- Wellington, the capital of New Zealand,
is a city built on steep hills.
If you're a tourist, you will probably stop by
the Wellington Cable Car at some point,
which will pull you up from the main shopping street
to the Botanic Gardens.
But if you're local, there are more than a hundred
other cable cars in the city
and they are definitely not for tourists.
- I purchased this house at the end of 2020,
and we were just looking for a house.
We weren't looking for a cable car house.
But this house just came with a cable car!
And we found out that the previous owner
had some mobility issues, and that's why she installed it.
And I've been living in this cable car house
for about two years.
- Access Automation has installed approximately
300 cable cars around New Zealand.
Majority of those will be in Wellington 'cause that's our base,
but we also do installations all around New Zealand
and all around the Asia-Pacific for that matter.
They've got lots of different names,
hillside lift, incline lift,
probably a more accurate description.
The Australians call them inclinators, which is a pretty cool name.
- This isn't just about laziness
or having something swish to raise your property prices.
There are quite a few houses in this city
that are up on hills and only accessible
by long flights of stairs or twisting, winding pathways,
tucked behind other buildings with no direct road.
There are even some cable cars
that give access to several different houses along one track.
- Our larger cable cars are for commercial installations,
for hotels and resorts.
We're looking at 800kg, 10 passengers,
up to 200 meters in length.
And some of them go on almost vertical cliff faces.
They're really spectacular.
A typical small residential cable car would carry two people,
might run 15-20 meters,
be ideal for a retired couple or just to get access to the home.
We still get a lot of inquiries for new cable cars.
A common inquiry is for people wanting to develop
the back of their section.
In the old days, they would tend to build the houses
close to the access point to the road,
but with the cable car, it gives the option
of opening up rear sections.
There's road access to the front lot,
but if you've got a 30 or 40° gradient hill,
it's not practical for people to walk up
40 or 50 meters up a gradient like that.
So that's where the cable car comes into its own.
The bar for safety's always going up.
And that's one of our challenges,
is to meet the very high requirements for safety
without making them unaffordable.
A small installation, you'd probably be starting around
200,000 New Zealand dollars these days.
There's significant investment.
- So if you've got to regularly lug bags of shopping
or anything else heavy up 20 meters of stairs,
or if you're older and worrying that mobility issues
might mean you have to leave your home,
and you've got the money to install one of these,
it is actually a reasonable approach.
But cable cars like this aren't cheap.
And like any other elevator,
they have to be regularly inspected and certified.
- Yeah, it was interesting moving in and, never having owned a house before,
and suddenly the house needs a warrant of fitness?
Which is something that I'd never thought about!
It's something I've only associated with cars in the past.
- So cable cars are covered by the Building Act.
They're actually considered to be buildings.
They require an annual warrant of fitness,
and our company is registered as an independent qualified party
to be able to inspect the cable cars.
- These cable cars are the same as elevators
in any other block of apartments.
Just open to the elements,
and not quite vertical.
- I think it's worth it if you're older.
Like as a young, fairly, quite fit person,
I was a bit like, "Oh, okay,
"I guess I just have this annual expense now!"
But it is fun for parties,
and everyone loves the cable car
and it is great when you're moving house.
- I started Access Automation pretty much 30 years ago.
And so we've been designing and building them
and maintaining them for that long.
It's been absolutely fabulous experience,
but I sort of feel like it's time to pass the baton on now.
That's something that requires new blood to really let it flourish.
It needs to be taken beyond what I can do.
I guess the most satisfying part of this job
is the fact that we're doing something that helps people.
We allow elderly people to stay in their homes longer.
At the other end of the scale,
young professional couples, we allow them
to develop properties made on hillsides and sites
that wouldn't otherwise be able to be built on.
So we're building a product
that it's got a human element to it.
I guess that's why I've been doing it for so long
and still enjoy it.