Patronage on Auckland busses is about 83 percent of pre-Covid levels. Photo: Duoya Lu
Auckland Transport has announced an end to the city's bus driver shortage.
At the peak of the shortage, buses in Auckland were down 578 of the required 2306 drivers needed to operate the network.
AT metro optimisation manager Richard Harrison said it had recruited locally and internationally to end the shortage.
Harrison described it as great news for bus users.
He said patronage on Auckland busses was about 83 percent of pre-Covid levels.
Despite the good news for bus users, Harrison said the next focus was bringing the ferry service up to the same capacity.
"We are short of qualified skippers and deckhands, but we're working with the whole maritime industry to start training and upskilling more of their workers very soon," he said.
Harrison said it planned to use the same lessons learnt in ending the bus driver shortage to address the gaps with ferries.
"It was a big help from the government relaxing the immigration settings for bus drivers, and putting in that pathway to residency. We're applying those learnings to resolving the crisis in ferry," he said.
He said now that the bus network was stable, AT was looking to grow usage by making the service more attractive to those not using public transport.