I hate waiting for buses. But I try to be a good public-transport moose.
Today, I thought to myself, I am going from new apartment to Dale’s game – do I drive, so when it finishes I can get home quickly? No! There is a bus outside Dale’s that will take me right home! It comes at 10.23 and if I miss that there is another at 10.53 and every half hour after that! I can be a good public-transport moose and, worst case scenario, I wait half an hour!
I reach the bus stop at 10.20. No bus comes. At 11.16 I text the bathless one and beg her to come and pick me up because I am starving and I have a cold and WHY HAS THERE BEEN NO BUS?
At 11.20 there is a bus. Stupid buses.
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Also: Wellingtonians who drive – how is that bypass traffic chaos working out?
9 thoughts on “Stupid Buses”
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Metlink are finally getting around to experimenting with GPS-based real-time information systems for buses, so that you can see from a display at the stop or from your mobile exactly when the bus is actually supposed to get there, not just scheduled to.
Even better, the buses should be on time. Even better than that, the buses (or trams) would go every three minutes so you didn’t have to think about timetables, but the chances of that happening anywhere other than major routes (eg.g. the “spine”) are pretty minimal.
It’s the lack of communication that drives me insane. Clearly the 10.53 service was cancelled. There seems to be no way I could possibly have found this out except by waiting as long as I waited. Bring on the realtime updates!
What I’ve seen of GPS in Auckland, it’s still only “realish-time” rather than real time. Especially round Queen St (currently buried under roadworks), you can stand around waiting for a bus to count down to “due”, then wait another five minutes only to have it drop off the GPS altogether without ever having shown up.
As for 3-minutes-apart-ness, the closer together buses are, the higher the chances of the schedule collapsing. My experience in Wgtn of the Karori line was that when it was scheduled for 15 minutes, you’d generally never have to wait more than 20 minutes for a bus. When it changed to 10 minutes apart, I found I still had to wait up to 20 minutes.
At least part of that is because the moment-by-moment contigencies of traffic flows meant that one bus would catch up with the bus before it, and then on reaching the Karori terminus, the earlier bus would go out of service and rush back into town – in order that the schedule would remain on track for buses from town (but so much for the buses to town…)
I have one word: Bike.
I used to bike everywhere when I lived in Hataitai. Dales place to the Hataitai tunnel was about 20 minutes tops. But it’s a but awful in bad weather. Mostly that’s a visibility issue for me, because I own decent wet-weather gear.
Khandallah is just getting a bit far out for me. 🙁
if you loose the car totally it makes the waiting for public transport a simpler and less irritating task. i recommend that you always carry a book and an mp3 player and expect the wait. that said, the london systems seem to work pretty bloody well (all things considered) so more often than not the travel here works without a hitch and is probably incomprable with only-one-an-hour-and-it’s-a-no-show busses in wellington.
oh – yeah biking is good. cycling is great in london, the weather and conditions all make it pretty easy and super time efficient to get around on two wheels. again it hits problems with comparison – welly isn’t particularly cycle friendly given the hills and weather but when and if i return you can expect me to be thrashing my way around much more by bike. especially if i get round to plucking up the courage to commute to work by bike. the courage needed isn’t worry over weather, hills or safety it is the sheer distance involved 25 miles each way. That is like riding a marathon on the way to work, and then another on the way home… Yikes!
bikes- london – life taken into own hands. (but you do get to pass the traffi at lights)
bikes- welly – good!!!!!
Well try the whole wait for a bus in london. 6 of every other bus goes past before yours turns up 40 minutes later than the 12 max shown on stop. And the journey to this stop ……
A five minute walk from departure area.
I live in Auckland. GPS doesn’t give accurate bus arrival times. It is an ETA at best. It seems to deliver the kind of estimates that your computer operating system gives as one downloads a file. I ignore those too.
I’m glad the bus company does not have access to a ‘pool’ of pre-cognitive bus timetablers. Don’t believe that GPS can predict taxi drivers blocking bus lanes, road works, or cyclists being knocked from their mount corner of Willis and Ghuznee. Such technology does not yet exist and I’m glad of it.
You’d do as well to expect no more from a GPS as you did from the print timetable. GPS’s biggest flaw is that it convinces people otherwise.
My bus always comes on time. I don;t know what all y’alls problem is…..