I was up in Auckland a few days ago doing some university guest teaching. As you might expect, I took a bus and train combo from the airport to make my way into town and then back again to the airport the next day. It was definitely quite interesting trying out the new train route through the downtown CRL tunnel; the demand has certainly jumped up since that opened about a month ago.
On my way into town, I clearly struck good timing when, partway along the train journey, someone got onto my carriage with a bike in tow…
Yep, Auckland Transport are now pretty comfortable about letting people bring bikes onto train carriages (assuming there is sufficient space). Possibly an interesting choice parking it in front of the mobility seating, especially when there were some cycle-parking marked ones at the other end, but it was a fairly quiet train so I’ll let it slide…
I’ve seen several examples of similar train-bike integration in my travels around Europe, the UK, and USA; I gather that even Wellington makes reasonable use of it on their services too. So it’s good to see it also become the norm up in Auckland too.
Have you tried taking bikes on trains?
Whenever Christchurch gets a train I imagine that it would be great if they had a reletively large bike parking space on-board. With Rolleston in particular there’s the issue that quite a lot of people live on the other side of town to the station, and once you get to Christchurch any station (bar a tunnel and escalator to the bus exchange) isn’t going to get you very close to your destination. Makes me think that having a sizeable amount of the passengers able to put their bike on any future train might be a good idea.