I know it's called anecdotal evidence - but the following cases are, I think, quite representative. Anyway, I will start with the inter-city transport.
Trains
New Zealand has trains - but it's only an overpriced crap for tourists. Seriously, who would want to pay at least 160 NZD to get from Wellington to Auckland in 12 hours?
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| Yes, this historic piece of wheezing, debilitated equipment was supposed to pull us all the way. Never mind most of the track is electrified. Luckily, there are only 6 carriages to roll. |
That was an almost-off-season price in early-to-mid 2013. Hey, winter's comin'! Let's bring the prices down to 130 bucks! And we'll cut the schedule to just three trains a week, each having basically just two carriages. Even then, it's more like half-empty than half-full.
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| Ok, that's two regular carriages, one first-class car, one luggage/generator car, a dining car and an open sightseeing car. |
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| That's the Raurimu Spiral, one of the most scenic parts of the journey. Huh? |
When I inquired about it, I was told - by a marketing representative of KiwiRail - that I would not miss anything, since a part of the stretch in question is just a boring, 8 kilometres long tunnel. Hmm, so now the Southern Alps passage of the TranzAlpine(!) train is the most boring? What are the coastal plains and farms then, anyway?
Inter-city buses
If you get used to the fact that most populated places have only one bus connection a day... well, I can't really get used to it.
In New Zealand, it does not work as in the rest of the world. There is no bus station to come to, buy tickets and sit down to wait for the bus (the same applies to the long-distance "tourist" trains). You need to purchase everything beforehand, on the Internet, and only for one specific bus/train.
If you don't catch the bus on time (a real possibility, due to the abominable inner-city public transport), well... bad luck. Go on the internet and hope the next day's bus is not sold out.
You can't just wait and take a seat on the next bus, mostly because there's no next bus that day. And even if there is... you have to buy an expensive new ticket (provided the bus is not full) and cannot reuse the one originally bought on-line.
There are no "bus stations" and "departure boards" to speak of. It pretty much resembles the flight tickets business.
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| An intercity bus, appropriately called InterCity. |
Anyway, the prices make it worth, at least in comparison with trains. But is there anything good about New Zealand long-distance buses?
Hardly.
They - by "they", I mean nakedbus.com and Intercity - boast a "modern fleet". Really? No kiddin'? Last time I checked, your buses looked like 20-year-old second hand pieces from other countries, painted, or simply bannered, over (with some of the work already peeling off, showing the original color scheme).
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| Lovely modern fleet |
The prices are decent, from $5 (if you look for their promo fares, which are few and far between) to no more than 30 bucks for any given leg (from overnight ones to very short ones).
There are, however, some negative experiences to be had. First of all, the drivers do not seem to be aware of proper bus culture. They feel the need to act as sort of tour guides and keep talking. Because they are positively not tour guides, usually it is an awkward, nonsensical and utterly unnecessary exercise in rambling, being repeated over and over again.
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| And they like to tinker with their SatNav while driving... |
Not to mention their punctuality. If they start more than 20 minutes late, it's all good and no excuse is necessary, even though the bus arrived at the bus stop less than 5 minutes ahead of the expected departure. That usually happens at the starting point. Obviously, in such a case, the bus should be able to come in early enough as there's no delay to account for. And of course, there is always a lot of folk with quite a bit of baggage, with the driver being the only staff around to check the tickets and help load up the bags
Then in another city, where they are scheduled to have a half-an-hour break, they are eager to leave several minutes earlier than even they themselves specify to passengers. Without a few people on-board, of course.
Then in another city, where they are scheduled to have a half-an-hour break, they are eager to leave several minutes earlier than even they themselves specify to passengers. Without a few people on-board, of course.
And what about their famous "unscheduled" stops at petrol stations (aren't they supposed to fill up in advance? I'm talking here about a 4-6 hour journey).
Nothing is announced, the driver starts filling up the bus, some passengers sneak out to the toilet (toilets in New Zealand buses? Even if they are installed, they are prohibited from use) and the driver just speeds off without one of them! (happened to me)
Luckily I was able to hitch a ride and the guy was so nice that he ignored all speed limits in order to catch up with the bus. Still, I was one of several passengers to go to the toilet and was sitting right behind the driver! He apparently did not notice I was missing, even though the previous passenger returned to the bus about 20 seconds before me (you can't use one toilet at the same time, right?)
Luckily I was able to hitch a ride and the guy was so nice that he ignored all speed limits in order to catch up with the bus. Still, I was one of several passengers to go to the toilet and was sitting right behind the driver! He apparently did not notice I was missing, even though the previous passenger returned to the bus about 20 seconds before me (you can't use one toilet at the same time, right?)
Talking of bus stops... Usually it's something like "in front of a McDonald's". No bus station to sit in, much less buy tickets.
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| nakedbus.com "bus stop" in the New Zealand capital (Wellington). You can see the bored passengers waiting for a bus... |
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| nakedbus.com "bus stop" in the largest New Zealand city (Auckland). Not much better, you see... |
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Unusually comfortable kiwi bus stop in one of the larger cities - Hamilton.
There actually is a small proper bus station nearby. |
Air travel
You think I was lambasting New Zealand inter-city transport? Wait a minute...
Yes, you'll need to wait. Air travel in new Zealand is a-m-a-z-i-n-g, at least on the routes where JetStar operates. Thanks to the intense competition, you can get a flight ticket for $50, $40, $30, sometimes even $20 bucks! Christchurch-Auckland (beats the sh*t out of the ferry, which on its own costs 50 bucks), Wellington-Auckland and other major destinations, including Queenstown.
Of course, minor towns still served by Air New Zealand only have to pay $80-$200 for one-way tickets - and if they're not content they can use buses (albeit with at least one or two changes).
Public transport in Wellington
Finally, we're getting to the topic from the beginning of this rather long post. I had mentioned that Wellington had the best public transport in all of New Zealand, and that it didn't amount to much.
Well, the reality is even worse.
Wellington has the worst public transport in all of New Zealand, which, itself, has probably the worst public transport in the world (even counting the US).
Hmm, let's see... Auckland has got a one-day ticket that allows you to use all kinds of public transport (trains, buses, ferries and God knows what else... they even have a street-car!) You pay NZD 16 and the whole network is up for grabs. And I'm not sayin' it's cheap-o...
Christchurch... you buy one ticket (some $3.20 last time I checked? No, it's $3.50 ca$h now or $2.50 on MetroCard) and you can travel on it with 1 change, as long as you get on the next bus within two hours of your first ride. On MetroCard, you get unlimited number of changes within the two hour limit. That means you actually can go on a trip (e.g. a short hike to Port Hills) and return on the same ticket, for one reasonable price.
Similarly priced schemes operate in Rotorua, Nelson, Queenstown or Napier (and I'm not saying the prices are attractive!) But not in Wellington. You can't call it affordable, you can't even call the prices there acceptable!
For $10 you get a one-day bus ticket. But that doesn't even include the whole bus network! Only two bus companies participate (GO Wellington for the innermost city bus network and Valley Flyer for travel to the Hutt Valley). Now considering Wellington is a much-much smaller city than Auckland, paying $10 for a daily pass that does not include any trains, nor the ferry or even some of the suburban bus lines, is just outrageous!
Price of a single ticket? 5 dollars (on something similar to MetroCard it's $3.63) for the most common zone (inner Wellington), that is comparable with the Christchurch fare mentioned above. And you don't get no free transfers, no, sir.
Wellington trains, anyone? Even more expensive. In case of the Wairarapa connection, also constantly late (it's still running on diesel, you know...) No wonder, since most of the bridges are in a terrible state of repair (or should I say disrepair?) that most trains pass through them @ about 10 kph.
Also, if you buy a train monthly pass, you can use it only on the segment you buy it for! You can't use it for the whole line, let alone for other lines of the same operator. Buses included? Dream on... On top of it, the Wellington terminus is positioned so unfortunately, that to get further downtown you are forced to use buses, which adds extra cost. Even if you want to walk, it's a no go due to the infamous Wellington horizontal rain.
For this much money, do you actually get any service in Wellington? You wish! By the way, do you know what is the Guinness World Record for a city bus delay? Well, I'll leave that to later.
Let's go back to the trains: At some point in June or July 2013 MetLink (the public transport operator) decided to close a handy train station between Petone and Wellington - Kaiwharawhara. That'd be alright, but they still kept real-time train departure information for this station live.
So one sunny day in July I decided to go on a trip, and since it's Sunday, no frickin' buses leave Khandallah until like 9 o'clock. So I made my way down to the Kaiwharawhara station for a scheduled train (and I had double-checked its live estimated departure that morning).
How surprised I was to find that the station was closed to public, allegedly due to an unstable pedestrian bridge used to get to the platforms. No trains henceforth were stopping at the station, but apparently, the online tracking system was not updated. There was no concrete information given as to what would be done about the situation.
6 months later, in December the same year, the same note remained hanging from the same fence and the station, the only practical station to get from lower Khandallah early on weekend mornings, was still closed. The (allegedly dangerously unstable) bridge remained there without any work having been done to remove, strengthen or rebuild it. Two earthquakes had struck Wellington in the meantime, with no apparent ill effects. But no, the bridge is not strong enough to support pedestrians.
So I had to resort to intra-city hitch hiking to get to the "bus station" on time to catch my bus out of the city. Luckily, one of the countless warm-hearted kiwis took me on board.
Back to the public transport
In civilized countries, public buses usually depart no later (or no earlier) than 2 minutes within the scheduled time. Well, this holds true especially in Japan and German-influenced countries.
In Wellington?
One Sunday as I wanted to go downtown (from Kandallah) the bus was late 15 minutes. On the very next Sunday I arrived at the bus stop about 2-3 minutes ahead of the scheduled time. No dice. The next bus went after an hour.
Was the bus too early? Impossible! The starting point (and therefore checkpoint for the drivers) is just the previous stop (a minute or two away). So at the time I was walking to my bus stop, the bus should not have started yet from its beginning. Mind you, to get to my bus stop I walk along the route the bus takes on Sunday.
Maybe the bus did not go at all? Quite possible, read on...
Another case. I need to go downtown, this time it's weekday evening. Nothing's coming (I arrive at the bus stop five minutes before the scheduled departure). The way the bus lines are designed in Khandallah, you can take both directions to go downtown (it's sort of a loop). There is another bus supposed to go downtown in 20 minutes from the opposite bus stop. Nothing's coming there either.
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| A random GO Wellington bus picture... |
15 minutes further on another bus was supposed to go from the bus stop across the street. Again, nothing. Then, after further 5 minutes (so altogether 45 minutes after I arrived at the bus stop, with no bus in either direction) finally a bus arrives (surprisingly, this one appears to be on time) at the bus stop I was originally waiting at.
After about 7-8 minutes we meet a bus in the opposite direction (so when it comes to my bus stop, it will have accumulated an about 15-20 minute delay). Not to mention the two previous buses that never showed up.
I returned to the bus stop, the next bus was supposed to leave at 6:40 pm, it's 6:50 and there's nothing again! I'm calling MetLink hotline, complaining that the first bus didn't go and the second is still not here. The guy replies (somewhat surprised): The first one did not go? I know nothing about it, I have not received any e-mail complaint.
So the dispatchers will only know of a bus missing out when they receive an e-mail complaint from a passenger? But with their policies, prices and service, there are no passengers to speak of in the first place! (I often was the only person on the bus, which makes for quite a sizable private taxi, doesn't it?) And even if you write a complaint, is it going to make the bus appear magically out of thin air?
No. What's more, even if you lodge an official complaint, it is never followed. I was offered to file an official complaint through the hotline/website several times. I tried it three times, never ever to hear back from anyone again, despite countless promises to the contrary.
No. What's more, even if you lodge an official complaint, it is never followed. I was offered to file an official complaint through the hotline/website several times. I tried it three times, never ever to hear back from anyone again, despite countless promises to the contrary.
To make it more sarcastic, the guy says - the next bus is only three minutes away! That's just a teeny-weeny delay! (by that time it was altogether around 15 minutes) Was he being serious, sarcastic, or he just deliberately wanted to cheer me up?
Great! So a 15 minute delay is just "teeny-weeny" in Wellington. This delay grew to 20 minutes in the city centre, and, of course, I was late to work, even though I had originally arrived at the bus stop early enough to comfortably walk to work (about 6.5 km)!
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| This picture serves to divide the text and make the reading easier... |
This is the kind of delay where you don't know, whether the bus is too late or too early, because it's completely out of sync with the timetable (the buses usually go every 30 minutes). What the hell is the timetable then for?
Usually, buses to Khandallah leave every half-an-hour later in the evening (and there's no traffic jam whatsoever at those times). Every day, these buses are 10 to 20 minutes late (depending on how fast the driver is). Or is it 10-20 minutes early? On average, the delay is about 15 minutes. If the average delay is 15 minutes with a half-an-hour interval between the individual buses, are they too late or too early?
Even this delay is not reliable, because every once in a while, just to throw you off-balance, a bus would be just 5 minutes late (so no good coming to the bus stop 10 minutes after the scheduled departure). My heart is weeping.
Based on my year-long observation, 95% of buses in Wellington are between 4 minutes too early to 20 minutes too late. If you want a more encomapssing figure, then 98% buses are between 5 minutes early and 25 minutes late. That's about a 30 minute window - no fun waiting it out in notoriously bad Wellington weather. The remaining 2% are either even more late or don't go at all.
0-800-C-U-S-T-O-M-E-R---S-E-R-V-I-C-E
Now, MetLink maintains an 0800 hotline where they are supposed to tell you real-time departures instantly. But what's the use? It is not going to conjure the bus out of the blue.
One other day I wanted to take a ride on one express line to Miramar (part of my plan to take a ride on every single GO line, the operator of inner city Wellington buses). So I know the same troubles cripple other suburbs, not just Khandallah!
I was waiting for this bus at the Railway Station, where the line starts. This is one of the few bus stops that shows real-time departures live on an electronic board (similar systems are more widely employed across the world, including cities in less developed countries, such as Tbilisi, Bratislava, or my hometown). Especially the Tbilisi system is astonishing, since it works without a hitch, it's installed at virtually every bus stop, and the public transport system is way more complex than in Wellington, with much less public money spent on it.
So I am standing at the bus stop, and just to be on the safe side, I arrived about 15 minutes beforehand. The bus is supposed to leave at 2:30 pm (remember, it's the starting point). 13 minutes later (it's 2:28) and the board shows 2 minutes until departure. So far, so good.
But the same info remains on the board even @ 2:37 and I know something's fishy. The bus (with its line number) is nowhere to be seen, not even in the big parking lot.
2:38 and the information about the bus is gone from the board - but no bus ever appeared! Time to call the 0800 number. I report:
—The bus number 31 never arrived, and so did not start the trip in the first place!
And I ask:
—Where is it?
The lady at the other end says:
—That's not possible! I'll look up its real-time position and tell you where it is.
I wait a while and then she reports back incredulously:
—The bus is not in the system!
She then thinks a bit and tells me:
—Don't hang up, I'll find out where it is!
And she puts me on hold. I get to listen to the metlink mobile website address about 8 times a minute:
—Visit doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot em dot metlink dot org dot enzet! That's doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot em dot metlink dot org dot nz!!!
So many dots, so little point (pun well intended). I don't even have a smartphone! I consider myself lucky the announcer doesn't pronounce the whole address: age tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou... forget it.
After about 3-4 minutes of further listening to repetitive music and more of the same overly enthusiastic voice telling me how amazing MetLink is I give it up and end the call, even though the male voice keeps eagerly convincing me:
—Thank you for holding. Your call is very important to us!
I hang up on her. Or on him?
—The bus number 31 never arrived, and so did not start the trip in the first place!
And I ask:
—Where is it?
The lady at the other end says:
—That's not possible! I'll look up its real-time position and tell you where it is.
I wait a while and then she reports back incredulously:
—The bus is not in the system!
She then thinks a bit and tells me:
—Don't hang up, I'll find out where it is!
And she puts me on hold. I get to listen to the metlink mobile website address about 8 times a minute:
—Visit doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot em dot metlink dot org dot enzet! That's doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot em dot metlink dot org dot nz!!!
So many dots, so little point (pun well intended). I don't even have a smartphone! I consider myself lucky the announcer doesn't pronounce the whole address: age tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou... forget it.
After about 3-4 minutes of further listening to repetitive music and more of the same overly enthusiastic voice telling me how amazing MetLink is I give it up and end the call, even though the male voice keeps eagerly convincing me:
—Thank you for holding. Your call is very important to us!
I hang up on her. Or on him?
So I start to think about changing my plans (angered, of course, over the lost time) and taking another bus elsewhere at 3:00, when, suddenly, I glimpse my line number happily resting in the parking lot! By now it's quarter to three. Apparently it just turned its front info board on and it's in no hurry to move on. Another woman is rushing to that parked bus as well.
So I join her and together we knock on the bus door. The driver was, quite apparently, convinced he starts at 2:50 instead of 2:30 and he keeps telling us we got it wrong, until we force him to look up his own service timetable! Finally, at 2:48 the bus leaves from the railway station and of course I missed the next bus I had originally planned to change to.
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Let's go back to this real time departure information system. In 50% of the cases, it works. In the rest, it stinks. The system includes all bus operators within the Greater Wellington area (I think about 3 or 4 different companies). It works, unless...
Unless a bus doesn't show up. In that case, you can read: 2 min, or 1 min (to departure), or even DUE, but this information is posted sometimes for 8 or 10 minutes, and then it disappears without the bus ever showing up.
The problem is, on any given day about 40% of the buses do not show their real time info, instead, you can only see their scheduled departure, which, as discussed previously, is the most useless piece of information in the known universe.
Therefore, often it shows: Scheduled 18:27, and then DUE, and then it disappears (without the bus appearing) and you've got no idea at all whether the bus is late, early or won't come at all. It's the same information you can access on the website and the same information is also used by the 0800 operators, so you're none the wiser after calling the hotline.
Another problem with this monitoring is that sometimes the information just freezes there. I don't know what happens in the real life, but when you see the information - bus is scheduled to arrive in 8 minutes - posted for about 10 minutes, then I don't know what's wrong. A puncture? Aliens kidnapped the driver and subjected him to an anal probe? Only God knows...
In other cases, even though it shows the bus is supposed to arrive in 10 minutes, hardly 4 minutes pass by and voila, the bus is here. I guess the bus traveled so fast that the relativistic effects kicked in, the time flow in the bus (including the GPS unit) dilated, so the bus experienced 4 minutes while the rest of the universe happily existed 6 minutes longer.
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But in 2013 MetLink wanted to extend the system to trains. Now if you think that corruption effectively grinds procurement to a halt, think again. New Zealand society is (presumably) not corrupt, but when it comes to completing a project, there are few countries in the world that take longer than NZ.
To start with, a huge amount of promotional leaflets was distributed to say how big and difficult this project was and that it would be carried out in three phases:
1. Putting up the electronic info boards on most of the train stations. It's exactly the same board as on virtually every bus stop that is equipped with it and it's really small (only three lines of text). Why is this a phase on its own?
2. Turning on the system not for real time information, but only for scheduled times. This was presented as the easier part of the implementation with the target date being March 21st, 2013.
What? Are you f**king kidding me? A four-year-old kid can program that!
3. The final (and technically "extremely demanding") part was to turn the whole system on for real-time live information. The implementation of this phase was supposed to be finished by the end of September(!)
Seriously? The identical system is working in the buses and it must be much easier to fit the same GPS units into the trains than in the buses! (let alone to power them). The GPS units are used to monitor and relate the position of the bus to the central system. What's the problem to use the same system and the same supplier, order a few more pieces of the same unit and hook them up to the very same central system? How can it take further 6 months?!
Back to the delays
It's not just me. A colleague of mine had a similar experience with local public transport. Once he was waiting for a bus no. 3 It was supposed to be due long time ago when he sees one, but in the other direction! And then another one! He lives fairly close to the terminus, so are the buses there being eaten by a bad dragon, never to return?
A third in the opposite direction when he finally calls the 0800 line:
—Where is the bus no. 3 that should have been here ages ago?
—We can't localize any bus no. 3 in your direction through our GPS system,
comes the answer.
—But don't despair, for one will eventually show up!
I think the operators' training at this 0800 line includes The Art of Cheering Up the Upset Customers 3-month intensive course.
I guess by this time the theory of a giant fire-breathing, bus-eating beast began to take hold even in my otherwise-rationally-thinking friend.
Where's my bus?
I can't only bash! The drivers are really helpful. Sometimes, when I take the last bus (and I am the only one in it), some drivers take me all the way to my doorstep (even though it's hardly 200m from the bus stop). Though by doing so, they are essentially leaving out the last leg of their journey, and if there is someone waiting there for the bus to show up, well... then... bad luck (that's probably why buses so often never show up!)
Of course I am not endorsing this sort of behavior, even though it's very unlikely there is anyone wanting to get on that late at night for just a few stops. Unless... unless it's someone like me, with a monthly bus pass.
In a similar fashion, some drivers on the late evening Khandallah services often have few passengers and so sometimes they ask - is someone going to get off there and there? And if no-one replies, they simply bypass one loop in Khandallah to save about 5 minutes. They don't really care that someone might be waiting there to get on as they find it higly unlikely.
Well, with this attitude (and the aforementioned prices!), how can you expect people to rely on the public transport in New Zealand, and not buy a car?
Well, with this attitude (and the aforementioned prices!), how can you expect people to rely on the public transport in New Zealand, and not buy a car?
Is it all that bad?
The same colleague of mine had a very good experience with one of the drivers. He'd just missed his last bus and then took another, a random one and since he was fairly new in town he did not know where the bus was headed.
And so he asked. The driver patiently explained to him that he goes elsewhere (not where my friend lives) but added:
—Don't worry and just sit tight!
They couldn't catch the previous bus while sharing the route, so my friend wanted to get off at the next stop. The driver just firmly reiterated:
—Sit tight!
He finished his run all the way to the endpoint and lo and behold! asked my friend:
—Where exactly do you live?
So he told him, only to be replied:
—Though it's not on my way to the depot, I'll take you home!
Long live the drivers' magnanimity!!
So off they go, through the nightly Wellington, my friend really grateful, but alas! it's not the end yet. Suddenly, they encounter a traffic sign telling them the short but all-important tunnel to Northland is closed for maintenance tonight! It was still quite a bit of a walk home for my friend, but no, the driver would not have any of that:
—Sh*t! I forgot this tunnel is regularly closed for maintenance!
swears the driver, apparently aggrieved.
Pedal to the metal, violent honking, quite a few traffic cones scattered, and deathly fear in the faces of construction workers was all that was left after the bus had sped through the tunnel. And all that to deliver one unlucky passenger home.
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The GO drivers are, in general, quite helpful. And usually too polite, one should say, sometimes to their own fault. Some of them have an obnoxious habit of incessant thank-you-ing to every passenger getting off. I guess it's the next level of personal service, I already feel like in a limo taxi.
Often they help newcomers to town, who don't know where to go, where to get off or how to get to their destination. They tell them, they instruct them, they even get off and show the way, and they remind you to tag off. Sometimes it's too intrusive, as they often start a conversation with anyone sitting close to them who appears just to sit in the bus, enjoying the scenery, with no apparent bus stop to get off at.
Yeah, the buses are not terribly busy and often the drivers get bored, running around with an empty bus. I am not kidding, when I did all the routes, often I was the only passenger on board and really, I had no real business to be there in the first place, apart from sightseeing!
Case in point. A guy forgot to get off at one of the bus stops. He asked the driver, who came up with an itinerary for him how to get back the fastest way (not just waiting for a bus in the opposite direction). The driver even called the dispatcher to get connected to the bus this lost guy was supposed to take next and asked him to take the passenger on board free of charge, even though it was a different operator! To top it off the driver asked the other bus to take this passenger out of his scheduled route to take him closer to home. That's what I call walking, no, rather driving, the extra mile!
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But let's get back to why GO Wellington sucks, all right? One day in March, I had scheduled a trip. The bus to National Park (or, more precisely, to Turangi) was supposed to leave at 9 in the morning from in front of Wellington's McDonald's. So I thought to myself - I can't risk anything, I will take precautions and leave very early.
There are a few buses on a weekday morning going downtown: 8.13 & 8.18 following the shorter route - about 15 min, and 8.16 following the longer route (25 min to the station). So I came to the bus stop and it was 8.13 or 8.14 when I see the first bus coming - it was the longer route one.
I realized I didn't want to take risks (what if the shorter route buses will be late or even won't show up?) and got on this bus, full of kids. I still had enough time either way. As if in spite, just when the door closed, a bus in the other, shorter direction, showed up. Damn! But no matter.
I watch the country go by for a few stops and then I start reading some pdfs. After about 10 min I curiously look out since I don't feel going up, down, left, right (your usual Khandallah wild ride) but instead we are driving on some flat road.
I don't know where we are, but I'm not concerned, since the bus must be just taking a slight detour to drop off the students at a local school.
When it's 8.30 I'm beginning to feel nervous. We're in Raroa now, so it's gonna be tight, since Raroa is even further away from downtown Wellington than Khandallah. Suddenly the driver stops at yet another school and tells me: it's the end, get off!
I was like...:
—What the hell's happening? Are you not going downtown?
And he says:
—Nope, I am no. 44 that goes to Raroa and Johnsonville schools.
So what do you know! It's the only 44 during the day that doesn't go downtown! The driver even argued it was shown on the info board that he goes to Khandallah and not Strathmore (Strathmore being a suburb beyond downtown).
I countered:
—Well, this is not Khandallah, this is f**king Johnsonville!
But anyway, he really did have Khandallah written on his info board - the only trouble with this is, that every single bus no. 44 is supposed to have "Khandallah" written up on the board! They are only supposed to switch the board to "Strathmore" after a few more stops, in Khandallah village, where there is a checkpoint. By then, I had already been on the bus! The info board should have said something like "Raroa schools" or similar.
Even then, some drivers forget to do it and then you can see a bus at the railway station going to Strathmore with the sign still saying "Khandallah". But never you mind, I was in a deep ditch.
This "special" school bus is not marked as a school bus. Regular school buses, even though operated by GO Wellington, are clearly marked so, they don't take adults, don't stop at regular bus stops and they even have different, three-digit line numbers.
But this freak hybrid bus is neither! Not a public bus, nor a school bus. It is not even shown in the regular printed timetable for customers! I mean, it is included in the section for buses going from downtown, but not in the section for buses traveling to downtown (to the railway station and beyond)! This just doesn't make sense as the buses on the Khandallah loop mirror each other in the timetable, so that they are shown both in the inbound as well as outbound timetable.
So this is in fact a school bus line which is deviously camouflaged as a normal bus no. 44, stops at regular bus stops, and allows normal folk to get on!
That's nonsense! That's like out of spite! The driver even told me he thought I was a teacher. A teacher? Seriously? In a tattered dirty white T-shirt, torn mountaineering pants and muddy hiking boots? With a big backpack? I didn't know Go Wellington employed visually impaired people as drivers as part of their Equal Employment Opportunity drive.
And to compound it, I had stopped looking outside and started to read my e-reader in the exact moment when the bus left the usual 44 route.
So the bus had a regular number, regular info board, went at about the same time when another 44 was supposed to go downtown, the driver did not tell me anything (even though he clearly noticed I was the only adult in a bus full of kids), it's 8:32, I am in an unknown place, my bus is scheduled to leave at 9:00 and the driver is telling me there is absolutely no public transport to downtown Wellington from here.
There are a few buses on a weekday morning going downtown: 8.13 & 8.18 following the shorter route - about 15 min, and 8.16 following the longer route (25 min to the station). So I came to the bus stop and it was 8.13 or 8.14 when I see the first bus coming - it was the longer route one.
I realized I didn't want to take risks (what if the shorter route buses will be late or even won't show up?) and got on this bus, full of kids. I still had enough time either way. As if in spite, just when the door closed, a bus in the other, shorter direction, showed up. Damn! But no matter.
I watch the country go by for a few stops and then I start reading some pdfs. After about 10 min I curiously look out since I don't feel going up, down, left, right (your usual Khandallah wild ride) but instead we are driving on some flat road.
I don't know where we are, but I'm not concerned, since the bus must be just taking a slight detour to drop off the students at a local school.
When it's 8.30 I'm beginning to feel nervous. We're in Raroa now, so it's gonna be tight, since Raroa is even further away from downtown Wellington than Khandallah. Suddenly the driver stops at yet another school and tells me: it's the end, get off!
I was like...:
—What the hell's happening? Are you not going downtown?
And he says:
—Nope, I am no. 44 that goes to Raroa and Johnsonville schools.
So what do you know! It's the only 44 during the day that doesn't go downtown! The driver even argued it was shown on the info board that he goes to Khandallah and not Strathmore (Strathmore being a suburb beyond downtown).
I countered:
—Well, this is not Khandallah, this is f**king Johnsonville!
But anyway, he really did have Khandallah written on his info board - the only trouble with this is, that every single bus no. 44 is supposed to have "Khandallah" written up on the board! They are only supposed to switch the board to "Strathmore" after a few more stops, in Khandallah village, where there is a checkpoint. By then, I had already been on the bus! The info board should have said something like "Raroa schools" or similar.
Even then, some drivers forget to do it and then you can see a bus at the railway station going to Strathmore with the sign still saying "Khandallah". But never you mind, I was in a deep ditch.
This "special" school bus is not marked as a school bus. Regular school buses, even though operated by GO Wellington, are clearly marked so, they don't take adults, don't stop at regular bus stops and they even have different, three-digit line numbers.
But this freak hybrid bus is neither! Not a public bus, nor a school bus. It is not even shown in the regular printed timetable for customers! I mean, it is included in the section for buses going from downtown, but not in the section for buses traveling to downtown (to the railway station and beyond)! This just doesn't make sense as the buses on the Khandallah loop mirror each other in the timetable, so that they are shown both in the inbound as well as outbound timetable.
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| Just to show you I'm not kiddin'... |
That's nonsense! That's like out of spite! The driver even told me he thought I was a teacher. A teacher? Seriously? In a tattered dirty white T-shirt, torn mountaineering pants and muddy hiking boots? With a big backpack? I didn't know Go Wellington employed visually impaired people as drivers as part of their Equal Employment Opportunity drive.
And to compound it, I had stopped looking outside and started to read my e-reader in the exact moment when the bus left the usual 44 route.
So the bus had a regular number, regular info board, went at about the same time when another 44 was supposed to go downtown, the driver did not tell me anything (even though he clearly noticed I was the only adult in a bus full of kids), it's 8:32, I am in an unknown place, my bus is scheduled to leave at 9:00 and the driver is telling me there is absolutely no public transport to downtown Wellington from here.
So he offered to take me to the Johnsonville terminus where he was scheduled to start the no. 47 service (that was even further away from Wellington). No. 47 arrives in the city centre only half-an-hour after my intercity bus leaves and it goes nowhere near the train station, so no dice. But there are other buses from Johnsonville, as well as a train that takes 21 minutes to get to Wellington (though I would have to pay extra). A spark of hope, maybe?
So I got to J'ville @ 8:35 and I see a green Mana bus heading to Wellington so I ask the driver:
—How long to the Wellington station?
He says:
—Depends on the traffic
See? He didn't tell me any particular number. Just great! So I force him to tell me some concrete information based on his daily run experience and he says:
—Half-an-hour.
Not good enough.
So I go to the railway station and lo and behold! a commuter train is scheduled to depart at 9:38 and it would arrive at 9:59 and there still would be a glimmer of hope.
Or wouldn't?
I can't see any train!
What's worse, it's 9:43 and there's still no train around...
—What's happening, what's going on?
I'm asking around.
—Well... late as usual,
I hear the reply.
—At this time of the day, it's always 5-10 minutes late.
Finally, the train arrives and leaves the Johnsonville station 10 minutes late(!), and I paid an extra 5 bucks, since my $145 monthly pass is no good here. We arrive in Wellington about 13 minutes late, my bus's gone, but the bus of the competing company is still there, even though it was scheduled to leave at 9:00 as well. I can't get on, since even if it has free seats, I would have to pay probably an extra 50 bucks, as my "flight ticket" is not valid for any other bus.
What pisses me off even more, that the buses of "my" company are at other times 20, even 25 minutes late when leaving Wellington.
More on timetables...
The whole issue of timetables is a rather ridiculous one. I don't know who designed them, but he must have been drunk (it couldn't have been she; women cannot handle that much). It's worse than if it was centrally planned from Brussels (Yes, I am aware Brussels is almost antipodal to Wellington).
The timetables are generally "regular" (the buses leave every half-an-hour or so), but only halfheartedly so. Buses of the same line that share exactly the same route between two checkpoints sometimes have wildly differing times!
For example, two buses, one after another, in the same peak or off-peak period, half-an-hour between them, have sometimes very similar time data (why not the same?), but then, for some mysterious reason, the very next bus is completely off.
In one instance, one bus is supposed to take 10 minutes over a certain leg. The bus following it immediately takes up 20 minutes according to the timetable. Over the same leg!
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| Yet another proof... |
Most of the buses do it (according to the timetable) in 10 minutes - fairly close, but the timetable says, it's 3 (sometimes 4) minutes to Onslow Road and further 7-10 minutes to Homebush Road. No way! How can the timetable suppose it's up to 10 minutes from Onslow Road to Homebush Road? The buses take maximum 5 minutes, often it's just 4. But that's not the main problem.
The main problem is, that according to the timetable above, it takes anything between 6 and 28 minutes!!! That's a huge range; there is never any traffic jam to account for any significant difference in travelling times and the morning passenger numbers are, at best, mild.
How on Earth, then, did the timetable authors came to such varying numbers? Look closely at some more examples:
- Weekday morning, one bus takes 10 minutes (8.00 - 8.10), the other bus takes 20 minutes (8.00 - 8.20). WTF?
- Afternoon buses - buses going in one direction take the usual 10 minutes, buses going in the opposite direction take 22 to 28 minutes; like what??? And then it suddenly drops to 15, before shortly shooting up to 19 and then crashing to 12. Definition of randomness.
- Buses going up take 15 minutes in the morning rush hour and 22 minutes past the peak period, while the opposite direction takes 15 minutes in the morning as well; past it, it takes only 10 minutes. Quite logical, indeed.
- Concerning Saturday times - the third row (really, no traffic there). Going downtown is always 10 minutes, coming back it's anywhere between 8 and 18 minutes. Are you REALLY being serious?
Other lines' timetables suffer from similar (if not worse) inconsistencies. In one case, the difference is 7 minutes on a much shorter leg (so the first bus takes 4 minutes, the next one 11 minutes). Like, what??? No wonder, then, that the timetable is not adhered to at all (again, there is only half-an-hour between both buses). Can-not com-pute. It's a complete mess.
But let's have a look at yet another inconsistency in the same (bus no. 43/44) timetable:
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| God, what idiot came up with this timetable?!? |
2 km in 4 minutes gives an average speed of 30 kph, and that's not counting stopping at bus stops (there are 7 altogether, including the Hospital and Courtenay Place). In this part of the town, you're lucky if your bus hits 30 top speed.
But even this is not the end of it. Buses arriving at the Wellington Hospital are invariably late, because they are supposed to take 5 minutes only to get there from Kilbirnie Shops. Now Kilbirnie Shops are further 2.5 km away and obviously this gives the same 30kph average speed over a curved course that includes a good deal of traffic lights and bus stops as well. There are 10 bus stops on this stretch, which gives an average distance of only 275 m between individual ones, with the smallest distance being 170m. More on that later.
So no wonder, then, that many buses alongside the Golden Mile (Courtenay Pl through Wakefield St, Manners St, Willis St and Lambton Qy to the Railway Station) are on average, as mentioned previously, 10 to 20 minutes late.
Not finished yet.
Look at the timetable on Saturday. Suddenly, it takes much more realistic 18 minutes to get from Kilbirnie Shops to Courtenay Place (as opposed to the 9 minutes on weekday evenings). And don't forget - the traffic is usually more substantial on weekday evenings than at any time during the weekend! So why does it take half the time (according to the timetable) on the weekdays?!?
Not to sound biased, the Saturday evening times are a bit shorter, though. But it is still 13 minutes! That's about 1.5-times longer than on weekdays! The part from Wellington Hospital to Courtenay Place takes 7 minutes on Saturday evenings as opposed to 4 minutes on weekday evenings! That's almost twice the amount! As a result, of course, Saturday evening buses are largely on time, with their delay being maximum 10 minutes.
In reality, any driver that crosses the aforementioned route in 15 minutes can be considered lucky as in heavier traffic and with little luck on traffic lights it can take even half-an-hour. Yet the timetable times on this part of the route, surprisingly, do not vary as wildly as in traffic-irrelevant Khandallah.
But let's have a look at Sunday times. Bear in mind though, that even when there's no traffic crossing Kilbirnie Shops to Courtenay Place in 15 minutes is a good time (and a fairly standard one at that, if no string of red lights is involved).
On Sunday, it's supposed to take 10 minutes during the day and - now get this! - 12 minutes during the evening? Really? So Sunday evenings are, you're telling me, like the busiest time of the week?
Let's recap:
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| The color indicates the traffic density |
The local drivers have learned to drive well and steer the big buses around with ease. Though, a question arises, why does the GO Wellington operator purchase big buses, if they're constantly empty and have tough time fitting the roads?
For the very few buses that fill up during peak periods, they could do away with increased intervals and use a fleet of much smaller vehicles instead (like the no. 29 below), that are definitely much more environmentally friendly.
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| This sort of big bus (note the double back wheels) negotiates the narrowest roads and tightest curves you would ever see in a city, while being mostly empty. What for? |
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| They know small buses exist... |
Not only would it save fuel (and consequently could possibly lower the ticket prices), but the buses would be swifter on the extreme slopes, would likely not overheat (as it happened to me once on a big bus; we had to stop for about 15 minutes) and would not constantly crash into the curb.
Crash into the curb? What??
There is one place in Khandallah, where drivers, turning right, pass a very tight spot. On top of it, the road they turn into is quite a bit more elevated than the main road. The buses, as elongated as they are, usually can't avoid hitting the curb with their protruding chassis; some do it at quite a speed. That makes things worse because the underside of the bus gets even closer to the ground as the strained suspension can't cope with the inertia, and the clearance is not high enough - big buses weigh a lot! Often it does not even help to go as slowly as 5 kph; the combination of relative road elevation, its width, and curb height make it quite impossible to avoid hitting the underside.
There is one elegant solution though; to cut the corner and use the opposite (right) lane. Because there is a traffic divider, you can only cut the corner by driving completely through the other lane. There's no danger in it; the view is perfectly clear and any potential oncoming traffic would be approaching slowly anyway. But only very few drivers do it; vast majority of them opt to unnecessarily damage the bus in these ridiculous circumstances.
Which brings me to one of my previous points - more drivers are willing to bypass whole sections of a route, but they will not, no sir, under no circumstances, pass through the oncoming traffic lane, if only for 5 meters. This turn is actually the beginning of the very loop I had mentioned earlier; the loop that many drivers leave out altogether!
There's another simple solution: remove the traffic divider entirely (and shoot the dimwit who placed it there on sight)! This intersection is a very quiet one and the traffic divider serves no apparent purpose, apart from making the turn for big buses impossibly narrow and tight. If you had seen how damaged the curbstone(!) is, you would not want to even imagine what sort of "beating" the bus chassis get.
I still haven't divulged to you the world record delay, officially inscribed into the Guinness Book. I am keeping it for later yet. For now, let me just tell you, for the record, that GO Wellington has got an official policy to employ visually impaired (i.e., blind) drivers. How do I know? (as if the image above did not convince you enough...)
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| And this is just crappy resolution from Google Maps... Still, thanks, Google! |
Equal Employment Opportunity
I still haven't divulged to you the world record delay, officially inscribed into the Guinness Book. I am keeping it for later yet. For now, let me just tell you, for the record, that GO Wellington has got an official policy to employ visually impaired (i.e., blind) drivers. How do I know? (as if the image above did not convince you enough...)
You want to get out. Go downtown. You go to the bus stop. The bus is coming (only 13 minutes late, amazing, ain't it?). You stand at the bus stop, obviously showing an interest to board the vehicle. The bus keeps coming on at the same speed, showing no signs of an intention to stop. You wave your hands, move right to the curb (just one step closer from where you were standing, you're all the time in plain view, there are no trees, structures, telegraph poles, no nothing, but the driver just fails to spot you. And fails to stop.
When it's clear that the driver just wants to go on and cannot see you (or at least pretends not to), you start jumping up and down like crazy and as soon as the bus passes, you start running after it. It's a suburb section, where, due to the terrain and geography, it's difficult to go even 30 kph! So the bus drives at just the exact speed so that you can't catch it, but you still keep your hopes high. However, no matter your fanatic waving, shouting and running, ultimately the bus runs away.
When it's clear that the driver just wants to go on and cannot see you (or at least pretends not to), you start jumping up and down like crazy and as soon as the bus passes, you start running after it. It's a suburb section, where, due to the terrain and geography, it's difficult to go even 30 kph! So the bus drives at just the exact speed so that you can't catch it, but you still keep your hopes high. However, no matter your fanatic waving, shouting and running, ultimately the bus runs away.
When something like this happens second time, you know better. When the bus is approaching and shows no intention to stop, you start shouting and waving like crazy, while the bus is still quite some distance from the stop. There is a 50% chance that the driver actually notices you and stops; this usually happens when you pretty much step out on the street, into his predicted ideal line. And even then I believe it's an automatic collision avoidance system, rather than the driver, that makes the bus stop.
In the other half of the cases, when you don't feel suicidal, the bus driver fails to recognize you even after you undergo what a doctor would term a bout of spastic arm flailing. In a few fortunate cases, there is an intersection nearby, so you can catch up with the bus; and if the driver is not deaf as well, you're in great luck. You can actually bang on the front door and the driver will... hear you, yes! And he (or she) will likely tell you off for behaving inappropriately (bangin' on the door and gettin' on the bus outside the bus stop).
I'm not joking. All three cases (and a few more) happened to me as described and more have been prevented because of my experience. The same has also happened numerous times to many of my friends. And it's not because on some days I feel like wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, or that the buses run at such a blindingly high speed that the drivers cannot make you out due to motion blur or fail to react in time because of relativistic time dilation.
On a completely unrelated note, I have, luckily, not been involved in a bus crash. Yet. What with the blind drivers and stuff... Go figure.
On a completely unrelated note, I have, luckily, not been involved in a bus crash. Yet. What with the blind drivers and stuff... Go figure.
Again, the solution is simple and pretty straightforward. Apart from, of course, knowing your route - where the bus stops are located - and minding the passengers, the drivers could be taught, no, trained, actually, better yet, forced, to signal their intention to stop, by using indicator lights. That way you can clearly see that they don't see you and you know you have to start jumping up and down in the middle of the road.
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Talking of delays - so that you don't forget it's a major issue - they're so pervasive that even the staff at 0800 MetLink hotline doesn't consider it unusual anymore. Take this conversation, for example:
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However, let's get back to the subject of the electronic boards with live real-time departure information. I had told you about troubles that occasionally bog them down as a reliable information source. Apart from being unable to track sometimes half of the buses, the information, when available, was at times unreliable.
Once, a bus no. 11, even though it was tracked real-time all the time, when the departure info switched to DUE (read: right around the corner), it remained DUE for 5 minutes! And no sign of the bus anywhere! The bus finally arrived after a long wait, but where had it been just before? Hidden in the Dimension X or Fluidic space?
On average, from my empirical observations, the information on the e-boards was too optimistic, by about 20 % - 25 %. When the bus was scheduled to arrive in 5 minutes (according to the real time data, not the timetable, of course!), it usually arrived in 6 minutes. This does not present a big difference, but when the board showed 20 minutes, most of the buses arrived in 24-25 minutes. Again, a random bus here and there arrived much sooner than that, just to throw you, and your false sense of security, off balance. In the end, you could never rely on this data with any reasonable degree of confidence.
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Me:
—Hi, I'd like to know the real time departure for bus #43, bus stop 5424.
Operator:
—It's 19:48, 19 minutes late.
—It's 19:48, 19 minutes late.
Me:
—What?!? 19 minutes??
—What?!? 19 minutes??
Operator:
—Yes, it's just a wee bit late.
—Yes, it's just a wee bit late.
Is he being sarkastic? Ignorant? Faking cheerfulness?
In the end, the bus, despite being empty and facing no traffic jams, arrived 23 minutes late (see! The 20% rule I just told you about) and I finally got downtown with a 28 minute delay. And that's with 30 min intervals in-between individual buses.
Sometimes I could get downtown 32, or even 37 minutes late. That's even later than the next bus was supposed to get there. I knew it was the previous bus only thanks to information from the 0800 hotline.
Sometimes I could get downtown 32, or even 37 minutes late. That's even later than the next bus was supposed to get there. I knew it was the previous bus only thanks to information from the 0800 hotline.
But it still is NOT the World Record. Stay tuned...
As if the delays are not a plague itself, sometimes, especially late at night, when the buses are reduced to only 1 per hour, they can be ridiculously early. I think my record was being 10 minutes ahead of the schedule, but some fast drivers were routinely 5, 6 or 7 minutes too quick.
If the drivers were a little bit conscientious, they stopped to wait at a major checkpoint (Khandallah village) - they never stopped at other checkpoints, though. Sometimes, as if in a celebratory mood (yay! My shift's over soon!), they would not even stop at the checkpoint (let alone wait) and continue waaaay ahead of the schedule. And in a few cases it wasn't even their last ride of the day(!) so they would not get home any sooner.
So people who possibly wanted to get on the bus, whether just before a checkpoint or elsewhere - bad luck, the bus had sped through at least 5 minutes too early.
If the drivers were a little bit conscientious, they stopped to wait at a major checkpoint (Khandallah village) - they never stopped at other checkpoints, though. Sometimes, as if in a celebratory mood (yay! My shift's over soon!), they would not even stop at the checkpoint (let alone wait) and continue waaaay ahead of the schedule. And in a few cases it wasn't even their last ride of the day(!) so they would not get home any sooner.
So people who possibly wanted to get on the bus, whether just before a checkpoint or elsewhere - bad luck, the bus had sped through at least 5 minutes too early.
Not that it bothered me - I wanted to be home earlier, as well. But I can clearly see why there was no public trust in the bus system at all. In the end, it was annoying for me as well. When you come to the bus stop 2-3 minutes in advance and the bus never shows up...
The problem is, the drivers do not adhere to the schedule, and they do not feel any need to improve. Even worse, the management doesn't seem to care!
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Then there is the issue of buses sometimes not showing up at all. To show you I am not kidding, I did 2 screen grabs of MetLink service updates from their own website. It was a random check from my side, I only looked at the website twice, that is, on two random occasions. Here is what it says:
Before I leave you with a bitter aftertaste from my rant, let me tell you about one more thing - the bus stop distances. Bus stops are outrageously close to each other (in general) but then there's a long stretch of no bus stops at all. There would be bus stops every 150 meters in sparsely populated areas and then, in similarly populated areas, no bus stops at all.
The main problem of bus stops spaced too close apart is that it slows buses down considerably (everyone wants to get off at a bus stop most closely located to his or her home/work) and, more importantly, creates greater imbalances in timetables. Some buses run into a bad luck of having to stop at every bus stop (and dropping off or taking on one passenger each), whereas other buses, and again, it's just a matter of luck, disgorge a lot of passengers at only one stop and do not stop at 5 others.
It is not conditioned by peak periods (not by any significant margins). Some buses take 40 passengers and 8 of them get off at one bus stop, whereas other buses take 10 passengers and they all get off, one-by-one, one after another, at incredibly closely spaced stops.
One example for all:
It's 140m (!) between the bus stop A and bus stop B. It's 220m from the bust stop at the railway station to the bus stop A. From bus stop B further on to bus stops C & D it's another 200m and 220m, respectively. So, in total, on a 780m long stretch of road there are five bus stops. Wow. Incredible.
Now this is right in the heart of the town and a random person always gets in or gets off (me notwithstanding). That slows the buses down incredibly; add to that a ridiculous amount of traffic lights (in New Zealand they call it "safety-conscious"; I call it "predposratosť") and it takes eternity until the buses cross the Golden Mile.
It takes at least 10 minutes; often more. If I get off at the railway station (or at the Old Bank Arcade) and run, I get to Wakefield Street (and Courtenay Place) at least about 5 minutes earlier than the bus). If I walk at a brisk pace, I am almost always faster than the bus. And if I walk at a leisurely pace, on "good" days (i.e., a busy peak period) I am faster than buses. There you go! Why? Sometimes there are 3 or 4 sets of traffic lights in-between the individual bus stops, despite them being so tightly packed.
Do you know what is the Guinness World Record for a city bus delay?
This is the answer:
45 minutes (Onslow Rd @ Benares St)
That's the second stop after the start of the route #44! If MetLink knew the bus was so late, why didn't they send a replacement? It was Sunday afternoon, tons of buses waiting at the ready!
I had wanted to get out but after I found out about the delay, unable to go downtown, I stomped home super-angry, went online and screen-grabbed the Live Departures info. Here's the picture (it's from the very next stop - Onslow Rd @ Mandalay Tce - as I know its station code by heart):
The bus was supposed to arrive @ 2:51pm. In reality, it arrived @ 3:36pm (remember what I wrote about the 20% statistical error on live departures system? 38 minutes in reality versus the 32 minutes delay shown up here as predicted. It all fits.)
Also, take note of the next bus. It appears to be "only" 15 minutes late! The timetable interval between buses on Sunday is 1 hour - but the real interval is like - whatever!
The other time I only copied the text. Here it goes:
Latest Tweets
Follow @metlinkwgtn on Twitter to receive updates.
2 hours ago - #route170 departing Lower Hutt at 13.58 is
running 25 minutes late
4 hours ago - #route81 departing Eastbourne at 1:25 wil not
run
5 hours ago - #route23 departing Houghton Bay at 11:30 is
running 12 minutes late
Both instances were at some point in the year 2013.
As I am writing this post (July 26th, 2014), I'm getting intrigued. Let's go online and check the current tweets:
It's 2:00am, so nothing current. But still, interesting stuff... Let's see what @Murrealism is complaining about:
Aha! Quite symptomatic. Which brings me to another point that I will detail later: buses deliberately not stopping at bus stops.
Let's check further back, the history of MetLink tweets:
Let's check further back, the history of MetLink tweets:
It's huge! And this is for just one day! Pretty much every day in July and June looks like this. And this is only what gets published on twitter! The routine delays of most bus lines are not even mentioned here! And I strongly doubt all the buses that don't run are shown here, either!
Anyway, most of the buses do not show any reason why they are not running or miss out on a leg of the trip. One can only wonder... Even if it's a breakdown, can't they send a replacement one? They do it in much poorer parts of the world with much lower ticket prices and much denser traffic patterns!
Another trouble is bypassing. I witnessed it once, in the morning peak. The driver decided the bus was too full (even though at least 10-20 more people could fit in quite comfortably) and decided to completely bypass one leg of his journey. Not only did he refuse to stop at every bus stop going downtown, he also completely bypassed further 6 stops on his way downtown. Now imagine someone waiting for that very bus to get to work on time. No dice. The bus, even though it runs, doesn't even show up.
Actually, not stopping at a bus stop because the driver believes the bus is too full is fairly common in Wellington. It happened to me and my friends several times, in addition to the case described by the tweet above.
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Some of the drivers are also quite inconsiderate, ignorant, or downright rude. The only time I went to Eastbourne, when I wanted to go back, I was waiting for bus no., I believe, 83. It was supposed to leave at, say, 15:30 (i was waiting at the terminus/starting point). I saw it arriving at, say, 15:22, meaning well in advance and comfortably enough to start on time.
But come 15:30, the bus is still parking, showing no signs of movement, and the driver is chilling out god knows where! So I see the bus, I see it's not moving, it's 15:35 and I'm in a real hurry. Off I call the MetLink hotline and complain about it. The lady promised me to contact the driver, even though she couldn't quite believe my story.
Oh yeah! 15:37, the bus is finally starting to move. I get on and tell the driver: You're 7 minutes late! You know what she told me? And I quote:
—You're lucky I'm only 7 minutes late. I could've been 10 minutes late.
In other words: f**k you and go to hell!" Actually, I don't remember exactly what she said in the first part. She may have said:
—You're lucky you can get on at all!"
—You're lucky I'm only 7 minutes late. I could've been 10 minutes late.
In other words: f**k you and go to hell!" Actually, I don't remember exactly what she said in the first part. She may have said:
—You're lucky you can get on at all!"
This would have been an insignificant story in the back of my mind, hadn't it been for quite an opposite experience just a few weeks before. I was in Wainuiomata, visiting local walking tracks, when, again hurrying back home, I was running to catch a bus from Wainuiomata South (Sunny Grove).
The bus was supposed to leave @ 17:11, the stop being a terminus/starting point. Sure enough, out of my breath, I see the bus leaving at 17:08, from a despairing distance of barely 30m. Just about the same outrageous type of behavior as is typical with nakedbus.com. Worse still, that was the last bus of the peak period and the next bus was scheduled to leave in some 40 minutes.
Talking of drivers, they really take their job rather easy. What happened in the following video is that the driver's cell phone fell out of the bus in one of the sharper turns, so he turned around at the very next T-intersection, drove back, turn around again at a previous T-intersection and then stopped along the road, backing up some traffic, just to grab his cell phone.
Not that I want to deny him his possessions, but it just show the professionalism of the whole public transport business in New Zealand. I cheer the driver for returning back for his phone, but can't imagine it happening in any city of a comparable size in countries with much better public transport. Anyway, see it for yourself:
Talking of drivers, they really take their job rather easy. What happened in the following video is that the driver's cell phone fell out of the bus in one of the sharper turns, so he turned around at the very next T-intersection, drove back, turn around again at a previous T-intersection and then stopped along the road, backing up some traffic, just to grab his cell phone.
Not that I want to deny him his possessions, but it just show the professionalism of the whole public transport business in New Zealand. I cheer the driver for returning back for his phone, but can't imagine it happening in any city of a comparable size in countries with much better public transport. Anyway, see it for yourself:
The main problem of bus stops spaced too close apart is that it slows buses down considerably (everyone wants to get off at a bus stop most closely located to his or her home/work) and, more importantly, creates greater imbalances in timetables. Some buses run into a bad luck of having to stop at every bus stop (and dropping off or taking on one passenger each), whereas other buses, and again, it's just a matter of luck, disgorge a lot of passengers at only one stop and do not stop at 5 others.
It is not conditioned by peak periods (not by any significant margins). Some buses take 40 passengers and 8 of them get off at one bus stop, whereas other buses take 10 passengers and they all get off, one-by-one, one after another, at incredibly closely spaced stops.
One example for all:
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| Why don't you remove bus stop A? Or bus stop B? Or both... |
Now this is right in the heart of the town and a random person always gets in or gets off (me notwithstanding). That slows the buses down incredibly; add to that a ridiculous amount of traffic lights (in New Zealand they call it "safety-conscious"; I call it "predposratosť") and it takes eternity until the buses cross the Golden Mile.
It takes at least 10 minutes; often more. If I get off at the railway station (or at the Old Bank Arcade) and run, I get to Wakefield Street (and Courtenay Place) at least about 5 minutes earlier than the bus). If I walk at a brisk pace, I am almost always faster than the bus. And if I walk at a leisurely pace, on "good" days (i.e., a busy peak period) I am faster than buses. There you go! Why? Sometimes there are 3 or 4 sets of traffic lights in-between the individual bus stops, despite them being so tightly packed.
End of the story
Before I wrap it all up, I need to leave the stage big time! Let's get back to my opening question:
Do you know what is the Guinness World Record for a city bus delay?
This is the answer:
45 minutes (Onslow Rd @ Benares St)
That's the second stop after the start of the route #44! If MetLink knew the bus was so late, why didn't they send a replacement? It was Sunday afternoon, tons of buses waiting at the ready!
I had wanted to get out but after I found out about the delay, unable to go downtown, I stomped home super-angry, went online and screen-grabbed the Live Departures info. Here's the picture (it's from the very next stop - Onslow Rd @ Mandalay Tce - as I know its station code by heart):
The bus was supposed to arrive @ 2:51pm. In reality, it arrived @ 3:36pm (remember what I wrote about the 20% statistical error on live departures system? 38 minutes in reality versus the 32 minutes delay shown up here as predicted. It all fits.)
Also, take note of the next bus. It appears to be "only" 15 minutes late! The timetable interval between buses on Sunday is 1 hour - but the real interval is like - whatever!
It’s as if GO Wellington managers went on a trip round the world, visiting every single country, learning a lot of useful things and in the end, taking the worst of every country's public transport system and applying it at home. And I should know, I've lived and worked in a lot of countries...
Take for example, my hometown. Despite a fully developed ecological transportation network of trolleybuses, the new mayor decided to turn the whole network off pretty much every weekend (and on some weekdays evenings, as well). Did he figure out it was cheaper to run diesel buses? Whoa! Why then didn't the previous mayor do the same when diesel was much cheaper back then? I can't believe it!
And then there's another, more important aspect - ecology. Slovakia generates vast majority of its electricity from green sources: nuclear and hydro power (actually, Slovakia is the country with the second largest share of nuclear electricity generation in the world, after France) So the electric transportation is indeed clean. Yet, for some sick reason, the whole trolleybus network is conveniently being turned off outside of peak times (and it would probably be turned off even during peak times, hadn't it been for the lack of conventional diesel buses)
Guess what! They do the same in Wellington. And you say New Zealand has an image of a green country? You bet! After they destroyed the pedestrian zone on Manners Street, letting more and more cars and diesel buses encroach on the city centre? The likes of Lambton Quay, Willis Street, Wakefield Street, Manners Street and especially Cuba Street would have been pedestrian zones in many countries ages ago. What keeps the New Zealand green image propped up? Have I mentioned bush and forest clearings in favor of pastures?
Go figure.
And for all this horrid public transport service MetLink asks outrageous ticket prices (I have discussed the matter of prices early on in the post). From my experience, the threshold to use the public transport is invariably around 50 New Zealand cents per ride (about 30 eurocents) Yet the Metlink price is 10x higher ($5.00 cash; 3.63 cashless) and, as a consequence, the buses are virtually empty outside of a short window of morning traffic (and some afternoon peak services). So I subsidize (by paying these high prices) buses running as private taxis, ferrying no-one.
Because they are so disproportionately big (and needlessly so) they use up a lot of diesel (the dirtiest of fuels), which makes them expensive and even less ecological than cars (taxis, private cars...). Public transport needs to be made affordable to citizens, to give them an incentive to use it. As long as a lot of people use it, there are enough services to make it convenient. If it's convenient, more people use it. The more people use it, the more they trust the system. When more and more people trust the system, even those that used to despise public transport hop on. Why? Because it's so much cheaper than taking your car to work!
The recipe for the Wellington public transport is following: Issue a public promise of lowering the prices year by year, say by 50c, until it hits at least $1 per a regular ride (NZ dollar is overvalued by about 100% when compared with euro and the GDP of NZ economy), which is roughly 30 eurocents.
Thereby you are slowly gaining trust of the public, while reaping the benefits of continuous decrease in price as opposed to an immediate cut. The amount of passengers in the buses is increasing, compensating more than enough for lower ticket prices.
Some help of the city counselors would need to be lobbied for, namely a scheme for imposing fees, with bans later on, for driving in the city with an unecological vehicle (diesel, petrol, and also LPG/CNG to a certain extent) so as to motivate the public to use the public transport even more.
Timetables (and routes in general) should be re-designed and improved and a stricter, more regular intervals introduced. Bus stops need to be spaced farther apart to make the journeys faster and decrease the time differences between individual trips. With more people using the system of course the time irregularities naturally decrease because majority of buses now need to stop at almost all stops. That makes even more people hop on the bandwagon and in effect can lower the costs even more.
A new fleet of smaller, more fuel-efficient buses (mini-van like) should be obtained to compensate for a higher amount of passengers, to be used especially on routes with lower passenger numbers, outside peak times and on particularly hilly routes.
To save running costs (fuel) even more, the trolleybus system should be extended, especially out into the hillier sections, where its cost-saving benefits are even more obvious. To cope with the higher demand in peak traffic, extra buses and shorter intervals would be employed. But that's, of course, just an outline.
My next post about Tokyo transportation system shows that it canall work.... I mean, that it actually works.
GO Wellington - and other operators in English-influenced countries - currently suffer from what I call the vicious price circle. The representatives claim high ticket prices are necessary because of low number of passengers.
But it's actually the other way round - people in these countries (New Zealand, UK, USA) are not using public transport because the prices are too high! Therefore, a leap of faith (in Adam Smith's invisible hand) needs to be made, meaning the prices ought to be lowered first in order to make the public transport attractive (or sexy, sleek, take your pick...).
A lot of American cities now benefit from reasonable ticket prices, such as those in Hawai'i (Honolulu, Hilo & Kailua-Kona), Salt Lake City in Utah or the subway in New York City.
All of the above would contribute to an enhanced sense of reliability of public transport and people would tend to use it even more. But at the moment it's just fiction, because right now, all you can rely on in Wellington public transport is that it is 100% unreliable.
Take for example, my hometown. Despite a fully developed ecological transportation network of trolleybuses, the new mayor decided to turn the whole network off pretty much every weekend (and on some weekdays evenings, as well). Did he figure out it was cheaper to run diesel buses? Whoa! Why then didn't the previous mayor do the same when diesel was much cheaper back then? I can't believe it!
And then there's another, more important aspect - ecology. Slovakia generates vast majority of its electricity from green sources: nuclear and hydro power (actually, Slovakia is the country with the second largest share of nuclear electricity generation in the world, after France) So the electric transportation is indeed clean. Yet, for some sick reason, the whole trolleybus network is conveniently being turned off outside of peak times (and it would probably be turned off even during peak times, hadn't it been for the lack of conventional diesel buses)
Guess what! They do the same in Wellington. And you say New Zealand has an image of a green country? You bet! After they destroyed the pedestrian zone on Manners Street, letting more and more cars and diesel buses encroach on the city centre? The likes of Lambton Quay, Willis Street, Wakefield Street, Manners Street and especially Cuba Street would have been pedestrian zones in many countries ages ago. What keeps the New Zealand green image propped up? Have I mentioned bush and forest clearings in favor of pastures?
Go figure.
 |
| Yes, you rarely see these guys off-peak. |
Because they are so disproportionately big (and needlessly so) they use up a lot of diesel (the dirtiest of fuels), which makes them expensive and even less ecological than cars (taxis, private cars...). Public transport needs to be made affordable to citizens, to give them an incentive to use it. As long as a lot of people use it, there are enough services to make it convenient. If it's convenient, more people use it. The more people use it, the more they trust the system. When more and more people trust the system, even those that used to despise public transport hop on. Why? Because it's so much cheaper than taking your car to work!
The recipe for the Wellington public transport is following: Issue a public promise of lowering the prices year by year, say by 50c, until it hits at least $1 per a regular ride (NZ dollar is overvalued by about 100% when compared with euro and the GDP of NZ economy), which is roughly 30 eurocents.
Thereby you are slowly gaining trust of the public, while reaping the benefits of continuous decrease in price as opposed to an immediate cut. The amount of passengers in the buses is increasing, compensating more than enough for lower ticket prices.
Some help of the city counselors would need to be lobbied for, namely a scheme for imposing fees, with bans later on, for driving in the city with an unecological vehicle (diesel, petrol, and also LPG/CNG to a certain extent) so as to motivate the public to use the public transport even more.
Timetables (and routes in general) should be re-designed and improved and a stricter, more regular intervals introduced. Bus stops need to be spaced farther apart to make the journeys faster and decrease the time differences between individual trips. With more people using the system of course the time irregularities naturally decrease because majority of buses now need to stop at almost all stops. That makes even more people hop on the bandwagon and in effect can lower the costs even more.
A new fleet of smaller, more fuel-efficient buses (mini-van like) should be obtained to compensate for a higher amount of passengers, to be used especially on routes with lower passenger numbers, outside peak times and on particularly hilly routes.
 |
| You can see these small buses only on the route no. 29, and they are pretty old, at that. |
 |
| One of the very few small buses out there... |
GO Wellington - and other operators in English-influenced countries - currently suffer from what I call the vicious price circle. The representatives claim high ticket prices are necessary because of low number of passengers.
But it's actually the other way round - people in these countries (New Zealand, UK, USA) are not using public transport because the prices are too high! Therefore, a leap of faith (in Adam Smith's invisible hand) needs to be made, meaning the prices ought to be lowered first in order to make the public transport attractive (or sexy, sleek, take your pick...).
A lot of American cities now benefit from reasonable ticket prices, such as those in Hawai'i (Honolulu, Hilo & Kailua-Kona), Salt Lake City in Utah or the subway in New York City.
All of the above would contribute to an enhanced sense of reliability of public transport and people would tend to use it even more. But at the moment it's just fiction, because right now, all you can rely on in Wellington public transport is that it is 100% unreliable.
