2024 - Dublin STILL ranked as second worst city in the Europe for traveling by car

An Underground absolutley is the answer, which is why so many people currently drive.

QBCs cannot take over the entire road nerwork and they do not serve the M50.

There is only so much buses can do to support commuters and it clearly isnt enough to give many drivers a viable alternative.

You could put in a congestion charge between the canals, but where would the park and rides be?

Buses have QBCs already. They are stiil slower than cars unless you are literally on a straight run into town.

Unless you remove cars completely from within the canals, there simply isnt the road space to give QBCs exclusivley to buses with 100% route coverage.

Copied and pasted from one free article on the Irish Times ...

"Sensing some cut-through from “the silent majority”, the Lib Dems are proposing a ban on anyone who booms out songs and TV shows on public transport, or at stations or bus stops and plan to enforce it with fines of £1,000 (€1,175).

It’s hardly an original idea. Three months ago in France, a middle-aged man was on a call with his sister in a quiet area of Nantes station when a railway employee threatened him with a €150 fine if he didn’t turn off the loudspeaker. When he didn’t pay up on the spot the fine soared to €200. Lawyers have been engaged.

Portugal’s transport authority has just announced fines of between €50 and €250 for passengers making excessive mobile phone noise, also known as an offence against civility."

None. Thats the point. They never will and thats one of the reasons they will never be quicker than cars.

Why won’t they have uninterrupted QBCs plus bus priority where needed?
Isn’t that the point of the BC infrastructure works?

Cars would be banned from half the road network if every bus had its own dedicated roadway.

How would cars even get out of their driveway, if you lived on a bus lane?

It's never going to happen, which is why an underground is the actual solutuon.

They would use diversions or be allowed pass once the bus has passed uninterrupted ie a bus gate.

Dublin is hardly sprawling.

15km from the airport takes you pretty much anywhere in the city/suburbs.

Bus corridors are fine, I have no issue with them at all. They just are not the solution to a city that will be pushing 2 million population in less than 15 years.

100%.

Its not that we shouldn't encourage bus corridors and cycle lanes; of course we should.

However, We cant rely on them as the primary solution and those transport modes are already at breaking point.

The population is going to get a lot bigger, bar an economic disaster.

If we dont get a metro network started in the near future & actually show the world that we are serious about being an Alpha city, Dublin will gridlock itself and investment will simply go elsewhere, followed quickly by our high paid jobs.

That is still a huge amount of roadspace. How many linear KMs does that equate to?

There is zero chance that all of that roadspace is going to be allocated bus only.

And as long as the road is shared, the buses and the cars will both get delayed, with the buses obviously running slower than the cars, due to the majority of the routes being indirect from the passenger pespective and constant stopping and starting to load/offload passengers.

Meanwhile, the population increases; which means more cars and more bus passengers, which means slower movement for all, but particularly for buses; as they cant take short cuts or diversions to avoid bottle necks.

The end result is that the bus capacity maxes out and everyone else drives, with a smaller percentage cycling or walking.

An underground introduces a completley new transport mode; one which is not inhibited by road traffic of any sort and can carry more people around the city, more quickly and without delay, vs any of the above ground options.

It also offsets the road congestion for both buses and cars, by removing a significant proportion of commuters from the ground network.

Therefore, it is the only viable solution when faced with a significant population growth, which will see County Dublin grow larger than the whole of Northern Ireland is today, probably within 15 years; and with a metro population closer to 3 million than 2 million.

Without the Underground intervention, The bus network will simply grind to a halt and people will be forced back into cars.

QBCs are not going to represent 100% of the BC network. For that to be achieved, every metre of roadspace on the entire network needs to be 100% bus only.

And even if we did somehow manage it, the rest of the much larger Dublin bus network will still be shared road space.

Its an upward spiral with severe limitations.

I cant think of a single bus route that is 100% bus route only. There is zero chance of the majority of bus routes ever reaching 100% coverage.

The plan will fail because its scope is inherently limited; before you even start.

From O'Connell Bridge you can be basically anywhere in the suburbs within 15km, same for most places, even from the airport; which is actually very close to the city centre by international standards.

Dublin might be urban sprawl by irish standards, but it is not a large land area at all. 5km to the east from OCB and you're in the sea FFS!

An Underground network would not need to be large (by global standards) to provide effective coverage here.

I agree that we have built planning around the car, but a metro system could still undo that, if the political will to build it can be found.