Auckland Transport Discontinued The 347 Bus
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At the end of 2016, Auckland Transport discontinued the 347 bus route which went from Britomart, through Onehunga and Mangere to Manukau and back again. This discontinuation turns my one-bus commute home into a three-bus or one-train-and-a-three-point-two-kilometre trek from the CBD to Papatoetoe. It was a very inconvenient and, in my case, expensive bus death.
The demise of the 347 route reminded me of the two thousand or so times that I sat on that bus. My first time on a public bus was my second day of high school. My older sister walked me to the bus stop at 7:10am where we waited for half an hour because the buses ran on their own time. Later that month, she moved to Australia to be with her boyfriend while he played professional…show more content… They always had headphones in and grumpy looks on their faces, which I could understand because the bus was consistently full, consistently humid and consistently off time. I started copying their hairstyles. They would bobby-pin the middle section of their hair back or braid sides of the front and join each braid together at the back like some sort of high schooler turned handmaiden or fairy princess hybrid. I thought they were so cool, the opposite of me, and I bumped into them on Facebook.
I don’t know how else to describe our, not quite, first encounter. I was on my Facebook feed, long before I blocked every page and person that was unrelated to Harry Potter or Taylor Swift, and Dorothy of primary school had posted a status about how nice it had been to see Mia and Liana again. I don’t know why I decided to look into these people but I did. I looked at every picture that I could, without adding them, and conclusively concluded that these friends of Dorothy of primary school were the pretty twins from the bus. The next day I sat at the back of the bus with the twins. They told me later that we’d actually gone to Kedgley Intermediate together, they were the identical twins that my primary to intermediate frenemy challenged me to differentiate. I can tell them apart now, by the way.
Once I had Mia and Liana, my bus trips were much more entertaining. We made friends with Patrick, who once accidentally caught the morning school