Utility companies that use Wellington city's trolley bus overhead infrastructure have yet to receive any information about future use when the Greater Wellington Regional Council discontinues trolley bus services in 2017.
The trolley bus service, which is owned by GWRC, will be replaced with hybrid diesel-electric buses.
CityLink, Wellington Electricity, Vodafone and Vector all use the infrastructure, which is owned separately to the buses, by Wellington Cable Car Ltd, owned in turn by the Wellington City Council.
“What happens to the lines is a separate consideration,” says CityLink chief executive Nick Willis. “They may not disappear at the same time.
“It may be that some of the poles get purchased by the utilities or we could take the opportunity to go underground.”
Willis says that when CityLink goes underground it doesn't remove existing fibre from the poles.
There has been no discussion yet about what happens to the poles, he says.
“Wellington Cable Car Ltd knows as much as I do, and that's only from reading the [news]paper.”