No mention of what they’re protesting but hopefully this isn’t some sort of attempt to repeat the literal shit-show from last year.
Edit: apparently it’s people gluing themselves to roads to promote trains. https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/national/traffic-disruption-warning-by-police-ahead-of-restore-passenger-rail-protest/
What do these people have against buses? We have a fairly decent intercity bus network, which is affordable and reasonably fast, in fact faster than the train in most cases. Let rail handle freight, it’s what rail does well.
In addition to being out of touch with reality, this is also not how you get people to support your cause.
Yeah busses are potentially part of the solution, but decent rail connections can be more disruptive (positively) over longer distances e.g Welly - Palmy, Auckland - Hamilton etc.
Having previously lived in China and experiencing the amazing train network there I definitely see the benefits of a solid rail system. Way more efficient than busses too.
Nuts to me that places like Wellington had pretty good electric bus systems with trolley busses but replaced them largely with diesel. Not sure what the bus fleet is like now though.
Also not sure why you are being downvoted for a pretty reasonable discussion.
Reddit is fucking weird about trains, and it looks like that has filtered over to here.
Our bus fleet is mostly battery electric now.
Didn’t all the trolley busses get scrapped in favor of Diesel some time ago?
The plan was to replace them with battery electric buses, with the diesels being a stop-gap measure.
To nobody’s surprise, the new buses took a lot longer to arrive than expected, but they are mostly there.
Ah nice. It’s been a while I’ve been in Welly, so I wasn’t sure what the current status is.
I think they want rail between suburbs and cities. Definitely if there was rail direct from Porirua to Lower Hutt a huge amount of people who live in one place would suddenly be willing to work in the other, or vice versa.
They probably would, but that would be ridiculously expensive, as it would require extensive tunnelling.
I’ve read some of their demands, mostly they want the old level of intercity services restored. Which, as I’ve already said, is currently served quite well by bus services.
Bus services in the regions seem to have really nosedived since covid.