What price trolleys?

The Dom Post editorial:

Sad as it will be to see them go, Wellington should get rid of its trolley buses. The case is sound.

To work properly, public transport systems need to be fast, reliable and affordable. Wellington has fine public transport, with unusually high passenger numbers, but trolley buses are hampering it on all of these fronts.

To keep the trolleys running, a major $52 million electricity infrastructure upgrade looms. Beyond that, simply maintaining their overhead wires costs $6m per year.

And money spent on the trolleys is money that could be spent on providing more or faster public transport.

Critics say dropping trolley buses is environmentally daft, because of their low carbon emissions. (They’re responsible only for what’s produced by generating their electricity).

In fact, the bus fleet will get cleaner from 2018 regardless of which replacement option is chosen, because of the significant fuel-efficiency improvements in new diesel buses.

On a deeper level, it’s clear the best way to reduce transport-related carbon emissions is to get people out of their cars. That’s not easy – as Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott once put it, ”even the humblest person is king in his own car”.

Maybe they could invest some of the money used on trolleys into safer cycleways, which is near zero carbon emissions for use!

The best counter to this is an excellent, reliable public transport system. Every measure that makes buses faster and cheaper encourages more people to take them. Green MPs of all people should recognise this, and drop their Save the Trolleys talk.The other argument for holding on to the buses is nostalgia; they’ve been a recognisable feature in Wellington’s urban landscape since 1924. 
This is fair up to a point, but the buses are working vehicles that people rely on, not municipal decorations.

No one should get too misty-eyed over this. Only 20 per cent of the city’s current fleet are trolleys. They don’t operate at weekends at all, and they’re frequently hauled off entire routes when roadworks or other problems arise.

So the city should say goodbye to the buses. 

I like the trolleys, but I don’t think sentiment should stand in the way of doing what’s right.