Commuters waiting at a bus stop on Lambton Quay, Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Commuters waiting at a bus stop on Lambton Quay, Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by Georgina Campbell
Georgina Campbell is a Wellington-based reporter who has a particular interest in local government, transport, and seismic issues. She joined the Herald in 2019 after working as a broadcast journalist.
You know there's something wrong with our public transport network when a bus driver waits with you at a stop late at night because the service was cut short.
The endless late and cancelled buses in Wellington in recent weeks have made me want to drive my car towork instead.
The frustration has really got to me.
I've had to warn my colleagues as I walk through the door (late again) that I'm in a foul mood and it's probably best not to talk to me until after I've had a cup of tea.
Between showering, brushing my teeth, and swishing on some mascara each morning, I now refresh the Metlink alerts page to see whether the express bus into the city has been cancelled.
It almost certainly is cancelled and the service may as well not exist.
Once the express bus did show up on the real time information board at night when I was trying to get home from town. I waited in the blistering cold only for the service to vanish from the board and disappear into the abyss.
I then had to hoof it to a different bus stop to try and catch another bus home. It was the week wild weather slammed Wellington and grounded flights, flooded streets, and even ripped part of a wing mirror off a car.
There were several weather watches and warnings across the region, including heavy swells, severe rain, strong wind, and snowfall.
— Georgina Campbell (@GeorgeKCampbell) July 19, 2022
The following week I arrived at the bus stop after work only to find a strangely labelled Number 2 bus to Kilbirnie pull up.
It was strange because the Number 2 bus usually goes all the way to Seatoun or Miramar.
The driver explained this bus was actually the Number 12 bus, but it wasn't going all the way to Strathmore Park, it was only going to Kilbirnie, so it was labelled as a Number 2 instead.
I decided to take my chances and at least get some of the way home.
When we arrived at Kilbirnie there was hardly anyone about and it was after 9pm at night.
The driver gave me a slightly worried glance and asked where I was actually trying to get to.
I told him I would be fine as another bus was arriving in a few minutes that would get me all the way home.
We struck up a conversation and he kept me company until the bus arrived.
One thing was clear to me following our chat - the problems with the bus network go a lot deeper than cancellations due to Covid-19 and winter illness.
Catching the bus has become the stuff of nightmares. Photo / Michael Craig
When I think about it, the bus network has been hobbling along with relentless driver shortages for years.
Currently Metlink in Wellington is 120 drivers short- a number which has doubled since last year. In Auckland, the driver shortage is sitting at about 400.
Thousands of services have been cancelled across both cities in recent weeks.
Auckland Council has decided to fund an immediate 8 per cent rise in wages for its drivers and discussions are under way with the NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi for a further $8m.
The pay hike takes the hourly rate for bus drivers from an average of $23.71 to $25.62. The other increase in the pipeline will take it to about $27.
In Wellington the hourly base rate is $27 per, but operators offer varying additional penal rates for things like overtime.
Drivers are the backbone of the city's public transport network, yet it appears the job is less attractive than before.
It's not an ideal time for public transport to be so unreliable just as the Government has extended half price fares until the end of January in response to the cost of living crisis.
Public transport is much cheaper than driving a car to work, which makes it an attractive option when budgets are so squeezed (not to mention it's much better for the climate too).
That becomes irrelevant if you can't rely on the bus to show up on time, if at all.
The other day my colleague wondered how the capital's $7.4 billion transport project Let's Get Wellington Moving (LGWM) was going to find additional drivers for its new network.
If only LGWM was at the stage of having to worry about drivers, alas, not even the detailed design for the actual public transport routes has been figured out.
My colleague has a point though.
The country is forking out billions of dollars for grand public transport plans, which are crucial to reducing congestion and meeting emission reduction targets.
But all that flash new infrastructure means nothing if there aren't any drivers.
• Senior Wellington journalist Georgina Campbell's fortnightly column looks closely at issues in the capital.
