Dunedin's school bus routes appear to be stabilising after a commercial school bus service closed, sending the system into chaos at the start of the school year.
At the time, pupils reported being crammed into crowded buses, being unable to board full buses and having to wait for another, and some buses only being available at inconvenient times.
Most affected schools and the Otago Regional Council said many of the issues had now been resolved, but some tweaking was still needed.
Otago Road Services ceased operating more than 20 dedicated school bus services around the city at the end of last year when Go Bus took over the Ministry of Education-funded routes.
The regional council provided route extensions to the Dunedin public transport network to support pupils who were not covered by other bus services, but many families said they had been left without a reliable means of getting their children to school.
Yesterday, Taieri College principal David Hunter said the situation appeared to have been resolved and it no longer presented difficulties for his pupils getting to school in Mosgiel.
A pupil, who declined to be named and travels from Mosgiel to school in central Dunedin each day, also said the issues had been mainly resolved but there had been intermittent overcrowding on one or two bus trips.
However, Queen’s High School principal Barbara Agnew and King’s High School deputy rector Darin Smith said there were still some transport issues for pupils coming into South Dunedin schools.
Ms Agnew said a lot of the issues had been resolved but there were still some to sort.
"Most of the existing issues are related to inconvenient timings for some transport services.
"It’s taken a bit of time but I’m really happy with how the situation is being dealt with."
Otago Regional Council transport implementation lead Julian Phillips said staff were still seeing "significant uptake" of the school services that had been added to the Orbus network.
"ORC is continuing to closely monitor capacity and is liaising regularly with the affected schools, as well as the Ministry of Education and community boards.
"We’re grateful to schools, students and parents for their patience and for the way they have adapted to these services, registering and using Bee Cards and learning their new routes.
"We are reviewing the potential for further minor variations to routes in future, to support more school connectivity within the public transport network."
