Paul Smith

Sitting in an Auckland City traffic jam you have to wonder. How come a city with just over a million people can end up like this when in New York - with ten times the people - the traffic races from junction to junction? Could the answer lie in the availability of  public transport? Might it have anything to do with Auckland’s biggest strategic blunder – the  removal of trams from our streets nearly 60 years ago? A peak time traffic jam is one thing, but something else which should be worrying the newly elected city fathers and mothers is air pollution. And again it’s instructive to compare. Eco-conscious San  Francisco has something to teach us with its ambitions for reducing pollution. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s goal is to reduce its fleet greenhouse gas emissions to thirty percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012 and become 100 percent emission-free by 2020. All of its diesel-engine vehicles with biodiesel by the end of 2007.  Perhaps all that talk about Auckland becoming competitive should start right here on our city streets with clean air, modern transport ideas and design for the people - not developers. 

And one last word for trams unearthed from that great book From Rails to Rubber, written and published by Graham Stewart. Well, actually it’s an In Memoriam notice -‘Rolled away – 29 December 1956’

Dear ones from us are taken

Noises we loved are stilled

A place is vacant in the town

That never can be filled.

If I had this world to give

With it all I’d part,

Just to see those trundling trams

Ding! Ding! Chhh! – restart