Shambles for visitors by bus

I PUT our son on a bus yesterday.

Well, I didn't exactly assist him to his seat ... as a 20-year-old he's more than capable of finding his way aboard.

He was off to Auckland to have his hearing not tested, but challenged (some sort of rock event he and a mate got tickets for).

No, I didn't put him on the bus, I dropped him off in the street.

Literally in the street.

Because the little Art Deco jewel of the east does not have a depot. It used to, a vast and relatively hospitable spread down Munroe St, but the lease dissolved and that was that.

Now it's a row of hard wooden bench seats, stained with spilled beverages and foods and carved with the names of the bored and the idle.

Mind you, there's nothing else to do while waiting for someone else to stumble over your baggage.

The backdrop is a concrete wall. It is sort of white with a patchwork of cream and grey-coloured splodges to hide the graffiti attacks.

Further along is a wall of posters promoting events and concerts. They are multi-layered and torn.

One's view while attempting to read the paper in a strong wind is of a large vacant property across the road. It is festooned with real estate signage and a small notice letting people know the former occupants have shifted elsewhere ... to Hastings.

Unlike buses and local authorities charged with providing a comfortable and welcoming place for passengers to embark and disembark, at least those former occupants found somewhere suitable.

In a strong easterly, and with rain in the air, the assembled throng are at risk of saturation.

In the dry, mild conditions, they are simply at risk of wondering how they were plunged into a scene from a busy market in Shanghai or New York.

Bodies and baggage were all over the wafer-thin footpath when I dropped the kid off. Pedestrians walking Dalton St simply had to cross the road ... there was no way through.

It is a shambolic slalom course.

I have been on buses across the rest of New Zealand, Australia, Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, China and Japan ... and I do not recall one city not having what could be described as a terminal, or depot.

They sold coffee and snacks. They had telephones. And they had walls and a roof!

Napier has got a footpath.

Mind you, they've put up an information board which says "you are here" and it tells you where things are nearby.

We are a tourism soaked city ... it is our main bread and butter in summer. And we have a footpath for bus visitors to admire as they arrive and leave.

There is a huge, often unused, carpark area beside the old Marineland. A cafe, a small waiting terminal and voila ... we could be back in the 21st century again!

Anywhere ... but a footpath.