Blind man halts buses in protest
A blind man is out to stop rule-breaking Wellington bus drivers after experiencing six near misses in the past two years.
Wesley Gyles-Bedford, 32, has been 90 per cent blind from birth, and is sick of bus drivers racing the lights and parking over pedestrian crossings.
People with disabilities should be safe at crossings when the green man was flashing, he said. ‘‘Between these lines is our safe zone.’’
Gyles-Bedford last week witnessed an Airport Flyer bus stop too late at the intersection of Boulcott St, Manners St, and Lambton Quay, partially blocking the crossing. He stood in front of the bus for five minutes while he called in a complaint to police, halting traffic.
‘‘I am getting tired of bus drivers driving off before I get their details,’’ he said.
Four buses were held up while he made the call, and a few pedestrians approached him, some even trying to move him out of the way, to which he held up his free hand and told them: ‘‘It is justified.’’
‘‘Nobody ever wants to help,’’ GylesBedford later said.
When approached for comment, NZ Bus, which operates the Airport Flyer, referred Stuff to Metlink.
Metlink said it was aware of several complaints from Gyles-Bedford relating to a variety of services and operators.
Gyles-Bedford said that on other occasions he had had near-misses as buses raced the lights and counted on pedestrians to see them coming to make it through unscathed.
His limited vision makes that impossible. ‘‘If a bus comes around the corner too fast, I don’t see it til the last minute,’’ he said.
‘‘It is dangerous. It is not on.’’ Gyles-Bedford said he wanted painted road markings pushed back to give pedestrians more space at crossings and disciplinary action taken when drivers broke the road rules.
The most dangerous intersections were those at Boulcott and Willis streets in the city centre, Rintoul and Riddiford streets in Newtown, and the length of the central city’s golden mile, he said.
Often buses would be going too fast to stop despite the pedestrians getting the green light.
‘‘The lights do change said.
When he worked at McDonald’s in Manners St, he heard local sales people describe the road as ‘‘the bowling alley’’.
Bike racks on the fronts of buses also often encroached on crossings, posing a risk to visually impaired people, he said.
Gyles-Bedford said he wanted more care and patience from drivers. ‘‘There is quickly,’’ he so much more drivers can do,’’ he said.
Blind Low Vision NZ access awareness adviser Chris Orr said the challenges Gyles-Bedford faced would sound familiar to many people who were blind or had low vision, throughout the country.
People with vision impairments were ‘‘reliant on many other environmental factors which we can’t always control – like the actions of bus drivers’’, he said.
‘‘There are solutions though, and we work closely with some territorial local authorities to help make public spaces and transport more accessible for people who are blind or low vision to use them confidently and independently.’’
Solutions could be better environmental design and bus driver education, and the organisation had been involved in the preparation of a training programme for bus drivers around the needs of people with disabilities.
A Metlink spokesperson said all complaints about their services were logged, investigated and relayed to operators for action, and they received input from disability groups to inform their services.
There was a spike in complaints from bus users at the time the network changed in 2018 but, according to a recent Metlink report, numbers were returning to prechange levels. Metlink received 4870 complaints between July and November last year, down 59.8 per cent from last year’s total of 12,113 for the same period.
‘‘We encourage all customers to call Metlink whenever they experience issues on the region’s network – this helps us make improvements.’’