Is transportation in the Dublin the worst in any European capital?

14dMoney

Bus corridors, bus corridors will fix everything.

Uncle Mclovin

No

Upforthematch

Nah don't think so. Not the best now but there's worse out there

Balanadan

Yes

The_Brood

14dMoney wrote: »

Bus corridors, bus corridors will fix everything.

There's pretty much nothing that can seriously count as public transportation.


Insane wait times between buses. Buses anywhere near city center - might as well walk. Buses any time city gets too busy - won't pick you up, will leave you on the streets, good night and good luck.

Trains - limited coverage, huge wait times, and break down way, way too often. "Signalling issues."

Trams - Finally a service with decent wait times - but like buses might as well walk in the city center, and have a ridiculously narrow area of coverage. Takes half a decade to build 2-3 stops as well.

And on top of it all you have to pay more for all this nonsense than infinitely better service in other European cities.

whiskeyman

Upforthematch wrote: »

Nah don't think so. Not the best now but there's worse out there

For European capitals, I'd like to know a few examples worse than Dublin.
For the size and volume of passengers at Dublin airport, it's always a surprise to many tourists there's no dedicated rail / light rail link to it.

Price seems a lot more than most other European capitals I've been too, with poorer reliability and quality.

Greyfox

The_Brood wrote: »

Insane wait times between buses.

I don't know what dream world your living in. Dublin bus is a really good service. When I check the app for next bus due it's quite accurate 97% of the time and IF your lucky to live on the Luas line it's very reliable.

LirW

It's okay but it's crazy expensive.
The need to go via the city centre makes it heavy on the wallet. The fact that there are no dedicated tourist passes with a flat rate. And for many people travelling the reduced rates for just a few stops are super confusing.

My folks were staying somewhere on Clontarf when we lived in Glasnevin and if they wanted to take the bus to come over they'd have to go through town paying for two journeys each.

I also know two people staying on Dublin for Erasmus and the cost of public transport was a big annoyance.

jam_mac_jam

Its a vicious circle, too many cars on the roads but you can't expect people to give up their cars if the buses are ****e. The main thing it needs is huge investment in rail and light rail and buses but that's never going to happen. We are never going to build up so get used to it, its never changing.

A Shropshire Lad

I doubt there are many other major cities where the only way to get from the main airport to the city is by a bus

Thrashssacre

Anytime improvements are suggested there usually shot down by some nimby brigade so it isn’t particularly surprisingly things have gotten so bad as the population increases. Half of the bus routes can be traces back over half a century

Snotty

Name a capital city with worse transportation?

Franz Von Peppercorn II

It’s not just capital cities but most cities of a similar and even smaller size.

Trains from the airport are the least of our problems.

Atoms for Peace

Snotty wrote: »

Name a capital city with worse transportation?

Sanaʽa

strandroad

I can't think of a worse capital city transport, in Europe anyway.
Badly designed, outdated, not integrated, slow, unreliable and very expensive. Clearly not built with the passenger in mind.

14dMoney

Atoms for Peace wrote: »

Sanaʽa

In fairness now, Sana'a is entirely reliant on an outdated bus service, so it seems like the only separating factor here is 2 Luas lines

urban sprawl

A Shropshire Lad wrote: »

I doubt there are many other major cities where the only way to get from the main airport to the city is by a bus

Berlin Tegel airport has no rail connection. Schoenefeld is on the rail line but is very much a second tier airport.

Bus is ok if it’s regular and reliable but the express bus links to Dublin airport are just way too expensive.

Noveight

Poor links to airport.

Two tram lines that don’t even connect to each other.

Thelonious Monk

I can't think of anywhere worse myself. European countries planned cities well a long time ago. Streets were widened, metros were built, they just got sh*t done. They could afford it as they were rich or they were Soviet countries where they made things happen.
So now in Dublin, even the prospect of putting in some bus lanes is looking like it can't happen due to NIMBYism and faffing about over trees etc. If you want a well run PT system big changes have to happen, people would have to be moved out of their properties and put elsewhere, we'd prob have to demolish lots of the city. That's what they done in Barcelona and Paris etc but back then you could just turf people out and they couldn't do anything about it.
So while we're taking years to plan a metro here, it wont happen because another recession will kick in and the can will be kicked down the road again.
I just cycle everywhere, it's quick, and free.

FunkyDa2

Thrashssacre wrote: »

Anytime improvements are suggested there usually shot down by some nimby brigade so it isn’t particularly surprisingly things have gotten so bad as the population increases. Half of the bus routes can be traces back over half a century

My bus route is the 16 and it, along with others, were so numbered in 1918 when the routes were being operated with electric trams. A number of those tram routes had earlier been operated by horse drawn trams.

http://www.dublinbusstuff.com/Routes16.html

wakka12

whiskeyman wrote: »

For European capitals, I'd like to know a few examples worse than Dublin.
For the size and volume of passengers at Dublin airport, it's always a surprise to many tourists there's no dedicated rail / light rail link to it.

Price seems a lot more than most other European capitals I've been too, with poorer reliability and quality.

By 'european'capital in these threads they always mean western europe

Im sure tirana,skopje, Sofia and Sarajevo among others dont have better public transport than dublin

I live along the green line luas and not far from Dart either and only 5km from town so busses arent a bad option either. So for me Id say dublins PT is decent but I dont see how somebody living in north dublin could say its anything other than ****.. But even at that I find Dublins PT shockingly expensive so I jsut cycle everywhere.

Thelonious Monk

wakka12 wrote: »

By 'european'capital in these threads they always mean western europe

Im sure tirana,skopje, Sofia and Sarajevo among others dont have better public transport than dublin

They probably do, because of the USSR.

Richard Hillman

The Dart goes at a snails pace now a days. The LUAS is the best but we're starting to see cracks in the system. I have noticed a lot of breakdowns/signal faults over the last few months, a lot more than previous years.

Then there is Dublin Bus. Whoever decided that there needs to be a bus stop every 200m needs shooting. There is an area in Sallynoggin where there are 7 bus stops over the space of 1km.

The actual sprawl is decent enough, it's just that there everything is so slow. Bus Lanes make little difference when you're stopping every 200m for 1 passenger. And of course every passenger is going to get on/off at the stop most convenient for them.

We need an underground that X's through the City.

Skatedude

I'm nearly 50 and have been working since i was a teenager and never had a job that i could use public transport for. Still need my car for work as buses/trains only run part of the week.

Adding bus connects changes nothing in that regard, more buses , but still running the same restricted hours, so still need car for work.

kneemos

Snotty wrote: »

Name a capital city with worse transportation?

Cork.

Not Europe but Buenos Aires doesn't have a rail connection from the airport to the city, and the public bus takes about 2 hours if I remember correctly. Pretty poor for such a huge capital city.

Thelonious Monk

downtheroad wrote: »

Not Europe but Buenos Aires doesn't have a rail connection from the airport to the city, and the public bus takes about 2 hours if I remember correctly. Pretty poor for such a huge capital city.

The metro is pretty good though

A Shropshire Lad

I was in Amsterdam last month which is a smaller city than Dublin but such a great city to travel in. You can jump on a train in the airport and be in the city centre in ten minutes. Also, trams go everywhere.

It took me about an hour to get back to Rathmines from Dublin airport on the bus

cdeb

There's plenty of European capitals without rail links to the airport. Cardiff, Prague, Bratislava, Luxembourg, Tirane, Podgorica, Zagreb, Belgrade, Budapest, Ljubljana, Nicosia, Tallinn...

Vilnius has a rail connection, but it's something like every 90 minutes, so there may as well not be one.

The notion that trains here break down "way way too often" is absolute nonsense, in my experience as someone who commutes by rail.

Lots of cities have trams that slow down in the city centre. It's because - wait for it - it's a ****ing city centre, and it's crowded.

The Luas lines do link up - certainly there's underground networks in Europe with "linking" stations which are far farther apart than the two minutes it takes to walk from the GPO to Abbey Street.

There's problems with Dublin transport alright, but putting out some of the daft comments that have appeared in the first two pages of this thread really doesn't do the posters concerned any credit at all.

14dMoney

A Shropshire Lad wrote: »

I was in Amsterdam last month which is a smaller city than Dublin but such a great city to travel in. You can jump on a train in the airport and be in the city centre in ten minutes. Also, trams go everywhere.

It took me about an hour to get back to Rathmines from Dublin airport on the bus

That's about average. I was appalled at how long it takes to get from the bottom of Dame st out to the airport. It took about an hour as well. What's especially annoying about it is the whole "the buses are great, it's the cars that are the problem!", simply trying to find a scapegoat to mask the NTA/DCC incompetence.

goose2005

This is Chisinau, Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe, and yet its trolleybus network is probably better than anything Dublin has

Even places like Kharkiv and Yerevan have metros.

mikemac2

urban sprawl wrote: »

Berlin Tegel airport has no rail connection.

True

urban sprawl wrote: »

Schoenefeld is on the rail line but is very much a second tier airport.

For a capital city the worst airport I've seen in Europe after Warsaw Modlin. Schonefeld is a dump belonging to the 1970´s

whiskeyman

cdeb wrote: »

There's plenty of European capitals without rail links to the airport. Cardiff, Prague, Bratislava, Luxembourg, Tirane, Podgorica, Zagreb, Belgrade, Budapest, Ljubljana, Nicosia, Tallinn...

Vilnius has a rail connection, but it's something like every 90 minutes, so there may as well not be one.

.

Many of those listed above are far far smaller than Dublin airport in fairness.

We are in the top 11th regarding volume.
Just below Paris Orly (has light rail) and Copenhagen (has rail link).

https://www.dublinairport.com/latest-news/2019/05/31/dublin-airport-was-eu-s-11th-largest-airport-in-2018

Samuel T. Cogley

I walk 1 minute to the DART station, where there is a DART every ten minutes, get off at Tara, walk 5 minutes to the LUAS which is usually just pulling in and get off a few stops later (lazy I know) and I live in an 'undesirable' area of Dublin. On a bad day my commute with waiting is 45 minutes door to door.

Very much depends where you live.

goose2005

wakka12 wrote: »

By 'european'capital in these threads they always mean western europe

Im sure tirana,skopje, Sofia and Sarajevo among others dont have better public transport than dublin

I live along the green line luas and not far from Dart either and only 5km from town so busses arent a bad option either. So for me Id say dublins PT is decent but I dont see how somebody living in north dublin could say its anything other than ****.. But even at that I find Dublins PT shockingly expensive so I jsut cycle everywhere.

Sofia has 308 km of trams, 193 km of trolleybus and a 2-line metro with 34 stations.

cdeb

whiskeyman wrote: »

Many of those listed above are far far smaller than Dublin airport in fairness.

For sure. I'm not arguing our transport is brilliant here. But I hate random internet whines about how crap everything is which are laden with errors. A discussion like this surely needs to have facts involved. These aren't small capitals like Reykjavik. These qualify as major cities without rail links

Samuel T. Cogley

cdeb wrote: »

For sure. I'm not arguing our transport is brilliant here. But I hate random internet whines about how crap everything is which are laden with errors. A discussion like this surely needs to have facts involved.

Checks to see if we're still in After Hours...

Elemonator

It's certainly the worst I have experienced out of all the European capitals and even some nondescript cities in European countries.

The best I've ever seen, just a few days ago for the billionth time, is Berlin. Very cheap tickets, which cover tram, regional train, U-Bahn (metro), S-Bahn (light rail, similar to a DART and runs underground on parts of some routes, and bus. It is a huge city and I was able to reach corners of it in an average of 20 mins as the lines go everywhere and the longest I waited for a rail type of transport was no more than 5 minutes. Services run 24hrs. They also have these electric Vespa like scooters, stand up electric scooters and bikes also that don't have to be returned to a bikes station and can be left anywhere inside the map area displayed on the phone app and where they aren't causing a obstruction. The end result is very little traffic in Berlin also.

Here you are doomed either by Dublin Bus being stuck in traffic the whole time, prohibitive cost, or having to wait an hour for a bus/train. In addition to this, we have no 24hr transport links or rail connection to the airport. We are still talking about building our FIRST metro line decades later. It's gone beyond a joke.


I've been to some tiny Spanish cities and they have a frequent bus service that is dirt cheap.

In the words of German tourists I've met numerous times in Dublin, our public transport system is "****".

z0oT

goose2005 wrote: »

Even places like Kharkiv and Yerevan have metros.

Pyongyang has a metro too. I was on it once.

cdeb

goose2005 wrote: »

This is Chisinau, Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe, and yet its trolleybus network is probably better than anything Dublin has

Even places like Kharkiv and Yerevan have metros.

Kharkiv is twice the size of Dublin. Yerevan is another ex Soviet city and they got metros once they hit a million population to make up for, you know, people coming along in the middle of the night to whisk you away to the gulag.

A trolleybus is just a bus. Here's the Dublin Bus route map.. Doesn't look worse than Chisinau to me.

Rubberchikken

inefficient at times. not always the most polite drivers.
vastly overpriced. sharing with some very peculair people.

bus corridors a joke. traffic lights that make little sense.

cdeb

Elemonator wrote: »

In addition to this, we have no 24hr transport links or rail connection to the airport.

Aircoach is a 24 hour service

Ken.

Mod-Thread moved to the Dublin City forum. Please read the local charter before posting.

Calina

In my experience yes, pretty much. The reasons are complex over time but typically the country spends as little as it can get away with spending on public transport infrastructure.

The issue with the airport and the lack of a rail connection is pretty much that all of the bus systems are unreliable. 747 cannot be called an express in either direction, aircoach is often full and the local services like the 16 take ages at best. And this on a route with soi disant competition.

There seems to be no integrated approach to moving people around the city. When I left, the place still did not have fully integrated ticketing, good if that has changed but it is still way behind. Luxembourg is about to make public transport free, Tallin has already. But Dublin's ticketing system is archaic and expensive. It actually wasn't worth my while to buy a commuter ticket at all because the cost of a monthly ticket was more than twice what I spent on bus tickets if I tried to commute by bus. Sure the leapcard reduces the cost but not massively. Plus point is it should have reduced dwell times a bit but...In terms of attracting people to switch from private to public, it just isn't there.

Oddly, experience in London is mixed too..A lot of engineerjng closures at weekends the last few times I was there. That is a function of age and years of under investment though and the routes are comprehensive. You can pay by wireless touch too.

mulbot

cdeb wrote: »

There's plenty of European capitals without rail links to the airport. Cardiff, Prague, Bratislava, Luxembourg, Tirane, Podgorica, Zagreb, Belgrade, Budapest, Ljubljana, Nicosia, Tallinn...

Vilnius has a rail connection, but it's something like every 90 minutes, so there may as well not be one.

The notion that trains here break down "way way too often" is absolute nonsense, in my experience as someone who commutes by rail.

Lots of cities have trams that slow down in the city centre. It's because - wait for it - it's a ****ing city centre, and it's crowded.

The Luas lines do link up - certainly there's underground networks in Europe with "linking" stations which are far farther apart than the two minutes it takes to walk from the GPO to Abbey Street.

There's problems with Dublin transport alright, but putting out some of the daft comments that have appeared in the first two pages of this thread really doesn't do the posters concerned any credit at all.

Tallinn does have such a transport system from the airport.

cdeb

Apologies; you're right. (And I should have said Larnaka, not Nicosia)

Still, the overall point stands.

strandroad

cdeb wrote: »

The Luas lines do link up - certainly there's underground networks in Europe with "linking" stations which are far farther apart than the two minutes it takes to walk from the GPO to Abbey Street.

The Luas is not an underground network though, it's a bog standard tram with a fancy name. They don't need linking stations, just plain stops, and any random mid-sized European city would have dozens of lines with multiple crosschange stops and junctions.

A Shropshire Lad

I dont know if Dublin Bus do any training in the area of customer service but some of their drivers are pig ignorant. Not a great impression for some tourists who have just arrived in the country

Idbatterim

dublins transport, given the size and growth of the city, are a disgrace! Two glacial, limited capacity light rail lines and the dart launched in 1984...

disposableFish

cdeb wrote: »

Aircoach is a 24 hour service

It's terrible though.

Wait an hour in the freezing cold at 2am and then hope you actually get on because there's 80 people that want to get on one coach.

strandroad

cdeb wrote: »

Aircoach is a 24 hour service

It takes 90 minutes to travel 25km.