Auckland’s Bus-less day

Well the bus lockout happened today, and while things held together in the morning it seems as though chaos did begin to unfold during the evening peak as people struggled to get on the limited supply of replacement buses and the trains. Furthermore, there’s no relief in sight as all signs point towards the lockout continuing tomorrow, and then probably over the weekend and into next week. If it does drag into next week then, with school back from its holidays, I really do think that all hell will break loose as the effects of the lockout on Auckland’s traffic today were definitely mitigated by lower volumes from school holidays. The image below (courtesy of Jon C from aucklandtrains) hints at the queues to get on a Ritches bus for people travelling back to the North Shore this evening:

For me the lockout meant an earlier start to the day, and I left home at around 8am. My radio appearance, that I mentioned yesterday, turned out to be only a brief one before I had even left the house as RadioLive ran out of time to contact me further. But that was OK. The walk to work took around 35 minutes, roughly what I had expected – and it was a bit easier than the walk home as it only included one uphill bit, as opposed to two downhill bits (of course the walk home was the opposite). There were quite a few other people obviously making the same trek, although perhaps not quite as many as I had predicted. This part of the city, except for the Link Bus route, isn’t really one of the more bus-oriented areas and I suspect that many people just chose to drive to work instead of walking. I was also relatively surprised by the lack of traffic on the roads as I walked into town, perhaps a lot of people took the day off work thinking that the roads would be a mess?

During the day I must say that the lack of buses zipping along Queen Street was actually quite nice. My office has a window that looks right onto Queen Street, and the buses are often incredibly noisy and distracting. So I must say that I didn’t miss them throughout the day.

The walk home for me was rather more annoying, particularly as it came at the end of a pretty long day. Whereas in the morning the traffic seemed to run fairly smoothly, Victoria Street was complete chaos as I wandered along next to it for most of my trip home. I do get the feeling that a lot of people made arrangements for the morning, thinking that things might be back to normal by the evening, but then when they weren’t everything began to break down.

Overall, the novelty has now worn off I think. The lockout is now just getting annoying, and in the long-run it is potentially quite damaging for public transport. People need to be able to rely upon transport to get them around, and the control one has over being able to drive their car might prove to be quite alluring if this situation goes on much longer. On a final note, I am very glad that ARTA has said they will be with-holding the subsidies they normally pay to NZ Bus. That’s around $150,000 a day. Yikes.