Auckland’s public transport fleet has flooded social media algorithms with content created by fan-created pages. Could Auckland Transport have dreamed of better free promo?
It’s another morning waiting at a bus stop in Auckland, watching your ride drive past because the bus is already at full capacity. “No worry,” you think, naively, “I’ll just wait for the next one” – until you realise “the next one” is another half hour away, you’ve got 20 minutes to get to work, and a pricey Uber is your best option to get from A to B as soon as possible.
Auckland’s bus services aren’t always easy to love. Which makes it all the more fascinating that they’re currently undergoing a reputational facelift thanks to social media, without Auckland Transport itself having to lift a Hop card or finger.
In recent months a slew of Instagram pages dedicated to buses in the Auckland region have popped up, filled with bus-related memes, photos and videos of buses in the wild, and aesthetically pleasing fan edits dedicated to favourite buses. The reigning king of Auckland bus fan pages is undoubtedly the mighty number 70, which runs from Botany to Britomart via Panmure and Greenlane and back again. Its fan page, @ifuckinglovethe70, boasts nearly 7000 followers – and a whole lot of copycats.
The 70’s fan page was the first of its kind in Auckland, inspired by similar accounts overseas. Kind-of like a Deux Moi for Auckland’s public transport system, keen bus spotters can share photos of their favourite wheels in action, memorable bus anecdotes or low-effort messages saying things like “I fucking love the [insert bus here]” or “[insert bus here] is the best bus in Auckland.”
Most buses with stops in the centre city have their own fan page, from West Auckland’s 18 (@upthe18bus) to the North Shore’s NX2 (@ifuckinglovethenx2). A bus fan page doesn’t need to start with “ifuckinglove[blank]” – there’s also @citylinkmybeloved, @the957bussesaregoated, @the_30_is_life, @i_liveforthe11t or @thetmkismypookiebear, for starters.
One pinned post on the 70’s Instagram page announces “we’ve got the first Auckland hydro powerd buss [sic],” which reads like the beginning of a press release (if the release had no proofreader), until you get to the next part: “ON THE BEST BUSS ROUT UP THE FUCKING 70 RAAAAAAA.” For clarity, bus is spelt with just one ‘s’.
The pages seem like a perfect marketing ploy to get young people excited about bus travel, but Auckland Transport says it’s not affiliated with any of them. “We’re huge route 70 supporters at AT and love their content,” AT spokesperson Jess Robertson said. “Who better to encourage people to catch the bus than the passengers themselves?”
It makes sense the 70 would be leading in the turf war of favourite Auckland buses. A 2023 report by Auckland Transport found the 70 had the second highest patronage of any Auckland bus route, with 3,637,401 boardings in 2023. The 70 has around 150,000 fewer patrons than the NX1, Auckland’s most-used bus route, but boasts thousands more Instagram followers.
I Fucking Love the 70 is easily the most active of all Auckland bus pages, posting daily memes and stories for its loyal Instagram followers. At the other end of the scale is the 195, which has two separate fan accounts with only a meagre five posts between them.
Then there’s the anti-fan pages, such as @ifuckinghatethe394, dedicated to the rail replacement bus which runs between Pukekohe and Papakura. The “394 hate club” shares DMs from fed-up passengers and memes that seem to mostly revolve around a single issue, the bus/train connection at Papakura station. It’s a relatively niche issue in the grand scheme of things, but clearly a big annoyance for 394 passengers all the same. For general hater activity, there’s also @ifuckinghateaucklandtransport, with around a thousand followers.
A hate page for the 70 also exists, but only boasts followers in the double digits, a lone photo of a missing bus seat shared from a different bus account, and a handful of comments accusing the page of spreading “propaganda”. Maybe the account has some juicy anti-70 leads hiding in its DMs, but it hasn’t been updated for six weeks.
If you’re more of a train person than a bus person, there are fan pages for that, too. The Western Line from Britomart to Swanson is the clear favourite with nearly 400 followers, likely because it passes all the great sights of Auckland: Newmarket, Morningside (aka, the home of The Spinoff), Henderson and Rānui. By comparison, the Onehunga Line page has a measly 30 followers.
Encouraging the public to use buses, trains or ferries can be a pricey problem for the transport network, even when there’s a positive incentive for the patron. Between April 2022 and 2023, Auckland Transport spent $650,000 advertising its half-price fares to the public, primarily targeting those who already use public transport, rather than those 70% of New Zealanders who hadn’t used public transport in the last 12 months.
Enter user-generated content, or UGC. In the world of entertainment, some of the most popular promotional content is made not by an artist’s highly-paid marketing team, but by a fan in their bedroom, for free. Think the ultra-viral Jacob Elordi fan cam on TikTok with some 10 million views that helped sell Saltburn to a younger audience, that one Josh Hutchinson/Flo Rida fan cam from 2014 which went viral all over again in 2023 during the actor’s Five Nights at Freddy’s press tour, and every KPop or Taylor Swift stan account on X.
For many UGC creators, fan pages are less about the specific subject of the account than the thrill of social media engagement. That’s true of “Harry” and “Alicia”, co-creators of the I Fucking Love the 70, who told 1 News they chose the 70 bus route simply because it was popular with students and easy to take photos of. For all we know, the 20, which has one of the shortest routes from St Lukes to Wynyard Quarter, could actually be Auckland’s best bus, but the fact that its patronage is underperforming means there are fewer photo ops and less fanfare. If a ‘best bus’ award is announced to zero passengers, does it really make a sound?
Of course, the problem with fan-run meme pages is that their admins are unpaid and under no obligation to keep the accounts running. After a flurry of launches over the past year, most Auckland bus fan pages are now inactive. While I Fucking Love the 70 remains committed to its mission, even if just for easy engagement, its competition has faltered. As the Hawk Tuah girl (apologies for making you Google that) will prove to us in probably a week, internet virality is a phenomenon that can catch fire quickly and burn out even sooner. Public transport is still great, though.