OFF OUR TROLLEYS?
Greater Wellington’s Green councillor Sue Kedgley would be huge.’’
Tass Larsen, the council’s manager of projects and planning, admits there is still some uncertainty worldwide about how long hybrid batteries will last. But manufacturers are dealing with this issue by leasing the batteries. So if they don’t last, the council can just send them back, she says.
The option of spending $16.5m to keep the substations going to a few more years is not a particularly wise idea, as they are not something you could just patch up, she says.
About 53km of cable would need replacing, so if you were going to do it, you would need to do it right and spend about $52m.
‘‘We already get plenty of comments about the reliability of trolley buses. Getting told that we would spend $16.5m and not have a reliable service was not inspiring.’’
There is also little environmental argument for keeping the trolleys, Hastie says.
With the oldest, most polluting diesel buses being phased out alongside the trolleys, emissions in Wellington city are predicted to drop by about 40 per cent come 2017, and then another 50 per cent of top of that by 2023.
Buses account for just under 3 per cent of the Wellington region’s emissions, and trolleys are just 60 of 517 buses across the region, so they were hardly keeping us clean and green, he says.