Hamish Bidwell: No one wants to ride the locomotive

Hamish Bidwell says Hawke's Bay does not need passenger trains. Photo / NZME

OPINION: Hawke's Bay needs passenger trains like a hole in the head.

I was a train commuter once upon a time.

For years I clambered aboard in Waikanae, for the one-hour journey into Wellington. I then walked 15 minutes or so through the city to my place of work.

I'd tried to drive.

And, by and large, the driving part wasn't too bad.

I didn't travel at absolute peak time and was therefore able to make actual forward progress for most of the journey. My normal shift started at 10am, unlike the tens of thousands of other commuters from the Hutt Valley and Kapiti Coast who got a daily dose of gridlock to go with their commute.

No, the issue I had was with parking.

It's expensive to drive for an hour to and from work every day, but the major cost was parking.

It wasn't uncommon to spend an hour going from parking building to parking building, in the search for a spot. Multi-level, earthquake-prone junkyards most of them were.

I can't even count the number of times I nudged or scraped concrete pillars. Or the occasions I arrived back to my vehicle to find someone had given mine a love tap with theirs.

If you were lucky, it might cost you $25 to park for the day back then.

Hamish Bidwell. Photo/ Warren Buckland

But sometimes you weren't lucky. Sometimes work was pressing and you had to take the odds of parking in a short-term bay and moving your car later.

If I'm honest, I copped an $80 fine for that on more than a few occasions. It didn't matter how close you were to meeting the two-hour limit or how strongly you pleaded your case, the parking warden remained unmoved.

In the end, despite the inconvenience of train travel, it was cheaper to pay the $30 for a return trip each day.

And that's the guts of it.

Sure, there were people on those hundreds of services in and out of Wellington who took that mode of transport for environmental reasons. But the vast majority of us rode trains to and from our various suburbs and towns because it was cheaper.

We didn't want to stand freezing on platforms and then walk, bus, taxi or Uber to the office. We'd have loved to have jumped in a car and not have to stand cheek by jowl on a packed carriage to get home but actually - given all the associated costs - we couldn't afford to drive.

Or should I say not drive far? After all, people had to drop their cars somewhere in the vicinity of a train station to start their journey in the first place.

We don't have that problem here. Free parking is plentiful and within five minutes' walk (at most) of your destination.

We don't have gridlock, we don't all work in the one CBD and we don't have a single incentive to get out of our cars and onto a train.

So let's completely dismiss the idea that Hawke's Bay folk are ever going to take the train to work or even travel for pleasure in their thousands to destinations such as Auckland and Wellington.

People simply don't want to get out of their cars and there's no compelling reason why they should.