Wellington’s bus stops don’t work for disabled people

Callum McMenamin — 5 August 2026

Wellington city frequently uses bus stop designs that are virtually impossible for blind and vision impaired people to use. Let’s take a look at the design failure.

Frequently, I try to catch a bus in Wellington and it drives past me.

I have vision impairment, which means:

• I cannot see bus numbers
• I cannot see if a bus is approaching
• I cannot wave down a bus because I do not see its numbers or the bus itself.

This sucks. I can’t drive a car and the bus system has been designed to exclude me.

What makes it even worse, is if I try to use my iPhone camera to help me identify a bus number, the dot-matrix LED displays use some odd multiplexing frequency which makes them impossible to read by device cameras — they can only be reliably read using human eyes. Damn it!

Below I have created a small (depressing) comic showing how I get left behind at bus stops while everybody else can enjoy the buses. It makes me feel excluded and angry.

The cursed long bus stops

Wellington frequently uses a horrible bus stop design, which I call a “long bus stop”. I think the technical term is a linear multi-bay bus stop.

Long bus stops allow multiple buses to enter the bus stop and queue in a line.

This means the bus you want could stop at a random point along the road, within a range of about 3-4 bus lengths.

This makes it impossible to predict where the bus you need will actually stop — the buses do not stop in a consistent location.

For people who can identify buses at a distance, this is not an issue. But for people who cannot, this means you basically cannot reliably use that bus stop.

I imagine this design also sucks for people with limited mobility, as the bus might stop 3 bus lengths away from you.

Long bus stop layout

In the graphic below you can see the typical layout of a “long bus stop”.

• I am the sunglasses emoji guy 😎 — my vision impairment means I always wear dark sunglasses.
• The smiley emojis 🙂 are sighted passengers.

I need to catch the 24

• I stand at the designated bus stop sign
• 3 buses are queued at the long bus stop
• Passengers with vision can see the 24 has stopped, 3 bus lengths away
• I do not know the 24 bus exists because I can barely see the bus directly in front of me

Sighted passengers walk to the 24

• Sighted passengers then board the bus they saw in the distance
• The bus driver assumes all passengers who want the 24 are now aboard

I am left behind

• The bus then drives past me while I stand at the bus stop
• I don’t know to wave because I can’t see the bus numbers
• It’s silly to expect me to wave at every single bus
• I get angry, frustrated, sad, and excluded 🥺

I have tried complaining and nobody takes me seriously

I decided to put the question to Metlink — how do they expect blind people to catch the bus?

Eight days later, Metlink’s response included this advice:

So, it’s fairly clear to me that Metlink has no clue how blind and vision impaired people are supposed to catch the correct bus.

Metlink’s staff appear to have a “theoretical” understanding of how they believe the bus system functions for blind people, which is not reflective of reality.

The official guide on catching a Metlink bus, which hilariously is not provided as a web page (only PDF and Word), is also completely devoid of practical truth, its singular page on accessibility states the following:

Now, this advice is completely useless. It simply isn’t true.

Also, I feel like I’m going crazy here, but the advice for blind people to wave the bus down seems to lack an understanding of the core concept of blindness: it means you can’t see the bus. This should not require explanation, but this is the cursed universe I’ve found myself in.

To confirm my issue isn’t “user error”, I decided to conduct an experiment.

• I stood at a multi-bay bus stop on Courtenay Place
• I stood exactly where the bus stop sign is
• I waited to see what buses do if they stop 2 or 3 bus lengths away in a queue

What did I discover?

Out of three buses that stopped 2-3 bus lengths away, zero buses stopped for me.

This is consistent with my continual lived experience of the issue.

What could be done to fix this?

When I lived in Melbourne, I never had this problem.

I would stand at a tram stop, and every tram would stop at the same location.

Trams would simply queue, and each tram would wait with open doors at the platform.

If this solution can work for a city of 5 million, it can surely work for Wellington.

There are also innovative tech solutions like Hailo — which lets you hail buses by selecting the bus you want in an app. It notifies the driver that they need to pick up someone from the stop, so they don’t drive past.

It’s 2026. This should not be a problem.

It makes me so sad that this is how I have to live my life. That even catching a bus can be a scary, unreliable, unpredictable experience. We clearly have the technology to solve this problem, and nobody has bothered to try.

So, what do I have to say to Metlink, NZTA, and the council?

Please, please, please stop treating accessibility as an abstract theory. Your guidance and rules need to be grounded in actual physical reality. You need to hire blind people into your organisation, because it seems to lack lived experience of disability. Just because you write something down in a PDF, doesn’t make it true.

Your bus system doesn’t work for me. And it needs to change.

— Callum