For a Sunday outing, the kids and I had some great father son daughter time and took public transport into and around the city.

The City: Christchurch

I live in the city of Christchurch in New Zealand -- but I prefer the Maori names Otautahi in Aotearoa. (I don't speak Maori but it's a beautiful language with better sounding place names than the unimaginative choices of the European explorers and settlers.) It is the largest city of the South Island, which provided many locations for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. The city population is around 340,000 depending on where you stop counting. Christchurch is known as the Garden City, and one thing that many visitors notice is the number of trees. We sure love our trees down here. It's a fantastic place to live in all seasons, except winter -- climate conditions mean the city has a far worse winter smog problem than you'd expect for its size.

Public transport in Christchurch is primarily one option: the bus. There are three main bus systems:

• a star-shaped network of bus routes from suburbs into the city center.
• a circular network around the suburbs, covering the University and all the major malls.
• a free hybrid electric shuttle along the main street of the Central Business District.

Urban living is on the rise, but most people still live in suburbs here. New Zealanders love their cars, with private motor vehicle use probably second in the OECD only behind the USA.

Back in the mid 1990s, public transport in Christchurch was in very poor condition with bus use at an all-time low. The problems started with a disastrous deregulation and competition for tendered routes in 1991, which led to a system that rewarded profitability over passenger service. Since then, a major emphasis on improving the bus system has produced great improvements and the number of annual passenger trips has doubled.

The future goal is to increase from the current 16 million to 25 million annual passenger trips by 2015. Strategies to achieve this include greater bus priority on main routes, increased bus frequency, more major suburban interchanges with cycle facilities, and park-and-ride schemes. This is great -- but despite the huge bus system success of the last ten years, congestion is worse than ever. Much of the city growth has been in new affluent suburbs and semi-rural lifestyle sections where the SUV rules the roads, so many new houses are lived in by people who never see the inside of a bus.

Getting into the city: Diesel Bus

Our public transport excursion starts with a diesel bus ride into the city.

The bus system has automated location using GPS and radio to track each bus, so our stop has a sign showing how many minutes we will need to wait. There's an elevated wait sign at major stops, and a simple push-button interface at most minor stops. For anyone at a stop without a waiting time display, there is a WAP website for getting the information by mobile phone.

Wait sign at a major stop.	Push-button interface at a minor stop.

A few city buses are trialling biodiesel blends, but the buses on our route are all regular diesel for now. Most of the fleet are now "super low floor" models that can "kneel" on request and have space for wheelchair users.

Most passengers pay with an electronic card, which can be topped up on any bus. The balance can be checked online. In approximate US prices, casual cash fare is $1.80 but the card offers discount incentives: it's $1.40 per ride with a free additional ride within two hours, a maximum of $2.80 per day, and a maximum of $14 per week. (Halve all those prices for 5-18 year olds.) This is very inexpensive compared to US $4.50 per gallon for gasoline and US$8 or more for a day of city car parking.

All bus routes into the city center stop at a purpose-built terminal building called The Crossing. Once there, I picked up a free copy of the 2006-2012 public transport strategy plan to read what changes are planned for the next five years.

Inside the Crossing.	A bus leaves the Crossing.

The Crossing has minute accuracy waiting times for each bus, but not everything there was kept up to date. As the picture on the right shows, we found this advertising display case with old posters informing of an event in the city center that already happened a month ago: a free evening outdoor screening of a certain motion picture documentary you may have seen...

From there, we walk a few yards to our next public transport: a free inner city bus.

Getting around the inner city: Electric Shuttle

The central business district has a free bus route known simply as The Shuttle that covers most of the main attractions. The distinctive yellow buses are hybrid electric vehicles that plug in overnight and run in all-electric mode for some of the route. I don't know how many buses are used on any day, but it's enough to provide a ride in either direction every ten minutes. Not all the buses operating the route are hybrids, though. We decided to let a regular red diesel bus operating the shuttle service go by and wait 10 minutes for the next one, so we could ride a quiet hybrid.

A red diesel follows a yellow electric.	Our shuttle pulls away.

The free Shuttle route includes many inner city locations such as the cathedral (shown in the first picture of this diary), visitors center, town hall, convention center, casino, main library, Polytechnic Institute, movie theaters and lots of shopping.

There is surprisingly little public online technical information about the hybrid electric shuttle which started service around eight years ago, making it one of the first initiatives that revamped public transport in the city. All I could find was this 1999 article pointing out its water-cooled solid gel batteries recharged by diesel engine, and this 2000 update reporting the switch to an LPG-powered Capstone Turbine engine for greater efficiency and lower emissions. Oh, and there is also Electric bus page at the website of its NZ-based manufacturer, DesignLine.

Tourist public transport

There are two other forms of tourist public transport in the CBD at the very center of the city. Both happen to be zero emission. There is a tram route covering a few blocks providing rides on restored heritage electric trams. It's not bad value at US$9 per two-day adult pass for the tourists, and there is a US$30 annual pass for local tram enthusiasts. There is also a restaurant tram providing dining each evening.

A restored heritage electric tram.	A tram stop in Victoria Square.

The other zero-emission tourist transport in the inner city is punting on the Avon river. This is a popular place for marriage proposals, as my American-born wife discovered on her first visit to New Zealand eleven years ago.

Punting on the Avon.	Punt with tram crossing in the background.

After enjoying the city sights, it was back home on another diesel bus. More than two hours had passed so that meant the ride home wasn't free, but the extra few dollars were worth it.

If you take public transport in your town or city, feel free to add a comment describing it -- the good, the bad, recent changes, future plans. Or better yet, take a camera next time you travel and write a photoblog for Daily Kos.

All photos were taken by retrograde and his son. They are free of copyright. Do anything you like with them.

Postscript: For anyone wondering about commuter trains, there is no urban rail here. Passenger trains are only available for (underused and overpriced) intercity travel. However, I just noticed (off-topic) an interesting environmental story regarding rail in the city that made the news here today: Anti-mine protesters halt coal train. But that's another diary...