Name: The city with a hundred private cable cars
Uploaded: 2026-03-28T16:45:27.000Z
Duration: 4 min 19 s
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Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, is a city built on steep hills.

Adverbs of manner

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.

The majority of those have been in Wellington because that's their 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 800 kg, 10 passengers, up to 200 m in length.

And some of them go on almost vertical cliff faces.

A typical small residential cable car would carry two people, might run 15, 20 m.

It'd be ideal for a retired couple or just to get access to their home.

We still get a lot of enquiries for new cable cars.

A common enquiry 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.

but if you've got, like, a 30 or a 40-degree gradient hill, it's not practical for people to walk up 40 or 50 m up a gradient like that.

So that's where the cable car comes into its own.

and that's one of our challenges: to meet the very high requirements for safety without making them unaffordable.

A small installation is probably starting at around $200,000 New Zealand dollars these days.

So if you've got to regularly lug bags of shopping or anything else heavy up 20 m 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.

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 was 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.

Like, as a young, fairly quite fit person, I was a bit like, "Oh, OK.

I guess I just have this annual expense now." But it is, like, 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 an 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 that 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 on hillsides and sites that wouldn't otherwise be able to be built on.

So we're building a product that's got a human element to it.

I guess that's why I've been doing it for so long and still enjoy it.