“Chaos” or Merely “Tough Nut”?

Tue, Jan 22 2013

/HB Today calls it: “Bus stop chaos in Napier”.

Barbara Arnott calls it: “A tough nut to crack”.

Apparently MUCH too tough to crack for a four-term mayor and a decades-serving chief executive — both long in the tooth — backed by twelve somnambulant councillors.

None of these Napier braintrusters can find a suitable place, properly equipped with amenities, for inter-city bus passengers to use.

Too tough to crack? Ridiculous. It’s clearly way beyond their pay grade. God forbid Napier was confronted with a genuinely complex challenge.

Oh, I forgot. According to Napier Council folklore, local bodies don’t deal with big picture stuff anyway … things like economic development, social well-being of a poor, struggling population, or even getting beach protection right. We shouldn’t expect too much of them … especially when it comes to buses (consider their $1 million Deco imports).

Here’s why the mayor and Napier Council aren’t getting the bus stop problem out of reverse gear … they dismiss bus travelers as low-life. Simply not a priority.

Bus travelers are not up-market cruise ship passengers; nor do they live on Napier hills with views. Those are the constituency to which the NCC royal court responds.

Instead, bus travelers are mostly everyday people for whom bus travel is the only affordable alternative. The Council could care less about these folks.

As Bruce Bisset would say, that’s the right of it.

Tom Belford
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ENDS

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