LGOIMA: Every bus replacement from September 2017 to January 2026
Greater Wellington Regional Council has released monthly bus replacement service counts for all four Metlink rail lines from 2017 to January 2026, broken down by planned and unplanned disruptions, in response to this January 2026 LGOIMA request.
The government agency: Greater Wellington Regional Council
Requested: 19 January 2026
The question
Under LGOIMA, could I please request historical data on scheduled bus replacements for Metlink rail services from 1 July 2017 to present. Specifically, I'd like:
- Which days had bus replacements (any duration)
- Which rail line(s) were affected each day
- Whether planned maintenance or unplanned disruption
A spreadsheet with columns for date, affected line(s), and replacement type would be ideal, though monthly PDFs from the Metlink website archives would also work.
The LGOIMA response
Please find the data you have requested in Attachment 1. This data is filtered by date, planned buses and unplanned bus replacements, and line.
See the rail data
After my patronage LGOIMA request, this was the other shoe to drop. I am going to try figure out how much bus replacements are responsible for the decline in patronage we’ve seen on the rail network in Wellington.
I ain’t a data scientist though, so use this for what you please.
a lil description so people can find it
This Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act response from Greater Wellington Regional Council reveals the monthly count of planned and unplanned bus replacement services across Wellington’s four Metlink rail lines — Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, Johnsonville, and Wairarapa — from July 2017 to January 2026. The data shows persistent reliance on bus replacements, with the Hutt Valley and Kāpiti lines regularly exceeding 500–1,000 replacement services per month.
