There were 68,000 journeys on Nelson Tasman’s new eBus service during it’s first month of operation, an impressive 68% increase compared with the average monthly usage from the last seven months (January to July) of NBus.

Xander (5), Jayden (7) and Hadley (5) and their mum Lisa are among the recent converts to travelling by bus.

"We had never used the bus before. I have a wee Mazda Demio and my partner has a big gas guzzling SUV, we used the eBus for the first time on launch day and haven’t looked back,” says Lisa.

“With the cost of putting petrol in two cars, we’ve just found it so much cheaper to use the bus, and we’ve been able to use the cost of petrol to do fun things with the boys instead.

“We use it in the mornings to take Xander and Jayden to school. We board route 3 from Victory, then change to route 2 at the Interchange and bus to school, it only costs me $1 each way because the boys are free and they love it, Hadley jumps up and down waving at the bus every time we see it.”

“We took it to see the Mako!” added 7-year-old Jayden.

Patronage on the service continued to climb across the month with a 16% increase from week one to week four. Between the launch of the service on Tuesday 1 August, and the end of the first month, Thursday 31 August, there was an increase of 675 journeys a day. The newly introduced Motueka and Wakefield routes are also proving to be popular with close to 3,000 journeys on the Motueka route alone across the month.

“These strong and growing numbers through the first month show the new eBus service is succeeding,” says Nelson Mayor Nick Smith.

“We want to encourage even more people to give it a try so the growth continues. Nelsonians’ budgets are under extraordinary pressure with petrol now nudging $3 a litre and using the eBus can help some family budgets.

“The eBuses have made a great start but there have been a few bumps. We are going to be continuing to improve the service with more covered shelters and refinements in timetables and routes.”

Nelson City Council has been asking for feedback on the timetable and bus stops and has received 231 contributions through Shape Nelson and 293 contributions through customer services.

“The transport and customer service teams are working through the submissions,” says Group Infrastructure Manager Alec Louverdis. “We now have four weeks of real-time data that we can use to refine our timetables and make improvements where possible. There are processes that both Councils now need to go through before we can implement any major changes, but we will be looking at one of the issues most commonly raised – an earlier Route 1 and 2 service from Nelson to Richmond."

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