Go-Ahead Dublin City Routes - Updates and Discussion

Surely the service they could deliver should be the one that they committed to as part of the PSO?

They've had a big recruitment drive, so they may (or may not, I don't know) have enough drivers right now, at this moment in time. But I'm not aware of them having done anything to address the retention issues that have plagued them since 2018.

I could be wrong... time will tell.

I’m not excusing GAI at all.

But if you think it isn’t happening elsewhere you’re mistaken. DB don’t announce them on their website - you have to look at the TFI real time app to see the cancelled and curtailed departures.

I’ve had a cancellation or curtailment most days this past fortnight.

3 x 15b in a row were cancelled on Tuesday evening in both directions, along with multiple 14, 15, 16 and 65b departures.

Every single day there are multiple cancellations or curtailments on cross-city routes due to “operational issues”, code for lack of staff. As @devnull says - the TFI Real Time app will tell you what cancellations and curtailments are happening when you select a particular stop.

Buses parked on the river side of Eden Quay is a sure sign of journeys being curtailed.

The entire industry is suffering a staffing shortage right now and that is seeping through to service reliability.

The link below lists all of the BE departures cancelled yesterday in the Northwest:

https://www.buseireann.ie/service_updates.php?id=6010&month=Jun

My own view is that the NTA need to cop onto the fact that the companies don’t have the staff and produce schedules that CAN be delivered. They should put a halt on expanding services until the companies can actually deliver the existing ones.

I must be imagining the issues that I outlined above then?

As someone above said about Eden Qy, The amount of cross-city routes at the moment running short C versions is very noticeable and is usually due to no relief driver. Sure you only have to listen to control reading out the long list of available boards for overtime every morning around half 8 to understand how bad things are atm.

The main reason why you would consider GAI to be an issue in particular is because their scale of operations is so much smaller than the other two major PSO operators, so the amount of cancellations they may have becomes a considerably larger proportion, one easier to highlight and notice.

Personally I have been stood up by Dublin Bus a number of times in the past as well - before the pandemic though, mind you, so cancellations at the time were more likely to be due to the previous departure running noticeably late, but I've had my share of departures cancelled outright due to the lack of a driver.

GAI's problems are really down to their relatively less attractive pay, which results in rather nasty staff retention rates. And it's a lot more difficult to find spare drivers when you have a pool of about 90 (that's my guesstimate on what the Commuter network should employ to cover the amount of duties I know they had 1.5 years ago) than when you have a pool of about 400 (my expectations on some of the larger DB garages).

It isn't, rightly so, but you started posting in an area where people have actual answers, so you're getting one.

It doesn't matter who the company is at this point, the problem is industry-wide. There aren't enough drivers to spare anywhere. The framing of the NTA-GAI contract is a part of it (although they do have a perfectly sufficient fleet for the commuter routes), the company's internal policy is another, and then that's on top of the international shortage due to the effects of the pandemic and what not.

Another part of the contract of course is that it's rather difficult to terminate it - a few trips missing every day is far from enough for it to happen. You'd have to have half the service missing all the time and the other half not running on time for the termination clauses to kick in.

I wasn't suggesting they would - merely stating (after a cursory glance through the contract itself) that it's so difficult to terminate it, either the Apocalypse, the Kim dynasty, or something to that extreme effect would have to happen for a termination to be considered... and even then you could say it's a third party act anyway.

I certainly think that the NTA have been too lax in drawing up contracts that penalise individual cancellations, but do not add more severe penalties for cancelling departures that are directly after one another.

There should also never be a situation where the last departure on a route can be cancelled. Rather than the more severe financial penalties that such action attracts, it should be cast in stone that they should operate.

Agree with all of this, BUT there should never be situations where on such lower frequency routes that two or more departures in a row are cancelled due to staffing issues.

Control need to manage the resource better.