Dear AT,

Your plans for Blockhouse Bay seem to be to turn our much loved suburb’s main shopping area into a bus carpark. This is a very unsafe idea. Along this stretch of road is a school, Plunket and a Playcentre as well as it being an area many intermediate and high school students walk through. Buses parked along Blockhouse Bay Road  would make visibility difficult for getting out of the library and also make it hard to see people/children who might step out from the footpath, this is a very busy pedestrian area.

Solution: Do not terminate your buses at Blockhouse Bay.

As you have acknowledged Blockhouse Bay is a growing area so please extend the route that currently terminates at Blockhouse Bay to terminate at New Lynn bus depot. There your drivers will have access to bathrooms and staff room facilities plus Lynmall is right there if they need to buy lunch. 

With Blockhouse Bay being a growing area we need a feeder bus to bring us to the train station. If your buses took different routes to New Lynn - Gilfillan, Kinross, Taylor and Bolton and then along Portage the increased trips to New Lynn would result in more people being able to access the train system, particularly useful along Bolton street where the government are building more pensioner state houses in the near future. 

The lack of parking at Blockhouse Bay would push cars to the side streets meaning school children and Playcentre members would have further to walk which is hard for small children. It also doesn’t make sense to remove a bus stop outside a school/Plunket/Playcentre and move it across a busy road which young children would then need to cross, it’s far safer to avoid them needing to cross by leaving the bus stop outside the school and just along from the Plunket and Playcentre. 

Taking the carparks would hurt our local businesses. We love our local businesses and want carparks to stay so their customers can easily reach them or they’ll go elsewhere.

We look forward to having feeder buses to the train station. Given you won’t need to spend the money you were going to on all the changes, please can you use that money to put a bus shelter at the bus stop on Donovan near Lewis so bus users and walkers have some shelter when it rains and also a zebra crossing on Donovan near Whitney. 

Thank you.