How do you feel about bus privatisation in Limerick?

Champ

With industrial action announced on May 1 due to plans to privatise 10pc of routes (not necessarily in Limerick) it made me consider how I view the state of the Bus Eireann services in Limerick and was wondering what others thought.

Drivers: The drivers themselves are for the most part a pretty friendly bunch and you get to recognize them easily after you've used the routes for a while. One even helped an old man across the street once he reached his stop.

Service reliability: Okay this is a major issue for city services especially if anyone has used the 304 route for any given length of time. The magical no buses showing up for an hour or so (experienced a 95 minute wait before) and then suddenly 2-3 turning up at the same time happens more than often than you can expect. You can factor in traffic etc but I got a feeling there's more to it than that. Certain drivers seem a lot more consistent in arriving on time even in the busy afternoon compared to others who seem to struggle to be on time in the quiet periods of the morning.

The regional services such as the 343 are seemingly a lot more reliable than the city services.

Pricing: Seemingly significant automatic price hikes every year with nothing tangible been received back as a customer. I wouldn't be so annoyed at the hikes if at least they made the services more reliable.

Existing Private Competition: The EuroBus seems to be an excellent alternative to Bus Eireann where available on the city routes. Not so much in the pricing area but in the reliability of service. I've lost count of how many times a BE bus never turned only for the scheduled EuroBus to arrive on time with the only problem been not enough space for everyone to fit in due to the amount of commuters stranded from the no-show BE bus.

Some may point out that this is influenced by the EuroBus running less buses but bluntly speaking commuters don't care about this. They just want a bus service that says when it will arrive that it will arrive on time.


Conclusion: I always like having choices and this is no exception and I think it's good that the EuroBus gives commuters an alternative when Bus Eireann is on strike. Therefore I'd have to lean towards welcoming privatisation (strongly influenced by lack of satisfaction with existing BE quality of service).

Cookiemunster

Seeing are there are only 6 routes in Limerick, it's pretty unlikely that any would be down to be privatised.

1huge1

Perhaps the UL/Castletroy route where there is already a bit of competition.

Quick answer, I am in favour of privatisation, just look at how successful the Luas is in Dublin and compare it to the shables that is Dublin Bus and the Dart.

Long answer has more to do with my belief in competition and the free market but that would take a while.

Rightwing

Privatisation is a disaster for the employee, good for the customer.

highlydebased

It would be very positive. So many areas unserved by bus along with terrible reliability in general