There’s a bright red cable car that runs up and down Victoria Mountain in Wellington New Zealand. Its so adorable, its easy to dismiss it as tourist kitsch. But this icon of the city has a history because this is the little train that could.

It could create living space out of the sharp cliffs surrounding the narrow harbor front of New Zealand’s capital city by providing  easy and direct transport up the side of steep terrain.  It could feed the imagination of city planners who one hundred and fifty years ago set aside a large chunk of land for a botanical garden and footpath that would enhance the quality of life for Wellingtonians then and now.

The Wellington cable car was the bright idea of the Upland Estate Company, which back in 1898 made what must have seemed at the time to be a ludicrous proposal to sell housing tracts four hundred feet above the city center.  Four years later when the line opened in 1902, it was an instant success, or so I learned when I spent a delightful morning at the Cable Car Museum, conveniently located at the cable car terminus.

Over the past 110 years  the Wellington community has spread out along the ridge, appropriately named Upland Road. An employee at the museum encouraged me to take the 10 minute walk to see the shops and cafes of Kelburn Village, one of the towns that owes its existence to the cable car.

Kelburn Village on Upland Road

The view along the road is spectacular in all directions. To the east is Wellington harbor and to the west a lush valley ends at the Polhil Reserve.  Many of the people who live along the ridge have built their own little cable cars to get themselves up and down the mountain. Some are little more than open metal boxes – others are quite deluxe. Its not too much of a stretch to imagine that the men behind the original cable car might be surprised that their engineering marvel has become an ordinary accoutrement of suburban living.

The view from Upland Road

As enchanted as I was with the cheery red cable car, I decided not to ride it back into town, so that I could walk through the Botanic Garden which  starts at the Cable Car Museum and descends into the city center.  The garden began more than fifty years before the cable car started up. Its quite large allowing time to transition from one exhibit to another. Several large sculptures accent the walk.

I especially enjoyed the camellias, the fragrant garden (yes, it really does smell!) and the trees which were well-labeled so that out-of-towners like me can know at a glance which trees are indigenous and which are imported.

As I sat in the cafe having a late lunch and watching the birds eating the crumbs off another diner’s plate, I thought about the juxtaposition between progress and nature. It strikes me that here in Wellington, they’ve got the balance right. While celebrating the fact that transportation can turn an inhospitable area into a community, planners haven’t lost sight of the need to set aside space to encourage transport of the self-propelled kind.

Christine Negroni

Author of The New York Times bestseller, The Crash Detectives, I am also a journalist, public speaker and broadcaster specializing in aviation and travel.