Cork transport survey

bjd

hi

I've just spent 55 minutes trying to travel 8 miles and with a general election looming I thought it was time we pointed out the bleeding obvious to all the politicians who will call to your door.

Cork County Council have a link on their website re doing a survey but only for EAST cork to do with the midleton railway. I thought that other locations should get a mention as well so as to illustrate the poor transport in some areas.

What the council are doing is getting people to keep a travel diary just for a week. I thought headings such as

Date
Location (Douglas, Bishopstown etc)
Travelling To
Time of Departure
Time of arrival
Weather
Route taken (i.e. what way you end up at your location)

I will summarise the info then and you can all pass it on to your local td

Anyone else in their own area could join in, we might just get Martin Cullen out at last

Lennoxschips

Date: June 2006
Location: Ballyphehane
Travelling To: Douglas
Time of Departure: 13:30
Time of arrival: 14:15
Weather: Sunny
Route taken: Walked, there is no form of public transportation that would get me there.

cc

doesn't the no.19 bus pass ballyphehane church and head on to douglas?

bjd

Lennoxschips wrote:

Date: June 2006
Location: Ballyphehane
Travelling To: Douglas
Time of Departure: 13:30
Time of arrival: 14:15
Weather: Sunny
Route taken: Walked, there is no form of public transportation that would get me there.

ha ha! excellently pointed out! prob could have walked to turners X and got the 6 but i take your point. You shouldnt have to.

daymobrew

bjd wrote:

I've just spent 55 minutes trying to travel 8 miles

Is this driving or by bus?
You could cycle 8 miles in a consistently shorter time. And it doesn't rain as often as you think (it may rain while you're sitting in the office but chances of rain during your commute are obviously less).

bjd

that was in a car daymobrew, seemed to be a particularly bad day but still, it wasnt fun, there is no strategic/future planning department I would imagine, its all reactive planning and building

Stark

Typical scenario for me when I went to college.

No. 8 bus from Mayfield to UCC.

To be in college by 9:00, get 8:10 bus, get in 8:55. 45 mins for a 4 mile journey. Too dangerous to cycle with the bad roads/traffic congestion.

After 9:00, the bus service went to ****e with every second bus typically not showing up.

In the evenings going home, you could expect no buses between 6:00 and 7:30. For some reason there were no buses timetabled to leave the city centre between 6:25 and 7:05. Add to that the typical drivers not being arsed doing their routes and you're talking about a typical 90 min to 2 hour wait in the evenings for a bus on a route that's supposed to be serviced every 15 mins.

The big problem was the route being split into Bishopstown to City centre and city centre to Mayfield. Drivers would usually choose to do only half the route even though they were scheduled to do the full route. So you could be waiting for your bus to Mayfield and a city centre bus would show up instead.

daymobrew

Stark wrote:

Drivers would usually choose to do only half the route even though they were scheduled to do the full route.

This type of thing needs to be reported to the company. Most companies will (at least try to) deal with issues, especially when you back them with solid data.
Over the years I've written loads of letters to Dublin Bus, Irish Rail and the Gardai. I've given up writing to the Customer Service team as they just fob you off - go straight to the top. Oh boy does that get a response

There is always tons of moaning on boards.ie but very little moaning to the people who can actually do something.