Bus Éireann Expressway Cut 3 Routes

The thing is over the past 20 years we have seen a massive explosion in coach and bus services, new services, new routes, vastly greater frequency and this has resulted in massive increases in the numbers of people using these services. It is night and day better today then it was 20 years ago.

But the issue for BE is that most of these innovative new services came from new commercial entrants and BE management failed miserably to respond to this new reality and compete with them.

BE’s traditional routes were built around extremely long, slow routes that stopped at almost every town and village along the way, whilst the new entrants started direct non stop or semi stopping services that used the motorways and were much faster and to no one’s surprise people flocked to the new services and BE has failed to change to meet that challenge. Instead they seem to be just retreating into PSO services where they face less competition and don’t have to be innovative.

Other operators realised that there was massive untapped potential in the market, that far more people would happily travel by coach if only it was faster and more frequent. Meanwhile BE stuck to their old slow route network which simply wasn’t fit for purpose anymore, they failed to respond to changing market circumstances.

I hate to see any routes shutdown and thus less options and competition, but I’m also sure that some of the other operators will happily expand to fill the gaps left and we will get PSO routes where they don’t.

No, I’m specifically talking about Expressway, BE’s commercial arm.

20 years ago when the intercity motorways were built, new commercial operators jumped in and got licenses to make use of those motorways with new direct non stop or semi stopping services using those motorways, the likes of Aircoach, Citylink, Dublin express, Dublin Coach, etc. and these services have been incredibly popular.

During this period BE Expressway management did nothing, they didn’t try and launch new services on the motorways, instead they tried to just continue to operate their old much slower routes like the x8 and of course they lost massive numbers of passengers to the better, faster services.

As a result, all BE expressway has done is cancel more then a dozen routes over the past 10 years, including major ones from Dublin to Cork/Limerick/Galway/Belfast.

There may be some decent Expressway routes left, but the Expressway network is now a shadow of its former self and the only “innovation” we see come from BE Expressway is them closing a couple more routes every few years!

It is clear to me that BE has failed miserably as a commercial operator and are retreating into just PSO routes now.

If you mean the green and yellow BE coaches on PSO routes then they are absolutely doing their job as a public service in covering the places that are not commercially viable.

No one in Cork thinks that! last year as many as 40% of departures were being cancelled and it got so bad that the NTA had to bring in reduced emergency schedules!

Frankly BE are a worse PSO operator then they are a commercial one, but they have an incumbent position in much of the Country outside of the GDA.