Dublin Bus experience

While the AX’s are a very reliable model and DB’s maintenance seems excellent, at 20 years old that is pushing it even for a very reliable model. I suspect over time you would see more frequent breakdowns if they are kept on the road.

That is why I’m a fan of the old 14 years rule, though I totally understand why it was broken for the increases of BusConnects.

Hopefully the charging for the new BEV buses can be sorted ASAP and replace the oldest buses in the fleet, before break downs become increasingly common and start to impact the publics view on the reliability of the buses services.

Not really. Up until just before COVID, either DB or the NTA had a policy to keep buses for only around 14 years, they were consistently buy about 100 buses per year that would typically replace the oldest 100 buses in the fleet which would be around 14 years old.

This has largely gone out the window with BusConnects, the size of the fleet has increased substantially and partly this has been achieved by keeping older buses around longer. Though keep in mind those oldest buses wouldn’t have been doing much mileage during covid, so that helps. Of course issues with charging infrastructure meaning the new BEV buses can’t be introduced as quickly as you might like doesn’t help either!

Older buses will require a lot more maintenance then newer buses typically and that is an issue at a time when you have a shortage of mechanics!

As an aside people who say scraping older buses is public waste don’t really understand the bigger picture, the difference between capex, opex and TCO.

Yes, it should only take one depots worth of chargers to come online to suddenly clear out all those old single door buses. Other then perhaps the VT class which offer something unique.

I’d guess they would like to see all the old single door double deckers buses gone by next year before they start rolling out the new validators for the next gen ticketing.