Decommissioning the Wellington trolley bus network may incur a higher cost than expected with the final bill as high as $20 million says Wellington Cable Car Ltd.
The Dominion Post reports that the trolley buses which run around a 50km route around Wellington will be scrapped by 2017 in favour of newer hybrid vehicles in a deal agreed to by the Greater Wellington Council.
Wellington Cable Car Ltd is a Wellington City Council-owned company which manages the overhead network of wires on which the buses run and has stated in its quarterly report that the estimated decommissioning costs were higher than most parties had first envisaged.
“Further work will be required over the remainder of the year to reach an agreed position by all parties involved,” it says in the quarterly report.
Wellington Cable Car chief executive Simon Fleisher says the scale of work had to be appreciated.
Along with 80km of wires that had to be removed along 50km of bus routes, there were also 3500 poles holding up the wires around the city and the brackets that held wires in place.
A further complication is the fact that 90% of those poles are also used for communications and electricity supply, and many of the inner-city brackets are attached to Heritage buildings.
Fleisher says the focus was now on working out what had to stay and what had to go, and the final price-tag for the job would be determined by this decisions.
He told the Dominion Post: “It will be a few million, but theres a huge variety on that number.”
