opponents: "There goes big-spending Bob again, another billion-dollar idea to bankrupt the city."

Yet still he wants to make it happen. Last year, Parker and his top officials from the Christchurch City Council took a fact-find trip to see the transport systems and inner-city regeneration projects of a collection of large North American cities, such as Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and San Francisco, and came back mightily impressed.

A couple of years ago, he admits, Environment Canterbury (ECan) was in the driving seat on public transport planning and the consensus was that all Christchurch needed for the next 30 years was a smart bus network - a low- key solution. This conclusion was spelt out in an ECan-commissioned report, the Greater Christchurch Public Transport Futures Study, in 2008.

But now Parker is pushing for light rail as the better idea. In as little as five years, he says, he can imagine "tram- trains" trundling down Riccarton Rd, connecting Canterbury University to a new central city Transport Interchange in Tuam St - a spine service, which could later be extended right out to the airport in one direction, the polytech and Brighton Beach in the other.

And then another set of services could be created based on the existing mainline train tracks that come into Christchurch from three directions. Why not, given the tracks are hardly used, yet nearly reach the centre of town?

Streetcar shuttles - each with the capacity to take several hundred cars off the road - could zip in at 80kmh from Rangiora and Rolleston on the heavy-duty rail, picking up gaggles of commuters from future growth suburbs like Belfast and Wigram. Then at the Hagley Park end of Riccarton Rd, and down by AMI Stadium, the tram- trains could branch off to run on the road, completing their journeys into the heart of town.

Once Christchurch has got the light rail habit, says Parker, the network could be steadily expanded to Sumner, Brighton, Halswell . . . you name it. Buses would still exist, but to fill in the gaps.

Look, says Parker, spreading out a set of maps on the coffee table, this is the reason it has to be done. One map is of the peak-time traffic flows as they were in 2006. A second of how they are projected to be by 2041 - when Christchurch has become a city of half a million, or more than 700,000 once surrounding townships are included.

In 2006, the roadways are still mostly marked green and yellow. Only a few familiar culprits, like Papanui, Riccarton, Lincoln and Ferry roads, are inked red for 100 per cent rush hour capacity. But by 2041 - if nothing changes and 19 out of 20 commuter cars continue to carry just their drivers - the map predicts gridlock all the way out to Templeton and Kaiapoi.

And Christchurch - a small place at the bottom of the world - more than any city cannot afford to let a reputation for congestion become a turn-off as it has for Auckland and others, Parker says.

"Christchurch has a rapidly greying population, and so we have to plan for growth to balance that. If we can't attract young people, if we don't have new families, then that will be the end of the city.

"And what we have to offer the world, what we have to maintain, is a city with liveability, with a quality of life," Parker says.

Parker's critics, such as former ECan councillor and Canterbury Regional Transport Committee chair Jo Kane, buy this part of the argument but then ask, do we really need light rail?

Kane says ECan believed that bus technology could be evolved to create a bus rapid transit (BRT) system - a tram-like service without the tram-like costs. Some smaller cities like Adelaide have bus guideways where the buses have sensors to self-steer along dedicated lanes. Combined with traffic- light priority and other advances, buses could do the job of shifting people smoothly and efficiently.

Kane says this evolutionary strategy was precisely the reason we have been putting dedicated bus lanes down main routes like Papanui Rd and Colombo St this past year. The street geography is being carved out to allow for a future automated bus network.

However, Parker dismisses this as the short-sighted, cheapskate approach - "thinking like Greymouth" rather than New Zealand's second city. A bolder outlook is needed.

Buses and roads wear out, says Parker. You are replacing them every 10 years. Light rail may cost more upfront, but - leaning across to tap the cover of a fat officers' report - he has the evidence that over 20 to 30 years, taking in carbon emissions, maintenance, the likely price of fuel, and other considerations, steel wheels are the proper choice for Christchurch.

"This city is trekking inexorably towards gridlock. So if the opinion of the community at the moment is to just do nothing - don't change anything because they can't see a real problem - then they'll be begging the council in little more than a decade for the kind of action we are talking about now."

- © Fairfax NZ News