About
A public record of the work already done.
Since 2002, councils, government agencies and community groups have produced a large body of work on how Queenstown and the Whakatipu should move. It includes transport strategies, spatial plans, masterplans, programme, indicative and detailed business cases, technical studies, modelling and design reports. The Queenstown public have collectively invested tens of millions of dollars in this work.
Much of it is hard to find. It is spread across agency websites, council agenda packs, business-case appendices and official information releases, and few people have seen it side by side. Move Queenstown brings it together in one place. It now holds 240 documents from 2002 to 2026, from 63 organisations, including 39 business cases and business-case volumes.
Why now
In July 2026, Mayor John Glover established the Mayoral Transport Taskforce to identify practical actions to keep Queenstown moving. His announcement pointed to modelling showing that even if every currently identified intervention is delivered, Queenstown's network still fails, and that continuing to plan within the existing framework is not enough. "We must act now, implement faster and think differently," he said.
The Taskforce, councillors and agencies are being asked to make decisions that will shape the district for decades. Thinking differently should start from what has already been studied, recommended and funded, not from a blank page.
What this site is for
Queenstown's transport future is debated in council chambers, in the media, on social media and around kitchen tables. When the original documents are hard to find, it becomes easy for claims about what has or hasn't been studied, recommended or funded to go unchecked. That creates confusion, and it leaves room for misinformation.
Move Queenstown exists to close that gap. Its purpose is to:
- Put the original sources in public hands. Every document, and the published data behind the dashboard, is available in full, so anyone can draw their own conclusions from the source rather than from someone else's account of it.
- Make it easy to fact-check. When you read, see or hear a claim about Queenstown transport, whether in a news story, a social media post, a public meeting or a submission, you can check it against what the documents actually say. The summaries give page references for that purpose.
- Inform decision makers. Give the Taskforce, councillors, officials and agency boards quick access to the evidence base behind Queenstown's transport choices.
- Support informed, high-quality debate. Help the community debate the options on a shared and accurate foundation of facts.
- Make past work count. Make sure work the public has already paid for is used, and not repeated or forgotten.
The site does not rank options or recommend a solution. It reports what each document says and links to the original, so readers can check the source for themselves.
Who compiled it
Move Queenstown is a public collection of information compiled by Ross Copland while researching and developing the Queenstown Cable Car project. Ross is Chief Executive of Southern Infrastructure Ltd, developer of the Queenstown Cable Car, and a member of the Mayoral Transport Taskforce. Given the immense public interest in solving Queenstown's transport issues, Ross wanted the public, researchers, engineers, councillors and policy makers to be able to find this information easily, in one place.
This site was built with the help of Southern Infrastructure.
Move Queenstown is an independent site. It is not produced by or on behalf of Queenstown Lakes District Council or the Mayoral Transport Taskforce.
Ross is a long-term Queenstown resident with a passion for infrastructure. He is a former Ski Area Manager for Coronet Peak, and was inaugural Chief Executive of the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, leading the development of the New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy. He is a Fellow of Engineering New Zealand and a co-founder of Engineers Without Borders New Zealand.
Who it is for
Taskforce members, councillors, council and agency staff, researchers, journalists and residents: anyone who wants to understand the evidence behind Queenstown's transport decisions.
What gets published
Only published public documents appear here. A document’s status (draft, final, superseded) describes the document itself; drafts that were publicly released are included and labelled as drafts.
Mass rapid transit
Mass rapid transit (MRT) means light rail, gondola/cable car, bus rapid transit and similar dedicated rapid-transit technologies. It does not include ordinary bus services or ferries.
Catalogue entries use that meaning. A document can discuss buses or ferries at length and still have no mass rapid transit reference. Where a study uses its own words, including “gondola”, those words are kept in quotations, figure legends, extracted references and page citations.
What this site is not
It is not a Queenstown Lakes District Council website, not a statutory document, and not advice to a decision-maker. Where a page links to a file, that file is the record. The page around it is a catalogue entry.
Where the files live
Each document is stored as a copy on this site so the link keeps working. The original publisher’s address is shown where one exists.
Glossary
Way to Go — the partnership of NZTA, QLDC and ORC that commissioned the 2020 Queenstown business cases.
Document status
Status describes the document itself. It is separate from the decision to publish a copy here.
- Final
- Issued as a final version.
- Adopted
- Adopted by the organisation that owns it.
- Draft
- A draft, consultation issue or working version. Draft is a fact about the document, not the publication decision.
- Not stated
- The document does not say whether it is a draft, a final issue, or an adopted version.
- Recorded
- Published or released, but the document is not marked as a draft, a final issue, or an adopted version.
- Superseded
- Replaced by a later document.