Better for city and district councils to develop bus services?

THE future shape of our local urban public transport is becoming a matter of increasing concern.

In that context it’s not surprising that the Otago Regional Council, Dunedin City Council, and Queenstown Lakes District Council seem to be having so much difficulty agreeing what shape such services should take and how they might best be managed in the future in our part of the country.

Arguably, territorial rather than regional control would prove to be a much better fit for the development and management of such services.

For DCC and QLDC ratepayers it ought to be patently obvious that their public transport services as presently delivered are seriously dysfunctional — big buses going round and round, belching out diesel fumes, with scarcely a passenger in sight.

Many folk in the Upper Clutha and the Wakatipu might now see as unacceptable the continued foisting on them of the development and ongoing management of those services by a council, none of whose councillors are permanently resident in their district and whose administration and management are headquartered hundreds of kilometres away.

This ought to be a priority concern for the new QLDC once installed. It would be interesting to hear what those currently aspiring to QLDC office might have to say about that. Mike Horder

Wanaka

I FAIL to understand how the

Dunedin City Council taking control of the city’s public transport system is good news (Letters, 20.8.22).

Releasing local public transport to the DCC will not fix the current issues. It would be interesting to know what the DCC could do that is different from the Otago Regional Council.

When the DCC previously ran the public transport system under a holding company, it was a financial burden to the ratepayers.

Driver shortage, sickness, low wages are currently being blamed.

The issues are much wider than that.

Malcolm Budd Otago Regional Council candidate

A ‘must read’

THE eightpage Proceedings of the

Conference of Chiefs at Kohimarama,

Auckland, in 1860 is a mustread for every New Zealander.

It records the speech given by Governor Thomas Browne and opinions expressed by some of the 154 chiefs who attended.

It would seem that Maoridom and secular society in general have today deviated immensely from valuing Christianity and the [English] laws, as these chiefs did. They contrasted these benefits with the insecurity of their old ways.

I am grateful to a friend for bringing this conference to my attention, and to Victoria University of Wellington for making the text of the proceedings widely available through its online Electronic Text Collection.

Ron Adams

Wakari