There’s the usual trail of travellers leaving the city for elsewhere.
Overpriced flights from Dunedin to Christchurch and further afield ply up and down the South Island’s east coast. A small handful of passengers wait in the early afternoon rain at the desultory platform K in Moray Pl for the sole Saturday Intercity coach service to Christchurch.
State Highway 1 is a different story, however. Streams of cars wind up over the Northern Motorway and bear northeast through the Otago countryside before crossing the Waitaki River and heading into Canterbury.
You take your life in your hands with some of the overtaking manoeuvres on display.
Without an effective passenger rail service, and with the often exorbitant cost of flights to and from Dunedin, there really doesn’t seem much option other than to travel by private car.
It makes one wonder. Have any politicians ever tried to make the trip between the island’s two biggest cities by public transport, or, to put it more accurately, the occasional bus?
Do they know how frustrating it can be, in terms of the dearth of services, to try to do the right thing and rely on public transport when there is business or pleasure to be done elsewhere?
Instead, our leaders blithely hop on the ATR at Dunedin or Christchurch airports for the cloud cuckoo-land 50-minute flight which they haven’t had to take out a second mortgage to pay for.
Meanwhile, North Islanders get all pious on Twitter about how they are doing their bit for the environment by not flying and travelling by train instead. Some hopes of that down here.
What is alarming, in terms of the impact on the environment, fuel use, and the wear-and-tear on the roads, is how many of those cars making the 365km run to Christchurch up SH1 only have a driver.
person.
This week we heard from state-owned enterprise KiwiRail that it is perfectly happy for passenger rail to return to the South, as long as territorial and regional councils, i.e. ratepayers, and Waka Kotahi, i.e. taxpayers, pay for that. That’s good of KiwiRail.
It seems incredible to believe that the Southerner service from Christchurch to Dunedin and Invercargill came to a halt in 2002. The route had been losing money for more than a decade, unable to compete with cut-price airline deals and the rise in private vehicle ownership.
So where is the nicely profitable KiwiRail when it comes to making passenger rail a reality in the South Island? And where are the champions in this Government who can help make a difference?
The disparities between the South and North islands have been highlighted by Otago Business School senior lecturer and rail advocate Duncan Connors, who says southerners lack an effective voice in the debate.
It is worrying, and highly inequitable, that there seems to be little or no interest at all in Parliament about southern rail. Recently its transport and infrastructure committee recommended scoping studies for four inter-regional services, all in the North Island and for trains running to and from Auckland and Wellington.
What about Dunedin to Christchurch? Or Dunedin to Invercargill?
It beggars belief that KiwiRail’s role in achieving any of this seems to be limited to helping councils consider timetabling, the size of network upgrades needed and the cost of running the service.
KiwiRail South Island operations general manager Mark Heissenbuttel said this week there was definitely room for more trains, but any track or station improvements would be ‘‘typically funded by the service’’ requiring them.
Perhaps the first step to getting somewhere for southerners is to restructure KiwiRail itself? Surely it should be funding such things itself, given it is a profitable government monopoly?
It seems any likelihood of the South being chuffed by passenger rail progress could yet be a long way down the line.
