Today (20th April), at about 5:50pm, I wanted to catch my usu­al bus, the #4 Happy Val­ley, from Wil­lis St, oppos­ite the Metro New World. I spot­ted it pulling away just as I arrived at the stop, so, think­ing to myself that I would prob­ably be able to catch up with it at one of the next two or three usu­ally busy bus-stops while it waited in a queue, I jumped on the next bus, showed my Gold Pass, and took a seat.

And, indeed, at the next stop, out­side the James Smith Mar­ket, the #4 was stuck behind anoth­er bus. As we pulled up to stop, I stood up to get off.

Upon com­ing to a stop, how­ever, the bus-driver refused to open the doors, and glared at me. After a few seconds, I had to ask what exactly was wrong. He refused to answer imme­di­ately, left the doors closed while a long queue of people stood out­side look­ing puzzled, rolled his eyes at me, and even­tu­ally asked me if I knew what bus I was on. I must admit, at the time, I did­n’t know, and admit­ted as much. He told me it was the #31 Miramar Express. This did noth­ing to enlight­en me as to why he was­n’t allow­ing me to get off and his oth­er poten­tial pas­sen­gers to get on. Finally, after anoth­er 30 seconds or so of glower­ing and mut­ter­ing at me, he told me to “read the bloody front of the bus before get­ting on next time” and opened the door. In all, he had taken about a minute off his ‘express’ trav­el­ling time to admon­ish me for get­ting off a bus that was stop­ping any­way. Nat­ur­ally, by this time, my #4 was long gone.

As far as I can tell from the Stage­coach timetable doc­u­ment­a­tion pub­lished by the Great­er Wel­ling­ton Coun­cil [pdf], the #31 does­n’t make stops from the end of Cour­tenay Place to the Mir­ar­mar Cut­ting. I would have thus thought I was with­in my rights get­ting off at a stop before Cour­tenay Place.

To that end, I would appre­ci­ate some con­firm­a­tion as to the exact details of my rights with regards to get­ting off the #31 before reach­ing the express sec­tion of the jour­ney.

I have been a Stage­coach pas­sen­ger for many years now, and buy a Gold Pass every month. The surly beha­viour of many bus drivers I usu­ally just put down to the fact that they have to deal with the nar­row roads of Wel­ling­ton and incon­sid­er­ate atti­tudes of oth­er drivers each day, and thus don’t usu­ally worry about it too much. But to have abus­ive lan­guage used against me for merely want­ing to get off a bus that had stopped to pick up pas­sen­gers any­way, has, for the first time, got me riled up enough to write this let­ter, which, I should let you know, will also be pub­lished on the wellingtonist.com web­site.

I look for­ward to hear­ing from you,

yours,

James Guthrie
wellingtonist.com

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UPDATE. An email of apo­logy has arrived, part of which reads…

Your points have been passed to the Depot Man­ager and the driver in ques­tion has been verbally coun­selled.

The Express only picks up from the rail, through to Court­ney Place [sic], from there it’s non-stop to Mirimar [sic]. The driver should have let you dis­em­bark when you reques­ted how­ever.

Verbally coun­selled? Obvi­ously it was a trau­mat­ic exper­i­ence for him as well then. The second para­graph does spell out that there is a pick-up rule only, so, tech­nic­ally, I was in the wrong. How­ever, for the life of me, I still can­not find where this rule is prin­ted on either the bus or on their web­site.