Choked roads, private plans: The race to solve Queenstown's traffic woes

Saturday, 6 June 2026

An artist’s impression of the Whoosh pod system above Central St in Frankton.

By early morning each day, Frankton Rd in Queenstown stops behaving like a road and starts behaving like a queue.

Airport shuttles, rental cars, buses, tradies’ utes, hotel vans and commuters edge along the strip between Queenstown and Frankton, hemmed in by lake on one side and hill on the other.

The road has become the visible failure point in Queenstown’s growth model. The resort keeps adding residents, visitors, flights, hotel rooms and suburbs, but its main corridors cannot be stretched in the same way.

Local councils know this - more than 2000 pages have been written about the problem. Their latest transport business case backed better buses and ferries, supported by service upgrades, hubs and network changes, while saying an off-the-ground option such as a gondola should be investigated.

Two private groups are offering solutions of their own, driven by a sense of urgency, and a belief that Queenstown needs more than conventional public transport upgrades.

Southern Infrastructure wants its cable car to become Queenstown’s public transport spine. Its proposal has been referred to the Government’s fast-track process, and the company has already lined up suppliers and a preferred contractor for the airport-to-town line. It also updated its plan to include about 1400 park-and-ride spaces across the edges of the proposed network, including in the town centre.

It argues the bus-first pathway has been overtaken by growth, cost increases and delays, and says a $400 million cable car could be operating by 2029 — a faster response to what it describes as a much larger long-term economic cost if congestion keeps worsening.

Whoosh, a Christchurch-developed pod system, is being supported by a consortium of Queenstown businesses as a more distributed network that could run above Frankton Road and serve stops every few hundred metres.

Instead of cabins hanging from a moving cable, Whoosh uses small electric pods running on an elevated track of cable and rail. Passengers would use an app or ticket machine to call or book a pod. Its plan is still in the early stages and a feasibility study is being worked on.

The cable car would use 10-person cabins and claims capacity of up to 3000 passengers an hour in each direction between major stops. Whoosh would use smaller pods for four to five people, aimed at shorter local trips along the corridor itself.

But the decision Queenstown faces is not simply cable car versus pods. It is whether either privately led proposal could become part of the public transport network, and what public test should apply before that happens.

The map above highlights an initial vision of the core phases for a Whoosh network in the Queenstown region.

University of Canterbury transport geography professor Simon Kingham said private-sector involvement was not necessarily a bad thing.

Commercial groups bringing ideas to the table showed innovation and a willingness to tackle a real problem, he said. But Queenstown still needed a clear public framework for deciding what served the wider region.

“It needs someone to say what’s actually in the best interest of the region.”

Kingham said the issue was bigger than congestion on one road. Queenstown’s transport choices had to be linked to decisions about growth, housing, visitor management, density and where people needed to travel.

“It is about where you are wanting people to live, how you want visitors to come and visit, how you want to manage visitors.”

If public money was involved, he said, the need for an integrated plan became even clearer.

“If we’re putting public money in, then you need a really clear plan of how this all fits together as a coherent transport plan.”

The Whoosh consortium says Queenstown’s problem is too varied for one answer.

An artist’s impression of Southern Infrastructure’s proposed Queenstown Cable Car, showing passengers boarding near a station above the road corridor.

Matthew Day, chief operating officer of Remarkables Park and spokesman for the group, said the district was not a normal city with a grid of alternative routes. It was “a collection of villages connected by these long narrow roads”.

“If there’s congestion or a blockage, then the whole thing stops,” he said.

The group of Queenstown businesses has come together in the past few weeks to work with Whoosh to do a feasibility study and consenting pathway, not a construction commitment. Other members include NZSki, Skyline, Queenstown Airport, Technology Queenstown and Queenstown Resort College.

Day said Whoosh was being studied as a “local first” transport option, but one that would also serve visitors.

“It’s not either locals or tourists, it’s absolutely both.”

He said the system could serve places a standard gondola could not, including Frankton Road itself.

“It’s not either or, it’s and, and, and,” he said.

Southern Infrastructure founder Ross Copland said Whoosh and the cable car would serve “a complementary but fundamentally different transport need”.

He said gondolas were suited to connecting busy transport hubs, while Whoosh offered flexibility to “wind along existing roads” and distribute passengers to places that would not make financial sense for gondola technology.

There would be overlap, he said, but Queenstown’s growth meant “all solutions will likely be required” to stop the town grinding to a halt as transport demand doubled again.

Southern Infrastructure expected the cable car to be contracted like other public transport services, operating alongside buses and ferries under Otago Regional Council (ORC) branding.

But Copland confirmed no council or Crown agency had yet given written support for public funding. He said the project would participate in the Regional Land Transport Plan process, with funding decisions to be made by ORC and the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA).

Otago Regional councillor Matt Hollyer, who holds the transport portfolio, said Queenstown needed to consider unconventional answers, including ferries, cableways, gondolas and Whoosh.

But he said the test was not whether an idea looked promising in isolation.

“The challenge is obviously what solution is actually going to work,” Hollyer said.

The proposed Southern Infrastructure cable car network, showing an airport-to-town centre line through Frankton, Lake Johnson and Queenstown Hill, and a second line from Frankton towards Ladies Mile via Quail Rise and Lower Shotover.

That meant understanding the full network around each proposal, not just the cable car or pod infrastructure itself. Park-and-ride sites, feeder buses, changes to existing bus routes, operating costs and the final leg of people’s journeys all mattered.

“No-one’s actually turning up here or moving around wanting to get to the end of a cable car,” he said. “They’re wanting to go to the next point.”

Hollyer said ORC would also need clarity from NZTA on whether it would fund any cableway or pod system as part of the public transport network.

He said the ratepayer would remain part of the equation, regardless of how a project was promoted or financed.

“Regardless of whatever proposal goes on … the ratepayer is going to be sort of in the background having to sustain it.”

The funding question is where things get complicated.

Southern Infrastructure says its cable car network would cost about $400 million. It has been referred into the fast-track process, suppliers have been selected, and Naylor Love has been named as preferred contractor for civil and building works on the airport-to-town line.

An artist’s impression of what a Whoosh transport station would look like.

But fast-track approval would not decide who pays.

The company has described the cable car as public transport infrastructure. Its own material points to a possible mix of fares, congestion charging, targeted rates or value capture, visitor charges, International Visitor Levy funding and Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act mechanisms.

That means the project will be judged as a public venture. If public funding tools, public land or public transport integration are needed, councils, NZTA and ratepayers all have a stake in the decision.

NZTA’s position is key because it is one of the agencies that would determine whether the cable car can be treated as public transport eligible for national land transport funding, rather than simply a privately promoted transport project.

Whoosh remains at feasibility stage, with no cost estimate or construction funding package released. Day said the consortium hoped to release more detail in the next few months.

That leaves the central question - who decides?

Not just who consents the projects, or who invests in them, but who decides what Queenstown’s public transport network is meant to become.

A fast-track panel could consider the cable car’s approvals. The Queenstown Lakes District Council (QLDC) could decide questions about local roads, land use and public land. ORC would have to decide whether either system belonged in the public transport network. NZTA would have to decide whether there was a funding pathway. Investors would decide whether the numbers stacked up.

Kingham said the decision needed to sit within a wider public plan, not emerge from separate private proposals.

Day said the Whoosh consortium expected any proposal to go through formal planning processes, but believed the wider community would ultimately decide whether it had support.

“No-one wants to do anything in Queenstown that the broader community doesn’t support,” he said.

Copland said ORC, NZTA and QLDC should make decisions about public transport infrastructure, but argued their own business cases had already shown Queenstown needed a cable-car-type solution.

“Their work and the conclusions drawn is why Southern Infrastructure advanced this project from planning into delivery.”

He said the remaining decisions related to design, land use, consent conditions, the commercial model, hours of operation and ticket pricing, with public participation still part of the process.

Hollyer said ORC was open to unconventional options, but needed the full picture first: the infrastructure, the operating costs, the funding, the feeder services and the community view.

“We’ve got to engage with our community. We’re there to represent the interests of the residents.”