Buses, trains, ferries.The anger is palpable. Commuters have had a gutsful of the mayhem playing out in the capital.<\/p>\n
Like the city\u2019s underground pipes, decades of under investment in basic infrastructure is at the heart of the problem, and the chickens have come home to roost.<\/p>\n
The result? A domino effect of delays, cancellations, re-scheduling, non-sailings, and frustration after frustration for the thousands of us who use public transport to get around.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s led to increasing numbers of people reverting to private car use \u2013 exactly the opposite of what our transport planners had planned.<\/p>\n
Paul Callister is a spokesperson for Save Our Trains and a senior associate at the Institute of Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. His current research centres on climate change policy, with a focus on sustainable transport, including long distance bus and rail networks.<\/p>\n
As we\u2019ve built more roads and imported cheaper cars, demand for public transport has taken a back seat, It\u2019s not unique to New Zealand, he says. But unlike in other countries \u2013 such as Switzerland and Norway \u2013 successive governments here have under invested in rail and bus networks and thrown cash at making it faster and easier to travel by road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Buses, trains, ferries.The anger is palpable. Commuters have had a gutsful of the mayhem playing out in the capital. Like the city\u2019s underground pipes, decades<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=837"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":838,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837\/revisions\/838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}