The following was submitted by a resident in the Raumati area by sending his writing to the funny looking email address found below and you are encouraged to do the same so it can be posted here too...

People who use trains get to their station in many ways but when you see these numbers below I think you'll know why there are not many people walking from Raumati to the the train even though the train runs past their community. I used a handy feature on Google maps to start to sort out why. The feature estimates how long it would take an average person to walk between two points selected on a map. So I took the walking times between several sets of stations to show how unfair Raumati has it when it comes to accessing a station if one chooses to walk. When the planners spread out the stops for the stations they placed them at certain distances apart and here are the walking times that resulted. Between Muri Station and Pukerua Bay Station would be about 14 minutes, between Plimmerton Station and Mana Station about 18 minutes, between Linden Station and Tawa Station about 15 minutes, Tawa Station and North Redwood Station about 7 minutes...but for the walking time between a proposed Raumati Station to the nearest station (Paraparaumu) along a populated community that continues to grow? ...30 minutes. Hardly sounds like we're asking for something unreasonable, does it?

Jeremy

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