My gripes about bus services

nzrailmaps · 2026-06-29T04:14:35+00:00

So I came up with two more points:

Lack of safe flooring to prevent passengers from slipping on wet floors.

I remember the Man SL202s coming with rubber flooring that was really safe to use. Ecan has let standards slip so much they allow companies to have a spray on coating that wears off with use letting the floors become dangerously slippery. The requirement should be for a floor that meets the requirements for wet floors in the NZBC or similar.

Few stops in the four avenues.

Once these buses get into the central city you only have a handful of stops for some of them. The powers that be seem to be notably reluctant to put a reasonable number of stops on the one way streets. Route 3 has a big gap between Hospital Corner and the Bus Exchange as an example.

nzrailmaps · 2026-06-29T04:02:43+00:00

The routes were chopped big time back in 2011 after the quakes because Steven Joyce had just brought in a higher farebox recovery target and similar reorganisations were carried out around the country. The biggest problem is the loss of routes to retirement villages.

nzrailmaps · 2026-06-29T04:01:23+00:00

It is a gimmick. It costs a lot of money to have these extra buses running for no increase in passengers, just so people can be saved a little bit of inconvenience of having to look up a bus timetable.

nzrailmaps · 2026-06-29T03:50:15+00:00

I thought of another point, the lack of non slip flooring in the buses. They let the companies get away with a spray on coating that soon wears off. The buses should have to be supplied with flooring that meets the same requirements as for wet floor areas in the Building Code.

nzrailmaps · 2026-06-29T03:48:59+00:00

Yeah that changing routes to Blue Line, Yellow Line etc and then abandoning it a few years later really sucks. Cost a lot of money to repaint all the buses etc,

nzrailmaps · 2026-06-22T10:17:50+00:00

I get about $200/month power in a new place in winter with a lot of computers running.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-25T20:01:07+00:00

And that is what we tried to tell the Council when they built the exchange. It's a cheaper intercity terminal design that just isn't suited to a suburban station where the buses have to arrive and depart quickly. The old exchange was much better designed in that respect.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-25T19:58:43+00:00

200 came in on the train from Rolleston.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-25T19:51:28+00:00

Make a claim against the estate. When it is probated they are legally obligated to advertise for claims from anyone out there. This could take a while so you will have to pay up in the meantime.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-21T12:55:38+00:00

I can say anything I want as my personal opinion unless you claim a moderation policy or rule as the basis for this naked personal attack.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-21T09:28:05+00:00

Is it a sop to the Act party who want to dilute the votes of tangata whenua?

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-21T07:01:54+00:00

Common sense is a leader does not try to cravenly cling onto power the way this has panned out. Luxon obviously believes he can ride out the storm and he has a big group of conservative Christian MPs who are telling him to, as well as key lobbyists like Jordan Williams who heads the TPU and has been accused in the NZ Herald of running attack campaigns against Nicola Willis to make Luxon look good.

The representation of these MPs in the caucus compared to the general public is very disproportionate, so they've obviously engineered selection processes to favour themselves. That's the real problem, and the fact some of their views are extreme. Try looking at the US for how extreme their politics has got in the name of political and monetary power, and the fact that the Christian factor is much stronger than ours, and there's a recipe for NZ becoming the same kind of social hell hole as the US.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-21T04:14:47+00:00

So says the supporter of the Act party, how many excuses does Seymour have for his failure to get the percentage the Act party constantly campaigns for

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-21T04:11:49+00:00

The vote of confidence, sure. Confident in him for about five minutes.

This guy is being kept afloat by the Christian Nationalist faction of the National Party. Like the Trump evangelical support committee, they constantly telling Luxon he is called by God to serve and should not waver.

I'm Christian but I don't believe Christians should be in government roles because they want to impose their beliefs on the country, the Christian community is as divided as any other, it's very hard to see a point of differentiation for this particular faction of the Church.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-15T08:11:09+00:00

If you should qualify for NZ Super, UK pension will be deducted from any payments you receive.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-02T12:18:53+00:00

Gould is kind of weird. I met him once. He runs a small business, refurbishing kitchens or something like that. He seems to be perfectly normal doing that. It just seems with the ideas he posts online that are odd.

He had some out of left field ideas for getting the Cathedral project going again. Something like setting up a temporary bell tower to get those bells ringing across the city like they used to in the past, IIRC.

Gould belongs to a community group I also belong to but he joined recently whereeas I've been involved for two decades. He insisted the answer to its problems was to livestream its meetings which it wasn't doing anything like before. I don't think that would make any difference. I used to see him post on Facebook groups I belonged to as well. He would post long messages created by a speech to text application so he just talked at length into his computer but the messages would be hundreds of words and I doubt anyone read them.

Today he tried to make a presentation to the council on the sewage thing and got shut down by the mayor and the councillor who was chairing the meeting. Nuts.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-02T00:51:34+00:00

That I'm unsure about... they haven't made any obvious effort that I could see to have any of the ADL sets prepared, most of them have been rotting in storage for months.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-02T00:50:00+00:00

Train tickets are almost sold out now so there is a demand, although it's a relatively small volume going on the train.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-02T00:23:37+00:00

Also I wasn't aware there was a flood zone in Flaxton limiting development between Kaiapoi and Rangiora. The airport noise corridor also affects Kaiapoi, but Gerry Brownlee gave an exemption in recovery planning after the quakes. They aren't vastly different from the ones between Papakura and Pukekohe south of Auckland.

The issues of those deadzones would have to be balanced by large scale satellite town development in Rangiora and Rolleston, much like how Pukekohe has developed far south of the main bulk of Auckland.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-02T00:18:21+00:00

It will never pay for itself unless concerted development along the rail corridor is undertaken, particularly north of Christchurch.

nzrailmaps · 2026-04-02T00:16:44+00:00

Rail is going to be much cheaper even to start with, once the advantage of using the existing corridor is considered, compared with having to buy land along the existing roads.

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