“As the rebuild progresses, there are huge opportunities for Greater Christchurch, but congestion and lack of good public transport is holding the city back.
“After nine years, National has failed to back public transport for Greater Christchurch. Labour will take a fresh approach by investing in projects to get the city moving. This will include restoring commuter rail, starting with the Rolleston to CBD line.
“This will be a permanent service. We will work with the local councils to determine best placement of stations and other infrastructure. The final cost and the level of any cost-sharing will be agreed with councils.
“Rolleston’s population has more than tripled in the last decade, and is projected to continue to grow rapidly. It makes sense to restart commuter rail with this line. The network will be expanded over time as suitable.
“Along with commuter rail, the $100m investment will be available to support infrastructure for buses and bus feeder services as determined through consultation with local councils. These investments will ease congestion and open up opportunities for residential and commercial development.
“A 21st century city simply has to have integrated, multi-modal public transport at its heart. National squandered opportunities to achieve this; Labour will provide leadership.
“National’s approach of ignoring public transport has resulted in gridlock and lost productivity. Labour’s fresh approach will unlock the railways for commuters, and help Greater Christchurch thrive,” says Andrew Little.
... 
Good.
Great – but why stop with Rolleston? Run the trains through to Rangiora in the north as well! The northern motorway is congested every week day morning.
And on that, Brownlee’s property owning mates got the bus centre built on Litchfield Street, and the real estate of the old railway station sold off. Anyone with half a vision would have rebuilt a station on Moorhouse Avenue, had commuter trains coming in from Rolleston, Rangiora and Kaiapoi, and Lyttleton, and a bus centre there as well!
Instead, multi rise car parking buildings in the centre of the city – and empty office space!
Brilliant thinking!
What they should be doing is designing and building a full nationwide rail system. Not this piecemeal city by city BS.
And it needs to be done rapidly so we’re talking thousands of people employed by KiwiRail. Going to need apprentices and trained engineers.
Cars, being highly inefficient, create more profit from the excess use of resources.
Car parking buildings are a waste of valuable inner-city real estate
Really? I find them really useful for parking in.
As the CCC keep removing inner city car parking (to make ours an accessible city) the car parking buildings are more important and more valuable to us every day.
About 60 years ago the Workers train travelled each day from Rangiora to city. The rail link is still there but no commuter train. Pity that the Central Railway station was moved out of town. 100s used this train every day, and now it would be thousands.
“What they should be doing is designing and building a full nationwide rail system. Not this piecemeal city by city BS.”
That is part of what Labour wants to do, Draco T Bastard, but until they get into govt they cannot do what they want to do which is : to have a total review of NZ’s transportation system and build up a properly integrated travel/freight system which includes rail, road and coastal shipping. So – until they’re in govt you’ll have to put up with this piecemeal dribbling of transportation policy.
Then they’re doing it around the wrong way.
Yes, each city needs rail but we need to know how that cities rail is going to connect to the main rail network before we go round building it.
Do we double track the present corridors?
Do we leave them the the same as they are now?
Do we want to build a high speed rail network between each major city?
Questions that need to be asked first and then an overall plan as to how to do it.
And, yes, I’m quite aware that Chch is already connected to the main trunk line. But if we change the main trunk line then we will probably need to change the connection and doing that after you’ve just done a major upgrade to the city rail is usually a bad idea.
I hope they find someone who knows how to do light rail – if they let the clowns who mishandled the rebuild near it, it won’t get to do much good.