RICHARD PREBBLE: A free bus would be cheaper
The Greens want to spend $4 billion bringing back long-distance passenger trains.
They say Infometrics has checked their figures.
I know a bit about railways.
As Minister I helped turn Railways from losing $1 million a day to earning $2 million a week. We doubled the freight carried and halved the cost.
I have since advised railways in Asia and Europe and was chairman of a joint venture railway company in Vietnam.
I could have saved the Greens the consultancy fee. I would have told them for free that their idea is nuts.
But they do not have to take my word for it.
The Greens campaigned for an Auckland-to-Hamilton passenger rail service that Labour agreed to.
In 2023/24 the taxpayer and ratepayer subsidy was estimated at $92 per passenger. Today the lowest advertised bus fare is about $20. A free bus service would have saved money.
Green transport spokesperson Julie Anne Genter says:
“These tracks are already there, so we should use them.”
And that is the issue. It is a single-track railway and we already use it.
New Zealand has a freight railway. Ninety-three per cent of the network is single track.
A container does not care if its train waits in a siding for an oncoming train.
Passengers do.
Passenger trains need timetables. They need speed. They get priority.
KiwiRail itself says the single-track limits its capacity.
The Greens propose passenger trains through the Kaimai tunnel on our busiest freight track. Their plan says the line can take a passenger service by “scheduling adjustments for freight”.
In English: stop the freight train and let the passenger train through.
Do that often enough and shippers will send the freight by road.
We would be nuts to spend $4 billion to divert freight from rail to road to create a heavily subsidised passenger rail service.
Richard Prebble is a former Minister and ACT Party leader who writes at I've Been Thinking
Train whistleblowing makes a sleepy noise underneath the blankets are all the greens and their Bussy boys!!
These tossers are too young to remember why all these train services stop running. No one was using them . Slow as shit . No transport at the other end,Just bullshit. As for them being free!!,Well that is just code for someone else can pay for it. Probably someone who would never go near a train
Thanks Richard. You possess more intellect in your smallest fingernail than all the Greens nutjobs combined. Sensible folk rightly suspect the Greens are clueless, deranged, fuckwits. These kinds of hair-brained ideas merely reinforce that they most certainly are.
As usual Prebs is spot on with his observations.
NZ is essentially broke and the last thing we need to be doing is subsidising a passenger train when we have busses. Nuts
"We would be nuts to spend $4 billion to divert freight from rail to road"
Sounds like a perfect greens policy. Unfortunately most don't realise it is nuts.