Road users in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland could be in for a stress-filled March as more people opt to drive their cars over taking public transport.
March is normally the peak traffic month on the super city's roads as school and university students head back to class, while workers return from summer leave.
Recent storms like Cyclone Gabrielle aren't the only thing making congestion worse than normal. Auckland Transport's (AT) metro optimisation manager, Richard Harrison, said ferries are one of the hidden reasons, as Fullers are short 36 staff.
"The challenge at Fullers is deckhands and skippers, and it may take some time to recruit extra skippers because of the substantial training requirements."
Harrison said AT is working hard to resolve staffing issues, including on buses where they're short 393 drivers - another major reason.
"Howick and Eastern added 34 new drivers in the last two weeks and are now at their full requirement of bus drivers," among other recent recruitments, he told Newshub.
AT will put on additional peak-time services, redirecting larger buses to the highest-demand routes like the Northern Express and route 27.
Bus and ferry patronage has returned to about 80 percent of pre-COVID levels on weekdays.
Despite that, policy director at the Automobile Association (AA) Martin Glynn said cancellations are rife.
"On various services, we're seeing quite a lot cancelled, but if it's not cancelled then it's late," Glynn told Newshub.
Glynn told Newshub that normally March is the peak month for traffic, but there's also a similar peak in November.
"It's incredibly hard to explain congestion when you have hundreds of thousands of people doing all kinds of things."
Train commuters are in for a tough year too as Kiwirail closes several Auckland train stations to repair and upgrade the network, stage by stage.
Since mid-January, six stations on the Southern Line and Ōnehunga Line have been closed, to reopen on March 19.
The end of March will see five stations close on the Eastern Line between Britomart and Ōtāhuhu, until December.
The Western Line wasn't untouched either, as Kiwirail staff discovered subsidence during a route inspection last October.
It's all part of a $330 million programme to get the rail network ready for the City Rail Link, expected to be operational in 2025.
But Glynn isn't too worried about the effect of train line closures versus other transport modes.
"About 12 percent of peak trips are public transport. It can definitely take the edge off congestion, but those train lines [out of action] won't have a city-wide impact," Glynn said.
Two-thirds of public transport trips go into the city centre and inner-city fringe suburbs like Parnell, Mt Eden, and Ponsonby, according to Glynn.
But he said: "The rest of Auckland is pretty vast. It will have localised impacts, but it's not going to have a huge impact on motorway networks."
Currently, every weekday sees nearly 15 percent of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland's bus services affected.
"Buses are much more significant [than trains]. They account for 75 percent of public transport trips."
Particularly the Northern Busway, "because many more people from the North Shore go to the city centre for work than other parts of the city," Glynn said.
Auckland Transport tweeted last week encouraging commuters to travel off-peak, which didn't go down well with Twitter users.
Last November, AT removed almost 1000 daily bus services to help reduce cancellations as winter illnesses hit the sector hard.
Some of those would-be commuters are simply choosing to drive instead of bothering with the hassle, but Glynn said there could be some respite in April.
"We've got school holidays, and we tend to have a lot of people taking holidays either side of Easter and ANZAC weekends, which provides some relief."
And Aucklanders will be hoping those holidays come sooner rather than later.
