Yesterday I ventured out after 8 weeks of isolation. I worked from home all through Alert Levels 2 and 3 so haven’t caught any buses, but yesterday I needed to catch the bus into the office, so thought I’d share what it’s like now.
Buses are running to their regular timetables again now, they have returned to regular front-door boarding.
The buses are still free, which was quite nice. But they do have significantly reduced capacity. No one is allowed to stand, and 60% of the seats are out of bounds. With the reduced capacity, Ecan are saying”
“If you have a choice, we ask that you avoid travelling at our peak times of 7am – 9am and 2.30pm – 5.30pm, weekdays.“
You can voluntarily register your trip to make contact tracing easier. You do this by going to the Ecan website and manually typing in the bus number, or calling a phone number.
Window seats have these stickers:
Aisle seats and the front 2 rows have these stickers:
I caught the 60 in at 9:00am. It was busy but not over-capacity. I counted 12 people on board: I’d estimate it’s new reduced capacity would be about 15.
Overall it was really easy and good experience. The worst part about it was the walk from the bus stop to the office. I had to dodge an unfinished patch, a VMS sign and an illegally parked ute all just in one block. Am looking forward to CCC starting up their parking enforcement again to get rid of some of this stuff.
TALKING TRANSPORT 
Thanks for posting! The sad thing is that most buses I have seen over the past few years would have easily coped with the most stringent social distancing regulations. We need a game changer to get people out of their cars and into buses. Public transport needs tick all boxes, it needs to be faster, more convenient and cheaper than traveling by car.
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Yep and it needs funding to do that.
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