Dublin Bus - Operation Freeflow

MiniD

http://www.dublinbus.ie/home/freeflow.asp

Can anybody make sense of the travel information on this page...

Increased Off-Peak Capacity

* An additional 5000 seats are being made available during off-peak for the duration of Operation Free-flow. This equates to an increase of 10% in fleet capacity (off-peak).

What routes have extra off peak services?

Early Bird Sundays

* To facilitate shoppers & retailers during extended opening hours over Christmas an early bird service, (starting an hour earlier than normal), will operate on all major bus routes on Sunday 16th and Sunday 23rd of December in addition to the normal Sunday timetable.

What is a major bus route? Which routes start an hour earlier than normal? Is this just one extra bus an hour before whatever departure is due?

Suburban Shopping Centres

* There will also be particular emphasis on supplementing regular service by Dublin Bus on specific times such as late night shopping on Thursday and on particular suburban shopping locations such as Tallaght, Blanchardstown, Swords, Liffey Valley & Dundrum with increased trips to facilitate customers.

"such as Thursday"... what sort of information is that? What routes will have extra buses? Will these buses operate from the shopping centres only, to the suburbs?

Why can't Dublin Bus just say there will be an 8am departure on routes 7/39/46A etc. Provide some actual information which will benefit passengers.

The information on the website is just confusing and serves no purpose other than being a wordy press release. I would not stand at a bus stop on a Sunday morning in the hope that my route is considered to be a "major bus route".

astrofool

Then they can say that due to lack of public interest, they won't wake up their bus drivers that early on Sundays

markpb

I mailed DB about this already asking exactly the same questions as you. Got a less than satisfactory response:

Good to see you noticed the freeflow page. Normally we just put up a news story to announce freeflow but this year we decided to try and be more activate with freeflow. However freeflow based around our operations so a lot of the information would be irrelevant to our customers.

To clear up the queries you had, the points on the shopping centres and the extra seats are linked. With help from the Gardai to keep the traffic moving and ensuring the QBC's and bus lanes are not blocked our buses will have quicker journey times and be able to complete more trips, improving the frequency of the service.

We will have additional information for the early bird services on Sunday 16th and 23rd nearer the time, these have yet to be finalised.

jjohnson1984

So basically it's spin? Fancy that.

FWIW I've found the operation freeflow to be absloutely useless and has made things worse for me in North Dublin, it seems the guards are giving very high priority to cars and less for buses. If you are on a main round then yes it may be a little quicker, but on a bus journey if you have to turn on to a main road heaven help you - the traffic lights are now awful!

trellheim

You see it depends what you are measuring.

One cynical approach might be :

We are judged on how the major routes flow [ i.e. overall success of Freeflow ]

=>We can speed up the major route flows by reducing traffic lights for side roads

-> so let's do that.