Scrap stupid bus service
How on earth did this happen? Greater Wellington Regional Council has replaced an excellent bus service that made Wellingtonians the highest users of public transport in the country with a new system that has left most bus users frustrated and angry.
A recent online survey revealed 80 per cent of Wellingtonians now think they have a worse bus service. Thirty per cent are resorting to taking the car. Uber rides are up 40 per cent. All this is at a time when cities worldwide are prioritising fast, clean, efficient public transport.
How did our council get it so terribly wrong? First, it prematurely pensioned off the city’s quiet, emission-free trolley buses in favour of noisy dirty diesels.
Next, it replaced many regular, direct bus services with a peculiar system of ‘‘hubs’’. In Miramar North, for example, it used to be possible throughout the day to take a No 2 bus straight to town through the bus tunnel. Students wanting to go to Massey or Victoria University and people going to Wellington Hospital could take the No 18 ‘‘Campus Connection’’ through Newtown.
Today, outside peak hours, Miramarians must take a bus to a ‘‘hub’’, a converted shipping container. Here they wait for a second bus. If they’re lucky, this will be going to the city. If they’re not, it will transport them to another ‘‘hub’’, in Kilbirnie, and another wait. If they’re trying to get to the hospital or university, they may have to make yet another change.
This is not just ridiculous but has serious implications. Many people using non-peak buses are elderly. Others are parents with young children.
Last week Metlink’s journey planner advised me a trip from Miramar North to the hospital would take 40 minutes. Previously it took about 15. The council’s website describes this as making ‘‘taking the bus around Wellington easier and more convenient’’.
Many people travelling to and from the hospital are frail and unwell. On a recent evening I walked through driving rain from the Aquatic Centre to the Kilbirnie hub, which was fully exposed to the southerly. An elderly man was huddling, shivering, in a corner. I asked him where he was heading and why he wasn’t wearing a coat. He told me he’d been discharged from Wellington Hospital a few hours earlier. He had waited in vain at the bus stop. Nothing came. He then walked 2.5 kilometres over the hill to Kilbirnie. When he finally reached the Miramar hub he would have to walk another kilometre to his house. I phoned my husband, he drove to the stop and we took the man home.
Life-and-death situations like this will become more frequent. And this is just the start of the mess. For some unfathomable reason, bus stops once close to shops have been relocated to sites across busy roads.
And many new bus routes make no sense. The No 2, for example, now runs from Seatoun, population 3500. The population of Miramar, with no direct off-peak service, is 10,000.
Clearly, whoever dreamed up this new system was never a regular bus user in Wellington. Sure, the old set-up wasn’t perfect. Some places were under-served. Others had too few buses on weekends. More night-time services were needed. But overall the system worked just fine.
We now have a catastrophe of Kafkaesque proportions. The regional council may comfort itself that what’s happening is ‘‘teething pains’’. It may think bus users will get used to chaos, confusion and inconvenience, come to enjoy 37-minute bus trips that once took 15, cease complaining when the Metlink planner instructs them to walk 28 minutes to catch a bus where it once took eight.
They are wrong. This new system must be scrapped. It will never work because it is stupid. And no amount of PR spin will change that.