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Hamilton’s bus service is reducing some services and putting up fares at the end of the week.
The changes involve:
- The removal of some services for the first and/or last trips of the day
- Changes and/or reductions to the number of trips on Friday nights
- Limiting of distances travelled to save on kilometres (for example, the Nawton bus will not travel all the way out to Tasman Rd before 7am or after 6.15pm. The cemetery section of the Silverdale service will become an “on demand” section, meaning the bus will only do that leg of the journey when passengers want to go to the cemetery)
- The Orbiter will finish an hour earlier at night.
Land transport operations manager Bevan Dale says the changes are based on a survey of demand -patronage data and feedback from bus drivers. “Any service changes that have been made are where the data has shown no one has been using the service. Hamilton residents have had over 12 months to prove to us that they will use these services so this decision has not been taken lightly.
“The changes will help ensure all city services are running efficiently while still maintaining a high quality service.”
Meanwhile, as in Auckland, Friday’s GST rise has prompted some fare changes.
Fares on Hamilton, Huntly, Raglan and Paeroa/Morrinsville services will all rise by 10 cents (the same amount as the lowest value coin).
“We are keeping rises to the minimum practical to ensure we cover the costs of the GST increase,” said Mr Dale.
But at the same time as the general fare increases, child fares are going up by 30 cents a trip.
This is mostly to do with the need to increase child fares to help pay for the extra school bus services being provided by EW, while a smaller part of the rise is due to the GST increase. Child BusIt card fares will rise from $1.30 to $1.60 and cash fares will rise from $1.80 to $2.10.
I reported recently us patronage had grown by 68% in Hamilton over the last 3 years.
Passenger trips leaping from just under 2.9 million annually to more than 4.8 million last year as new services progressively came on stream.
The Nightrider service has improved patronage to reach more than 1,000 passengers a month.
4 Comments
You don’t grow PT usage by making cuts and charging children higher fares.
This is PT backwards lesson 101. However, you can directly blame:
1) National Party for the capping of PT funding in the Waikato
2) Rate Control councillors who are anti PT. They wanted even more dramatic cuts than this.
There is an irony that they are only doing trips to the Cemetrey,
“The cemetery section of the Silverdale service will become an “on demand” section, meaning the bus will only do that leg of the journey when passengers want to go to the cemetery”
How does the bus know you want to be collected?
Cemetery trips are usually one-way
Yeah, very disappointing - I am not too fussed about cutting inefficient services IF you instead up other services to compensate for them (not necessarily in the same place or time). But this seems all cuts, only…
y do they need to put da bus prices up im quite happy paying $1.30 at the moment!!!
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr