Comment & Analysis: Irish Rail’s Dublin Commuter and Dart services are in a heap after timetable changes, which were too ambitious for the network and what the company was able to implement and will be corrected soon. And, in Cork, the Bus Éireann-run city bus service has been falling apart for the last month with driver shortages at least on par or worse than the chronic problems witnessed in Dublin after Covid.
Now was not the time to celebrate 1 million passenger trips on public transport daily in Ireland for the first time ever.
The daily average number of passenger journeys is 1,070,901. Crudely, you could say 500k people using public transport daily, but that’s off the mark too, because some people are making one-way trips.
Anyway, the Green Party in Government and the public transport system could be accused of sometimes not publicising the improvements in recent years effectively enough. But not holding off for a week or two until the Cork bus issues and Dublin rail issues have eased at least somewhat is a communications misstep.
I have recently said to a number of people that more people using public transport is an indicator of success, with responses from more than one saying that those numbers are because people are packed into overcrowded public transport. There can usually be a fine line full and overloaded, but what rail passengers in Dublin and bus passengers in Cork have had to tolerate recently jumps way beyond any fine line.
The National Transport Authority’s press release on the passenger milestone is dead right to highlight the new or improved BusConnects routes, the 54 new or improved Connecting Ireland rural and inter-urban routes, the new 24-hour Bus Éireann service to Shannon Airport, quicker bus journeys thanks to the implementation of the Dublin City Centre transport plan, and increased rail services including five additional services a day on the Heuston to Galway corridor.
The denial of the improvements includes people claiming there have been no rural improvements. The reality is that the Greens have probably focused on rural and smaller inter-urban bus improvements with Connecting Ireland and the new urban bus services in towns more than it is politically advantageous for them, even if it is for the greater good. The same could likely be said for at least some of the inter-urban rail improvements in recent years.
The denial from some people that public transport has been improved is stunning. Most have not given credit rightly due to the Greens for securing the extra funding and to the transport authorities and operators for implementing the improvements.
It’s worth saying that in terms of future investment in infrastructure, we don’t know yet if the Green Party has managed to secure the 2:1 funding commitment to public and active transport over road development in the latest budget, but there has been a large-scale shift already.
A lot of political capital has been used to make that happen, with politicians across all parties in and out of Government asking where the money is for “their roads”. But many people have blinkers on if they think investment in rail and buses is guaranteed to continue. New governments in other countries are slashing public transport and increasing fares.
But, again, while it is right to highlight improvements, the timing is just rubbing salt into the wounds of people stuffing onto Dart trains or the people left behind on damp Cork streets and roads as a huge number of services are being cancelled daily.
Even generally, people can — somewhat understandably — find it hard to accept that public transport has improved when they have not seen it directly because their service is poor or because they have no service available to them. At a time when things are so bad for a large chunk of public transport users in our two largest cities, it’s just too much to celebrate.