A further 114 trips on the Metlink bus network will be temporarily suspended from Sunday 20 November to provide greater
certainty for customers during the national bus driver shortage.
80 trips are being taken off Wellington city routes with the remaining 34 coming from Porirua city routes.They comprise
60 weekday and 54 weekend trips.
Service alerts on the Metlink website and app will list the suspensions, and they will be shown struck out on the online
timetables, allowing customers to plan ahead.
The suspensions follow the 67 trips paused in October to reduce frequency but improve certainty for bus customers.
While the suspended trips have been selected from different routes to those in October, they are again chosen from
higher frequency routes and those with lower patronage
Metlink is working with its operators to deploy larger buses onto affected routes to compensate for the lesser
frequency.
Operators will prioritise trips on the affected routes to avoid consecutive cancellations where possible.
Suspended trips will be reinstated as soon as our operators have the necessary number of drivers.
Metlink anticipates some of the suspended trips will restart during the summer holiday period, when school bus drivers
can be reassigned.
As Metlink remains short of 120 drivers to fully operate the bus timetable, ad hoc cancellations will unfortunately
still happen across the network.
Metlink encourages customers to check for suspensions and cancellations ahead of their journey by visiting the website
and app.