How do we fix Wellington's bus replacements?

If you need the train on weekends, near public holidays or late at night, you know bus replacements well.

When the tracks need work, the trains must stop. Buses are our backup solution to moving people around. We need bus replacements to maintain our railways.

Unfortunately, decades of neglect mean there’s lots of maintenance to do. That's made bus replacements an almost weekly occurrence. In February this year, nearly 13% of scheduled trains were replaced by a bus.

The shittiness of bus replacements is undermining people's trust in using trains. Let’s explore bus replacements, the council's ideas on improvement, and how we could truly solve the situation.

Bus replacements are a crappy user experience

My partner and I often take the train on Fridays and come back on the weekend. We avoid bus replacements as much as possible because they're a pain in the ass.

Using bus replacements is riddled with uncertainty every step of the way.

Metlink’s website is desperately unprepared for showing bus replacement services – which are happening almost weekly. Timetables tell you which trains are cancelled, but will not show you when the bus replacements will arrive. Pain in the ass.

In fact, bus replacement timetables are only available by downloading PDFs or looking at small JPEGs on a dedicated “bus replacing trains” page. These documents are impossible to read on a phone and are written like hieroglyphics. Pain in the ass.

Quick. it’s 11am. You’re in Silverstream and reading this on your phone. When is the next train to Wellington?

Bus replacements run as often as the trains they are replacing. However, a bus replacement carries 68 people max, whereas a single train carriage carries 230 people. Logically, every cancelled train carriage should have three buses replacing them then, right? Absolutely not. You get one bus to replace the train. Everyone is packed in like sardines. Pain in the ass.

The buses are also... worse. They’re often noisy, run down, and don’t meet accessibility standards. That’s because, as chair of the Transport Committee Thomas Nash told me over the phone, “we don’t have enough high quality buses, especially when [maintenance is] not planned.” Pain in the ass.

Since my partner and I cycle and scoot everywhere, we take our wheels on the train. We can't with a bus replacement. Bikes are currently banned on buses, and even when that ridiculous ruling is done, bus replacements sometimes don’t have bike racks. You also don't know if it can take bikes until the bus arrives. Pain in the ass.

If passengers have a crappy experience (like, say, the thousands of city workers who got screwed by bus replacements in January), they’re found to have a 20% worse outlook on bus replacements than the average passenger.

The council wants Wellingtonians to ride the train more. To achieve that, people need to trust the train every single time. Our trains are lovely to use – they’re comfortable, relaxing, and smooth.

Bus replacements must be as rock solid as the trains they’re replacing. Otherwise, people will give up and drive.

Councillors have some ideas, but…

The system is at fault here – our regional councillors have less control than you think over bus replacements.

Bus replacements aren’t run through Metlink, so don’t have to meet Metlink standards. Bus replacements exist because of a section (3.11) in the council’s contract with Transdev (the rail provider).

This system was designed as a last resort solution. It is not designed whatsoever to be the main way train passengers get around on weekends for the next decade.

Councillors know it's not good enough, and the council has improvements in mind, like:

• adding live location tracking of bus replacements through Metlink, like every other bus in the region.
• getting bus replacements to meet Metlink quality standards.
• making it easier to understand which train line a bus is replacing, improve the online timetables, and ensure fares are consistently paid.
• making Platform 10 feel like a quality bus stop.

All of this sounds… fine. They won’t solve bus replacement capacity, which was what passengers mentioned as their top priority when interviewed by the Council. Plus, these things won’t be ready until next year at least.

Climate change is an urgent challenge, and train travel is a key way for Wellington to cut pollution. I'm sick of accepting small improvements to the transport status quo. What could we do instead?

…we must think bigger

The political will is there for bigger changes. Voters elected people who promised better public transport. Bus replacement users tell their leaders that it's not good enough. If the will is there, but things aren't getting better, then we should change how we do bus replacements.

Councils, by and large, don’t do things themselves. Their job is to manage contracts with companies that do stuff. Waste, roadworks, rail repairs, running the buses, running the trains.

This system was made in the name of efficiency, and sacrificed know how within council. It's not working – if it was then bus replacements would be good.

Instead of contracting out skills, our regional council should run bus replacements themselves.

Imagine if the council bought 80 electric buses and ran them themselves. Hire the drivers, choose the schedule, run the buses directly. Improvements could be implemented directly rather than through a convoluted contract.

This is all available in law, too. I scrounged and found that in the dying days of the last Labour government, councils were given permission to run their own transport operations.

Unless the Council severely fucks it up, it will only be improvements to the bus replacement system. The bar is literally on the floor.

I wish I could say “stop replacing trains with buses”, but I can’t. We need to fix our neglected tracks, and the only way to do so is by replacing trains with buses sometimes.

Citizens clearly want better services. Politicians who are serious about climate change shouldn’t respond to their demand with minor tweaks. It clearly doesn't work.

This is a chance for our leaders to be creative and bold. By thinking bigger and running bus replacements themselves, fixing the tracks might not feel so bad.