Bus services getting worse due to improved network

There are actually 3 services in each direction that don’t serve Straffan or Celbridge (120e and 120x).

OP there are now 21-23 PSO buses each way between Edenderry and Dublin, Monday to Friday, 18 on Saturday and 13 on Sunday.

That is a massive change in service level.

There has to be a balance - how many people would you get from Edenderry alone on the services, and how many are going from there to intermediate points.

Clearly plenty of people do use them but it is a balance between journey time and serving the various points along the routes.

Kearns Transport offer a feeder service route 820 from Edenderry into their commercial Tullamore-Dublin route 845 service at Enfield each weekday which offers a faster connection of 1 hour 10 minutes to O’Connell Bridge.

The 120 routes are PSO subsidised - their job is provide a service where it is not otherwise commercially viable to do so.

If the demand was there as you suggest, don’t you think that the likes of Kearns would provide more services?

That's really the job of commercial operators though, when it comes to regional or intercity transport.

PSO is about providing services where they would not otherwise be commercially viable, in an efficient a manner as possible.

There are two 120e/120x services that bypass Straffan and Celbridge as I posted above. That's probably as much as you're going to get from the PSO network.

This may not be 100% the right thread, but here goes.

To-say (April 9th), several services were curtailed due to demonsrtations at Merrion Square. The 15B normally operates from there, but to-day it was operating from Pearse St.

I turned up iat Redmond's Hill (Augnier St) to get a 15B to Rathfarnham. No 15Bs were indicated but there were 3 No 15s showing over the next 20 minutes or so. Howeve a 15B turns up unannounced just 2 minutes later. Driver daid it didn't show on the bus stop sign because of service disruption ("due to the new Taoiseach"!).

Assuming the bus was correctly inputted into the system (the onboard sinage was all ok), does the gps on the bus not indicate to the information system what bus it is and when it is ecpected? Disruption in Merrion Square should not affect this.

Or does Dublin Bus (or the NTA or TFI or whatever bureaucracy is responsible) use some other system? Surely not rocket science to get this right. As far as I am concerned, another NTA foul-up.

If you use bustimes.org it will show live location of bus on map. This is better than the RTPI screens or (useless) TFI Live app. It even works late in the evenings when the majority of routes are finished and buses are heading back to the garage, not on their usual routes. The final 13 to serve Grange Castle shows as heading out the N4 and M50 to Harristown Depot most evenings after 12:30 as an example of this.

Thanks, this explains a lot. But I thought that once you had signed in and set things up, that the AVL should kick in more or less immediately.

It's a minor side effect of the GPS equipment relying on the ticket machines, whose data feed is driver-oriented rather than bus-oriented from the scheduling point of view (in Dublin Bus: GAI handles the data on the bus side of things, but it still suffers from logins). One has to wonder if the new ticketing system will fix that issue.