Auckland buses are not safe

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#3453651 16-Jan-2026 17:31

pdh:

>Our society seems to be getter (sic) more violent in general though

Not saying that I'd like to live in Singapore - or Dubai - but societies' decisions have consequences.
Our decisions over the past 60 years have all been in the direction of condoning bad behaviour...
So we have more of it.

Singapore & Dubai are ridiculously safe - unless you engage in bad behaviour...
Then you are taught very quickly to stop it.

I admire what we have achieved (in Auckland) with the bus-way and improved train infrastructure...
But I sincerely hope that it is all obsolete within 10 years.
15 at the outside.

Combine the concept of uber with fully self-driving vehicles and you get a much better and lower-cost mass transit system than is possible with bus-ways and trains. They are/were 19th century tech. Cars are/were 20th C tech.

When 21st C tech (self-driving uber) gets here, we'll see these benefits

(a) you are at greatly reduced risk of unpleasant human interaction
(b) you get to door-to-door, dry, warm & private service
(c) you don't need urban or station car parks - or on-street parking
(d) you have minimal empty seats
(e) you can have full bus-way lanes... instead of them being 5% utilised
(f) you have no single-point-of-failure - except (maybe) the app
(g) you can transport big parcels / luggage / multiple bags of shopping / prams / pets
(h) you could choose to reduce your cost by intelligent (safe) ride-share
(i) you will benefit from speed increases - as self-driving becomes as safe as elevators
(j) you will only bother with urban private car use - as a mark of extreme wealth/luxury

Perhaps the biggest attraction is that it will cease to be a government monopoly.
Hopefully !

This whole post really is quite silly. Comparing a rapidly growing city state with +90% guest workers to a relatively mature western democracy doesn't make sense. The whole reason most of us are in Dubai is opportunity. When a lot of that opportunity has become very hard to access in western democracy it's hardly surprising that things are different. New Zealand can't just deport it's problems.

As for the fantasy that self driving vehicles can scale to replace mass transit it's just that - fantasy. Personal vehicles are always going to be less efficient at moving large numbers of people due to passenger density. They just can not scale.

SpartanVXL

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#3453797 17-Jan-2026 13:21

The one thing true self-driving can do is reduce traffic times. Humans are terribly inconsistent at driving, just take a look at Auckland anytime something minor happens e.g. water falling from the sky.

johno1234

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#3453858 17-Jan-2026 21:34

SpartanVXL:

The one thing true self-driving can do is reduce traffic times. Humans are terribly inconsistent at driving, just take a look at Auckland anytime something minor happens e.g. water falling from the sky.

This is correct. Simple skills such as maintaining proper spacing and merging smoothly are beyond many drivers which greatly impedes traffic flow. Self driving cars should do better.

gzt

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#3453865 17-Jan-2026 22:20

insane:
I've been taking the bus to work several times a week for the last 4 years and have only had a couple mildly uncomfortable moments. If I ever did feel sufficiently unsafe I would just move to another seat and/or get off the bus and take the next one. But I appreciate I'm not representative of most passengers or someone likely to get creeped on by another guy. Our society seems to be getter more violent in general though, or perhaps it's just more visible with social and digital media.

I get the feeling recent incidents and weird behaviour are a combination of drug use and mental illness. Sometimes at the same time. That won't really be known until the recent incidents come up in court. Housing stress and increasing suburban homelessness isn't going to help any of that either.

gzt

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#3453866 17-Jan-2026 22:29

johno1234: What’s the solution? The bus fare is already too expensive so there’s no way they can afford to put security staff on them. All I can think of is more cameras and aggressive investigation and prosecution of all offensive behaviour.

Some minor campaign encouraging people to report the low level incidents will probably help. From there the routes and times affected will become pretty clear. In some cases the pattern is going to be obvious and relatively easy to deal with on that basis.

That does need some kind of strategy and plan behind it.

It seems like something the mayor's office could usefully create and bring together.

Linux

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#3453867 17-Jan-2026 22:30

More passengers attacked unprovoked

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/police-appeal-after-person-injured-in-an-unprovoked-attack-on-onehunga-bus/N7WCETYKTFEWDBMAWGCMB7D22Y/

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gzt

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#3453868 17-Jan-2026 22:39

johno1234: My daughter relies on the bus to get to her job. Her route seems less troublesome but it makes me worry.

I'd guess the usual commuting times with a bus full of average people is going to have safety in numbers.

Eva888

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#3453884 18-Jan-2026 09:26

Arthritis or stiff neck muscles because of crooked sleeping can often require carrying Deep Heat spray in ones bag.

pdh

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#3454314 19-Jan-2026 15:29

>As for the fantasy that self driving vehicles can scale to replace mass transit it's just that - fantasy. Personal vehicles are always going to be less efficient at moving large numbers of people due to passenger density. They just can not scale.

Well silly me !

Small independent (but smart) unmanned aerial vehicles could never replace heavy WWII bombers - they just couldn't scale.
What was I thinking ?

A modern bus is 1.5 to 2 million $NZ (if AI is to be believed) and carries 100. A modern robo taxi (already running in trials) might cost of about 60% of a Model 3 Tesla - say 40K $NZ - and carry 4. So - half the capital cost per passenger.

Running costs for the 25 smaller vehicles will be higher (at peak times) and much lower at off-peak times.

Add in the savings implicit in door-to-door service (no need for parking, other vehicles, etc) and those 'running costs' improve.

The driver of the bus (3 shifts) will cost you 200,000 per year - with employment overheads of perhaps another 100,000.

That saving of 1000 $ per day will also help with the running costs.

If you believe this is fantasy, then you just haven't been paying attention to how tech disrupts.

Handle9

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#3454363 19-Jan-2026 16:02

Guess what, UAVs haven’t replaced bombers. In fact the US is refurbing their B52s and expect to keep flying them into the 2050s.

The type of driver doesn’t affect the saturation problem with personal transport. At rush hour you need huge numbers of cars as a large proportion of the population wants to travel at the same time. The roads saturate, you haven’t got enough vehicles to satisfy demand and everything grinds to a halt in gridlock.

Everywhere in the world is investing in mass transit because it can move much higher numbers of people more quickly than any type of car.

johno1234

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#3454370 19-Jan-2026 16:44

Handle9:

Guess what, UAVs haven’t replaced bombers. In fact the US is refurbing their B52s and expect to keep flying them into the 2050s.

The type of driver doesn’t affect the saturation problem with personal transport. At rush hour you need huge numbers of cars as a large proportion of the population wants to travel at the same time. The roads saturate, you haven’t got enough vehicles to satisfy demand and everything grinds to a halt in gridlock.

Everywhere in the world is investing in mass transit because it can move much higher numbers of people more quickly than any type of car.

A significant part of the gridlock problem is driver incompetence. The theoretical throughput of Auckland roads and motorways is much higher than that realised because idiot drivers don't know how to merge or keep correct spacing or change lanes or stay in an appropriate lane.

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richms

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#3454373 19-Jan-2026 16:54

johno1234:

A significant part of the gridlock problem is driver incompetence. The theoretical throughput of Auckland roads and motorways is much higher than that realised because idiot drivers don't know how to merge or keep correct spacing or change lanes or stay in an appropriate lane.

I would say its the crapness of the traffic lights. Plenty of times you can be sitting at an intersection waiting on a red turning arrow with noone coming in any direction for up to 45 seconds. AT have an incentive to not make cars flow freer since that means that it makes the bus look more attractive.

Richard rich.ms

johno1234

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#3454421 19-Jan-2026 17:51

richms:

johno1234:

A significant part of the gridlock problem is driver incompetence. The theoretical throughput of Auckland roads and motorways is much higher than that realised because idiot drivers don't know how to merge or keep correct spacing or change lanes or stay in an appropriate lane.

I would say its the crapness of the traffic lights. Plenty of times you can be sitting at an intersection waiting on a red turning arrow with noone coming in any direction for up to 45 seconds. AT have an incentive to not make cars flow freer since that means that it makes the bus look more attractive.

I agree. I am sure I have mentioned this before and someone who works in that area swore black and blue that dumb traffic lights like that were extremely rare in Auckland!

Lias

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#3455104 22-Jan-2026 15:20

My 2 cents: This is just a symptom of removing corporal punishment from our homes, schools and society as a whole and drinking the koolaid of the Greens, Howard League etc on punishment. Kids are not scared of their parents, teachers, or the police. Bring back the cane, the strap, the hiding from your dad when he gets home and the kick up the arse from the local copper's size 10.

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Kookoo

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#3455692 25-Jan-2026 02:17

Buses are definitely not safe. My daughter and her friend frequently catch a daytime bus and there's an incident at least twice a week. Some random addict giving them grief, teens vaping and abusing everyone on the bus, people with mental health issues scaring everybody.

My two cents - it seems that the drivers are now trained to ignore these situations because the police no longer have the resources to deal with it anyway. The problems themselves are nothing new, but in the past the driver would park the bus, call the cops, and tell the culprits the police are on the way. That would either calm them down or they'd do a runner - either way problem solved. Now the drivers just keep going - probably because they've been trained that way. It doesn't help that many of the drivers are now immigrants whose English is so far from perfect that they struggle to tell you the destination, never mind trying to reason with some troublesome drunk cuz.

Hello, Ground!

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