‘Too much, Magic Bus’

At least when The Who sang their song about it, they could reasonably expect the bus to show up unlike in Auckland.

The old saying about buses – you wait and wait and then three come along at once is now sadly redundant. Anyone seeing three in a day, let alone at once, is advised to get an urgent blood test for hallucinogens.

At a time when most councils are doing their utmost to get drivers out of cars and onto public transport, some councils are also making it harder to catch buses.

Just a day after the government agreed to heavily subsidise bus drivers’ wages to help ease the desperate labour shortage, Auckland’s transport wallahs announced a move that managed to be both brute-realist and contrary at the same time. In order to safeguard the bus service’s dependability, they would cancel 12% of scheduled bus trips.

“Tough on buses, tough on the causes of buses” seems a peculiar ethos for these times, and admittedly it takes a bit of getting one’s head around. It helps to think of it in the same vein as the previous government’s claim that surgical waiting-list numbers had dropped, when it had simply purged the lists. The bus swifty is roughly

an inversion of this, and no less maddening. Auckland Transport is stopping putting buses for which it doesn’t have drivers on the bus timetables. Until now, it’s advertised a schedule of routes and times while constantly cancelling a proportion of trips. Now, it’s only scheduling buses it knows will be driven.

That, AT says, will make the bus service “more reliable”. This is rather a heroic characterisation of the fact that it’s simply ceasing the pretence that about 1000 phantom bus trips might magically become real.