Right, I have nothing to do tomorrow afternoon, so I am thinking that I shall go out to Lower Hutt to look at a car I found on the Turners website. The sweet irony here is that I need to use public transport to get there. I got awfully sick at the end of the holidays, so was unable to drive back from Whangarei so instead flew, which was dissapointing as I had been missing having a car all year, and thus was stuck without one for a further nine weeks. But that’s ok as I never leave the city and everything I need is within twenty minutes walking distance from where I live.

However, the car I wish to look at is the exact one I would like to buy, if I can sell mine over the holidays, so I feel that I should really have a good look at one in the flesh. To get to Lower Hutt I have two options, I can use a combination of bus and train or just a bus. So to plan my route I
decided to use the handy dandy route planner on the metlink website. First of all it is incomptent. Just like the bus service, you punch in your depart time and about five times it came back saying that “2:00″ is an incorrect time. How? I mean how the hell can 2:00 not be a time. Then I finally got a result and realised that it was set up in 24 hour time not 12. Feeling a tad embarrased I punched in 14:00. Again, this is not a valid time! Why not? After two goes this time it worked.

It gave me a nice list of where to catch the bus, which one to catch, how long it will take. But the thing that pissed me off the most was that it told me to walk! I can accept that it is unreasonable to expect to be picked up and dropped off by a bus at your exact destination. But being told to walk, by the public transport website just infuriated me. How dare it tell me what time to walk! At 1.03 walk to bus station, at 1.04 get on bus (I said I wanted to leave from the bus station). How dumb can the person who designed the website be? I mean if people are too stupid to figure out they have to get onto a bus they clearly can’t use the internet.

Once I got to Lower Hutt it told me to get off the bus and catch another one back in the direction I came from, and the bus ride only lasts one minute. Wouldn’t it be logical to get off at the stop before I change buses. In fact if its telling me to walk, why not let it tell me to walk from where I changed buses, by looking at the map it’s hardly far. This in effect proves that public transport is incompetent. I shall find out tomorrow if it is useless.

Now you may say that I am a typical National voter etc blah blah, doesn’t care about the environment etc etc. Well I shall have you know, the car that I am going to look at has a smaller engine than my Toyota, therefore is cheaper to run, the engine is newer and hopefully better maintained therefore less emissions. See I am looking at  a BMW for entirely environmental reasons. And you thought I didn’t care.