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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25, No. 6. 1962.

Mayor Kitts asked ... — What About Our Cable Car?

Mayor Kitts asked ...

What About Our Cable Car?

"When is the council going to do something about our cable car?" That's a question that a lot of Vic students may have been asking lately as they battle out of the sheep run to catch the five o'clock launching of that "antique tram that rattles up the hill."

Last week Salient put the question to the Mayor. We pointed out that the Wellington City Cable Car, touted as one of our scenic wonders, is also a bit of an economic marvel. Apart from being one of the most overworked and underrated of the Transport Department's services, it has managed to show a profit continuously for years: last year it made the tidy sum of £4,135 after its direct working expenses.

We considered that pretty good, especially when the Department as a whole showed a £131,000 loss. Mr Kitts was of the opinion that it was impossible to isolate any of the Transport Department's services as an economic unit, any more than one could say that the sewerage system was unjustifiable because it did not run at a profit. Very well, we said, but surely if one was going to improve a service, a likely choice would be one that already ran economically.

Report

REPORT

Even in its present antiquated condition the cable car is a fast, high-density service — carrying three times as many passengers a mile as the average Wellington Transport vehicle. Vic has always taken an interest, ranging from benign to vindictive, in its welfare, as well we might: before Varsity was in session this year the weekday turnover averaged about £75; during enrolment week it averaged about £120 a day, and now it has settled down to a steady near £100 a day during term. The Vice Chancellor estimates that enrolment will increase to about 7,000 students by 1967—at that rate a lot are going to walk up and down the hill every day.

The cable car is not really a cable car, by the way. It is technically a funicular railway. A cable car is a single car that grips onto a continuously moving cable to go, and releases it to stop. The Wellington car was originally planned on this model, and Training College students may be interested to know that it was supposed to go right over the hill into the Glen.

Apart from the rush-hour rat-race and some lovely fluorescent lighting our great-grandfathers wouldn't feel out of place on the trip up the hill today. When the council took it over in 1946 from the private company that originally built it—which sold out voluntarily, Mr Kitts informed us—there was a new 100-seater car on the blueprints.

Nothing much more was heard of that plan. Some of those students with that trampled five o'clock feeling may be asking what happened also to the "various types of cars" that a W.C.C. Transport Department annual report of about four years ago said "were being considered" for "the modernisation of the cable car." One, designed right down to the indirect strip lighting and pink ceilings, was a light and strong metal car designed to carry 110 people. The present car carries only 75. Apparently this plan was pigeonholed.

A lot of other plausible ideas have been contributed by people interested in the car's future. Every four minutes the car can haul a full load of people from the densest part of the city to a low-density suburb—has the Council considered the possibility of a parking lot at the top to encourage people to leave their cars there instead of in Salamanca Road? Has it thought of aligning the stops to cut out the grinding halts in between stations, which make the grip men gnash their teeth? A little work with a stopwatch showed that this could raise the number of trips per hour from thirteen to seventeen.

Mr Kitts himself mentioned the possibility of a second Cable Car: an alternate route had been considered from Dixon Street up to the Science Block, but he said that governmental pressures against the raising of loans by local bodies would make that sort of largescale improvement unlikely in the near future. He agreed with us that there was a case for improvement of the existing car. Frank Kitts has a reputation for getting things done in Wellington—Salient and Vic hopes he adds to it with our Cable Car.

—R.G.L.