The Future is Rail – the organisation that has completed successful campaigns for the return of the Northern Explorer and Coastal Pacific passenger trains have turned their attention to the regions extending from New Plymouth to Whanganui, Palmerston North and Wellington. Their petition to government focusses on “reconnecting communities” across the North Island with “safe, sustainable, and inclusive public transport”.
Apparently, the Regional Transport Committee has committed to advocate to central government and support KiwiRail in undertaking a feasibility study on the future of passenger rail in the region. All good stuff – so long as it occurs before the TRC becomes a thing of the past.
Here is my submission to whoever gets to pick up the cudgel because a project as worthy as this should not be let to slip through the cracks.
“Reconnecting communities” may be interpreted many ways and sounds great – so long as key players within our communities start to walk the talk. I reckon there are two aspects of this that have huge potential.
The first is that the new service should have a whole car devoted to meeting spaces. If we assume that the ride between New Plymouth and Hawera takes 90 minutes, imagine the time that could be saved if all the hui hoppers in the region were constrained to meetings only taking the time required for the train to travel between Hawera and New Plymouth?
Here’s how it would work. New Plymouth people needing to attend a meeting in Hawera would board the train in New Plymouth as passengers, and when they got to Hawera, the people they were needing to meet with would also board the train. The meeting would take place in one of the pre-booked meeting spaces in the “conference” carriage on the way back to New Plymouth where the New Plymouth attendees could disembark – having concluded the business during the train’s travelling time and saved themselves (and the Hawera attendees) at least an hour’s worth of driving time. The benefits are boundless. Less driving time, a more equitable distribution of time investment for all attendees, and the discipline of getting the business done within a specified timeframe.
The second potential benefit lies in more effort being put in by those entities who only do business from the main centres to ensure that the appointment times they are offering the hapless outsiders who must travel to access their services coincide with the train timetables. Perhaps in this way we could avoid the common situation (in health services for example) where people in the south without any form of transport were regularly booked into ridiculously early morning appointments in New Plymouth – requiring uncomfortable and inconvenient adjustments to their daily routines and those of whoever was transporting them. Perhaps this potential benefit could morph into a potential decentralisation of some essential services.
If you are still reading, you are welcome to write me off as a nutter. Chances are you will be New Plymouth based. Just know that I have spent a great deal more of my working life travelling to New Plymouth to attend meetings than my New Plymouth colleagues ever spent travelling to meetings in Hawera. Know also that I have done a great deal of advocacy for people without transport being assigned silly times for appointments in New Plymouth. And finally, I have sat through a good many meetings that took far longer than they needed to and/or that people either left early or arrived late just because they could. These proposals would deal with all of these issues – not the least that unless they are already commuters, New Plymouth people heading south traditionally seem to think they are heading into tiger country from which there is no return and the road from New Plymouth to Hawera is long and arduous – whereas Hawera people know the trip to NP only takes an hour.