Dear Wellington Regional Council,

I would like a breakdown of mileage covered by buses operated by GWRC/Metlink and its contractors, specifically with regard to the proportion of kilometres travelled in revenue service vs for other purposes.

Ideally, this would include:

* Approximately 10 years of data, in yearly or monthly increments
* Separated by operator, including bus companies no longer operating GWRC routes.
* Total fleet km travelled
* Fleet km travelled in revenue service
* Fleet km travelled in repositioning for revenue service; e.g. travelling from a base to the start of a route or vice versa, or from the end of one route to the start of another while not in service
* Fleet km travelled for charter service
* Fleet km travelled for rail replacement service
* Fleet km travelled for operational reasons outside the above, such as repositioning between bases, or for overhaul/maintenance.

If the data or subsets is available but in other formats (e.g. separated by individual bus chassis, or on an hourly rather than km basis, I would prefer the original data where practical.

If some of this information is only held by the operators, I would appreciate you requesting it from them.

Yours faithfully,

Aidan Thornton

Hi Alice,

Apologies, but FYI strips email addresses to avoid posting them publicly.

I realise that my request is a little broad. Ideally I'm looking to make things easy for you where possible :)

The basis of the request is that I noticed back during the major reshuffle in 2018 a significant increase in buses marked as 'not in service', driving on the motorway and in other locations. Previously I'd almost entirely seen not-in-service buses stationary, or very obviously at the start/end of a route. While this has reduced (I was told at the time it was partly due to new operators not yet having nearby stabling facilities), it's still ongoing.

With the current driver shortages, I'm wondering whether Metlink has investigated not just issues regarding the supply side (employing more drivers), but also whether the existing drivers are being used as effectively as possible - for example, route & timetable design taking into account stabling facilities, and buses being scheduled to go out-of-service near a maintenance facility when due for maintenance, vs paying drivers & using hours to relocated vehicles unnecessarily.

I'm concerned that, due to the present separation of all the different entities involved, detailed design like this is being missed, that may have been more present when the routes and facilities were mostly holdovers from Railways Road Services doing everything

Comparing the hours/km that are being driven by in service buses vs out of service buses, or in service km as a proportion of total odometer km, seemed like an obvious way to track this that Metlink probably already records. A breakdown of driver hours by cost centre could be another way of measuring this, but I suspect Metlink might not have access to that information as it's buried inside the private bus companies.

I hope that helps you?

Yours sincerely,

Aidan Thornton