Buses vanishing from schedules raises questions

Auckland public transport users are being left stranded at bus stops after scheduled buses seemingly vanish from electronic timetables.

Auckland Transport (AT) has about 840 electronic signs across the city’s transport network, 740 of which are at bus stops.

Known as real time boards, these electronic signs tell users bus numbers, destination, when a bus is scheduled to arrive and when a bus is due. This information is also available on AT’S mobile app.

Public transport user Annette Huang said she sometimes found her plans in ‘‘disarray’’ after scheduled buses disappeared from the real time board.

‘‘It happens enough for it to be a nuisance,’’ Huang said.

Every Wednesday, the St Heliers resident meets with a group of five to 13 people. Together, they take public transport and go on outings around Auckland.

On one trip, the group were waiting in Glen Innes for the 007 bus to Pt Chevalier. The bus stop

‘‘I wish there was more information on the real time board and it told us when buses were actually cancelled.’’ Annette Huang

had a real time board.

‘‘We were waiting and all of a sudden, it wasn’t there,’’ Huang said.

‘‘It messed up our plans for the day.

‘‘I wish there was more information on the real time board and it told us when buses were actually cancelled,’’ she said.

AT media relations manager Mark Hannan said the real time system was configured to display scheduled bus services on the electronic boards, based on timetable information.

‘‘Therefore, the information displayed is as accurate as the scheduled timetable for any given bus service,’’ Hannan said.

Some scheduled buses disappeared from real time boards because there were some issues with the current system, he said.

If a particular service did not run, it had to be manually removed from the schedule to ensure it was not displayed on the real time boards, Hannan said.

‘‘If this does not occur, the specific service will continue to appear on the real time boards because the system still believes it is operating.

It will ‘‘disappear’’ from the real time board at a particular bus stop once the scheduled arrival time passes.’’

MANDY TE/STUFF St Heliers residents Annette and Eddie Huang often go on bus trips around Auckland but sometimes their plans are put out by buses that never show.