20% cut to fares for all public transport operators from April

All of the monthly and annual tickets for Dublin are poor value over the pay-as-you-go alternative, and of course this has only got worse over time as the single fares have been restructured, first with the €1 discount on changing bus/luas/train and now with the TFI90 fare. Fact is, the vast majority of people don't takes numerous trips in a day, most people take one return trip a day for work plus the occasional trip maybe a couple times a week for social reasons. DB have failed to create an incentivise for this group of people (who are by far the largest) to sign up and pay for their PT services on a recurring or long-term basis. They've failed because they make the cost difference to the customer so small between the PAYG option versus monthly/annual, and by setting the value threshold for monthly/annual tickets so high (the point of usage at which it costs less to have an monthly/annual ticket than to PAYG). It's as if our public transport providers just don't understand the value in signing up customers on a subscription model. Of course, the taxsaver incentive has a lot to blame for this because the less DB absorbs the cost of creating an incentive to 'subscribe', the more of their Government subvention they effectively get to keep because the more that cost is shouldered by Revenue. I'm picking on DB here because they're the only operator who benefit from a network effect in their services, IE and Luas are even more guilty of this because they can't even bring you to most parts of the city.

If anything the whole funding model for PT is broken because we live in a system where the people who pay the least for public transport are those users who are most well able to afford the higher prices, when really the people who should be paying for it are the private cars and taxis clogging up the city's streets.

Noted but of course, the existing fare structure is a legacy one inherited by the NTA and devised originally by DB, and it goes without saying that the NTA have also completely failed to do anything about it.

Dublin Bus took 263m in "customer income" - fares and FTS grants - in 2019, compared to 39m in subvention. 2020 is not useful for comparisons and from 2021 on they are paid to operate the services with the NTA taking the revenue.

There would be some savings in payment processing, cash handling, ticketing systems (although you still need something to work out passenger loads) and so on but it'd be millions if even.

Some of that 263m was indirectly subsidised via Taxsaver, can't easily find figures on that - because the figures don't exist!

There's 2.4m in the labour force with 8% unemployment so 2.2m. However, around half of those don't pay any income tax anyway so you're looking at putting over 200/month on each taxpayer if funded by income tax.

The other thing is that free public transport has been shown to just pull people away from walking a cycling - not cars - so is of no environmental of traffic benefits anyway.

Even if it replaced thirty or forty cars, it would make a huge difference to towns and cities. One of the biggest problems with public transport, as it currently stands, is that buses have almost no priority over private cars (including the parked ones, which is an enormous kick in the teeth). They need to be eliminated, whatever the cost. And before I'm accused of "cycling evangelism", I haven't been on a bike in almost thirty years.

Actually it was the NTA who steadily removed the discounts that season tickets gave during the recession as the then FG led government wanted passengers paying a greater share of the cost, on the grounds that most of them were getting a tax rebate.

Nuts, but there you are.

It should be combined with measures that make car usage in urban areas extremely difficult. Take as much space as possible away from cars (including public parking spaces) and force people to use public transport instead.

Measures like that just make it more difficult to live in urban areas. We should be making rural living harder, not urban living.

They make it more difficult for a minority to take up the majority of public space. It should be far easier to negotiate urban areas without dragging a massive box on wheels around with you, and without having an automatic right to store it in public.

Yep. Tallinn done it and it mostly led to less walking but little or no change in car use.

Tallinn's public transport options seem very comparable to Dublins but with half the population so it should be appealing to use.

As per the fares determination, the fare cuts are being implemented in three phases.

With regard to Irish Rail, taxsaver monthly and annual fares were cut in phase one, intercity website fares were cut in phase two, all other fare cuts are in phase three effective 9th May.