A brief word on Auckland Transports appalling service

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Unknown-1

Dear Auckland Transport – I get on the bus, I get told old my card is no longer used, I buy a new card, transfer the old balance onto the new card & hop onto another bus only to be told they can’t use the new cards yet!!!

Imagine Kafka has taken over the public transport system and he’s in revenge mode.

It’s almost as if Auckland Transport want to purposely make their crap service even more crap – how is this possible? What staggers me is that Auckland Transport have 133 staff who are paid OVER $100 000 per year and 48 staff who are paid over $150 000 per year.

How can an organization pay themselves that level of renumeration for a service so pitiful and poorly organized? The drivers trying to negotiate increasingly congested motorways are paid a pittance and they sure as hell aren’t seeing any of the extra money supposedly going into public transport while price fare increases continue to gouge passengers.

It’s like Auckland Transport manage to warp not only the definition of the word ‘due’, they also seem to confound the rules of capitalism. How can a joyless service squeezed empty of any investment manage to pay so many staff so much for such little in return to the long suffering public transport users of NZ?

Screwed by privatization once again.

Cattle-trucks on their way to the abattoir provide better comfort.

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5 COMMENTS

  1. AT is a cabal of traffic engineers whose primary purpose, that is when not implementing the government’s national strategy to build more motorways, is to ensure that more single occupant private motor vehicles can dominate the roads of Auckland faster and more effectively. Walking, cycling and public transport are, in their considered, professional, opinion, marginal activities best left to politicians to employ in empty, rhetorical, gestures.

  2. You can blame NZ Bus too.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZ_Bus

    I suggest the Auckland City Council buy back the bus operator from NZ Bus – or better yet seize back from NZ Bus for failing to provide an adequate service.

    Wellington City Council should do the same – Wellington bus services have been going steadily downhill since they sold it off to Stagecoach in 1992. Prices have steadily ratcheted up over the last 15 years, faster than inflation, and the service these days is appalling. Buses are cancelled daily without warning.

    Recent Auckland Mayoral debates raised the point that it is cheaper to run a quality high-capacity reliable bus service FOR FREE than it is to continually upgrade the roading system for more single-passenger cars. I think it was John Minto that pointed this out. He was called “radical”. This isn’t radical. It’s ****ing sensible.

  3. While generally not a leftist, I favour wages 50% higher for ARC and Waka bus drivers because they do a difficult job professionally and quite a lot of them are of professional calibre or burnt out teachers I presume. Also they deserve higher wages as the bus system is the core of public transport and much lower cost passenger than the trains. In reality low wages for bus drivers are a cross subsidy to a train system unlikely to be successful as the rail routes are designed for freight and 100 years out of date particularly as much of the high paid CBD white collar type job and employees who pay high rail commutter rates have left for Aus, UK, NY or Silicon Valley.
    I also favour higher rates for a smaller number of competent hospital cleaners and orderlies. I suspect the various outbreaks of nasty infections and viruses in hospitals reflect inadequate cleaning and an inability of some of the staff to read notices and warnings.
    In all areas health, defence, and education and university I favour much higher pay for a smaller number of competent staff. The competent police and military officers would not so much get higher pay as the reward of the end of PC anti sex feminists restriction . In otherwords I regard McCain as a consistent sellout over KC 135, Tailhook and Obamacare.

  4. Sack the lot, and tell them to try getting a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s, if they do not succeed, they may eventually get “help” from Paula Bennett’s “Yellow Department” and get a subsidised job there or at any other fast food outlet.

    Yes, it is a shambles what is happening in public transport in Auckland, and I suspect that issue with “Snapper” is still casting shadows on the “hop flop” system.

    As for the trains, I know they still have technical issues with electronically controlled signal and other systems.

    My view that Auckland public transport is only little better (in part perhaps even worse) than what is available in underdeveloped countries overseas, has not been proved as wrong yet. I get confirmation almost every time I jump on a bus or train.

    Passengers put up with too much: Create a scene, I’d say, board buses and trains, occupy them, refuse to pay and take such protest actions, and see what they will do. If thousands do it, they will be stuffed, and they can forget their high salaries at Auckland Transport.

    But we are in “kind”, longsuffering and little, so considerate New Zealand, so almost nobody dares to rock the boat, and just puts up with any crap served up daily, be it by this by government, bureaucratic psychopaths or Auckland Transport and the service providers they are suppose to manage.

    Time for a wake up call, a rethink, a reality check and ACTION!

  5. It is probably, that all the money has gone into the new trains now, so that is why there is little money for anything else. The new trains will be challenged by trying to negotiate the still somewhat deficient track network, try to cope with often faulty signalling, will be equipped with ticketing systems that are also not quite what they should be, and hence the trains will look like a flash new BMW trying to drive up a mud track in the Amazon jungle.

    Forget also the pay for the drivers and other staff at the bottom, they are “undeserving”, due to not having studied accountancy, business management, engineering and the likes. They are the bottom slaves, like the untouchable cast members in Mumbai or Calcutta, and yes, some of them actually may come from there.

    Welcome to “the most liveable city”, Auckland City, where the top man is also struggling daily with his cheeky “trouser snake”. Modern in parts, but backwards in the fossil fuel time warp, that is what I see in the $uper City, little else.

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