Wellington commuters will notice fewer buses around the Capital after Metlink made the decision to suspend 67 services because of a driver shortage.
Exclusive figures released to AM on Tuesday morning reveal in August, eight percent of the services were cancelled - that's 7969 in total. In the year to August, more than 30,000 bus services were cancelled.
The amount of cancelled services has skyrocketed this year. In January, only 1.6 percent of trips were cancelled, which increased to 5.5 percent in March before jumping to 8.8 percent in August.
Metlink said from Monday, 67 trips on the network will be temporarily suspended to improve the reliability of service for bus customers during the driver shortage.
Morning and afternoon peak trips will be suspended across 14 Wellington city bus routes, with the Metlink website and app detailing the trips affected.
"So it's a really small percentage of the total number and the reason for that is to try to provide some more certainty for our customers. We kind of like I guess sacrificing frequency for reliability," Metlink general manager Samantha Gain told AM co-host Ryan Bridge.
She added Metlink isn't sure when the 67 routes will resume and they're 120 bus drivers short of their full amount of 650.
She told AM the number of cancellations is starting to reduce and hopes the measures in place will help.
"We have seen a peak around that time [August], which was also being contributed to, we think by COVID and COVID-related illness and people being away, not only the drivers but also other people in the bus depots," she told AM.
"So it's a bad situation, we are seeing that tail off a bit now and we are putting in these temporary suspensions in order to try and manage certainty for our customers."
Metlink has written to Immigration Minister Michael Wood to ask him to change the settings to allow more drivers into the country.
Wood said the threshold for most of the immigration settings is based around New Zealand's median wage of $27.76 per hour, which is higher than what bus drivers are paid in Wellington - $27 an hour.
Gain said they're looking at different ways to attract more drivers to address the shortage, which includes increasing a driver's wage.
"There's quite a lot of work going on around bus driver conditions and how they might be improved to make bus driving an attractive career to bring more people in as a recruitment exercise as well and we're involved with that work," she said.
"I think we are likely to see the wages will go up. We wouldn't be advocating at all for the median wage to go down to enable that threshold to be met by us."
Watch the full interview with Samantha Gain above.
