Auckland Transport is being forced by reality to ditch part of the insanity it inflicted on Waiheke Island in its recent 'revamp' of our bus service, in which all it did was to make an arrogant and insane mess of it. It has been forced to restore a small part of what had been there and had worked for years.
Of course its spin in that article blames the 'shortage' of bus-drivers, when the real cause was its own worse-than-incompetent messing about, at our huge expense, which created a need for drivers that never used to exist and never should have existed. Bad design needed more buses and drivers than reality ever had.
But sociopaths/bureaucrats can never admit to their own blunders and fix them. Public servants can. Sociopaths/bureaucrats never can. They always have to pretend something, such as a shortage of drivers, or that their new action is only 'interim', or that their 'revamp' was based on 'rationale' when in fact it was entirely irrational, etc., etc. They blame anything and everything except the damned fools in their mirrors.
Those who design systems in which people are to work must always remember that they are not designing systems they are designing people's lives, and people matter. When they fail to remember that they will produce an evil mess. As AT has on Waiheke.
The mechanics of design must include three things. They must look for and eliminate bottlenecks; they must look for and eliminate imbalance between flows; and they must look for and eliminate wasted action. AT did the opposite. It created them.
It created traffic and pedestrian bottlenecks in Oneroa and Ostend, for example. And it made what was already the longest run longer, by taking the Blackpool loop off the Onetangi run and putting it on the Rocky Bay run, which made it impossible for the Rocky Bay bus to get round in time, so more buses were needed to cover that run. And the sudden jump in the number of buses showing 'Not in service' is glaring evidence of a huge amount of wasted effort, and thus yet more proof of very bad design. Then there is the hideously expensive vandalism in road-works all over the place.
What AT should do, what it must do, is restore the whole service, both logistically and physically, to what was there before it attacked it with its insanity. It must restore it to the sanity that was there before.
That means it should, it must:
1) Make the island's two routes--Onetangi and Rocky Bay--what they were last summer, but also restore the first part of the Onetangi route to what it was even further back, so that it again goes along Korora Road and Waikare Road and stops in front of Waiheke Real Estate, where there is room for two buses, off the main drag, and where there is a big paved area for lots of passengers to mill about (outside Lazy Lounge there is neither, so using that creates a traffic and pedestrian bottleneck)
2) Destroy all the vandalism it has perpetrated in road-works, especially Belgium Street and the stop outside Placemakers. Make those as they were, so that the Placemakers stop is again what it has long been--the island's only full transfer stop, through which all the buses pass in both directions in a very safe place. That means telling the bus company that the U-turn is again to be in the depot, period. And AT must abandon its nonsense (its 'rationale') that Belgium Street is a 'hub'. That is bunkum, that is folly, that is insanity, that thought has ruined the street and created unsafe situations for traffic and pedestrians.
3) Leave the organisation of the service wholly to good-hearted islanders.
Get off our island AT; sack yourselves off our island AT; and take your insanity, your sociopathy and your profligate vandalism with you. We need you like we need a bullet in the brain.
