The Let’s Get Wellington Moving website features ”a History of Wellington Transport planning”, This seems to imply LGWM does not want the public to think too hard about Wellington planners discarding Trams 60 years ago. Instead, their document makes it seem that transport planning began only “from the 1960s”.
In truth, that was when transport planners finally rejected Trams! Knowledge of history can protect us from reliving its mistakes.
A deeper dive into Papers Past (Papers Past (natlib.govt.nz) ) as well as Google, probably only scratched the surface. Yet it still revealed 60 years of problems arising from Wellington’s hilly nature, narrow streets with trams sharing with cars (fewer in those days).
Most important was the difficulty stopping a heavy tram in emergency and particularly in wet weather. That has not significantly changed. Most inconvenient to LGWM is that in those days they were more plainly called “TRAMS” rather than employing the euphemism “Light Rail”... Here is a photo carousel of trams from Wellington’s past.
[hover mouse over photo’s side, & click, to reverse or advance]
|