City Busses (Rant)

Try living in Dublin with the bus service!!!

Metallicababe wrote:

Its hard sometimes to understand the logic of the service which is being offered to the raheen area. Why is there not a double decker bus or better still why not a more regular service (say every ten minutes)

It's a few years ago that the service to Raheen included double-deckers. That's the only reason the long City Centre-Castletroy-City Centre-Raheen route goes up Old Clare Street rather than out the Ballysimon Road - the buses wouldn't fit through the low railway bridge on the Ballysimon Road but would fit under the Singland bridge. These days of course all the double-deckers are gone but the route is still the same. Service is still crap though.

I know exactly how you feel man. I used the service five days a week for over four years while at college, and was subject to the same pathetic service. I just ended up having to ask the bus driver every time I got on, where was the bus bound for. Like your own experience, he would pull up in town (when the bus would be designated for the Caherdavin route) and then roar "All off!". Jesus, I dunno how many nights I walked for over an hour in the freezin cold solely because of this lack of a proper controlled bus service.
I always maintained, the biggest customers for Bus Eireann are students, and they are the first group they will sh*t on everytime. As far as Im concerned, Limerick doesnt have a bus service.. just a couple of clowns driving around in tin cans following routes and schedules that suit them. :mad:

From my experience the only people that take the bus in Limerick are those that have to, i.e. the elderly, students, people that can't drive and people that can't afford cars. Given the choice between taking the bus and driving, most people in this city opt for the former it seems. If taking the bus means half-hour waits only for a dangerously overcrowded bus to pull up and reasonably refuse to take on any more passengers, coupled with really long walks from the bus stop to wherever it is you wanted to go (There is some statistic that everywhere in Paris is within 500m of a metro station. I doubt the same could be said for Limerick regarding bus stops - if people have really long walks after their bus journey, often in the wind, the wet, the rain, they will be discouraged from using the bus)....Bus Eireann have to get their act together so that people will choose the bus rather than the car. If they can convince more people that they are offering a good service, they will increase their revenue and then be able to invest in improving their service even further. I've a couple of suggestions of how they could improve their service:

1. Schedule the busses for every 10 minutes on the busiest routes, every 20 minutes on all other routes. People willl only choose the bus over the car if they know their bus will be at their stop when they want it, or at least if they know they won't have to wait all that long. This would involve buying more buses and hiring more drivers - good for employment then.

2. Establish a night service. Sure the taxi-drivers will be up in arms, but isn't competition good for the consumer? This could be run to some of the areas most in demand at night time but maybe only every 40 minutes.

3. If they feel that double-decker buses are too awkward what with bridges and that, why not invest in those single-storey buses twice as long as normal buses with the accordion type thing in the middle?

4. Give the public more incentives to use the bus. For example, in the town in France I lived in for a while, Besançon, nearly everyone that used the buses had weekly, monthly or yearly bus passes. This was made by making the bus passes much cheaper than buying single tickets - for instance my student monthly bus pass there was €21 whereas if I bought single tickets (each one costing a euro) I would have spent well over €50 on the bus per month. The bus passes were available in every newsagent, and also in the universities and schools. The bus company also had a shop in the centre of town to buy them. Encouraging the majority of people to have travelpasses is also good because it speeds up the time it takes to get onto the bus - there is no waiting for change, all you have to do is flash your ID.

5. The town also had a great idea to show car-users what life on public transport is like. If you brought your car into a mechanic in Besançon, the bus company alllows you to travel for free on the bus for the duration of your car being out of action.

6. Perhaps put park and ride facilities on the outskirts of the city, i.e. at Coonagh, Patrickswell, Annacotty etc. Make the use of these facilities much cheaper than city centre parking. Hopefully this would free up traffic so buses would run on time and make restore the public's faith that the bus would be on schedule.

7. The design of the current buses needs to be changed. There's too much seating on them for a start - it's fine when there are hardly any passengers on them but positively dangerous at 5 o'clock in the evening when passengers are squashed up against the front windshield. Remove some of the seating and replace it with areas to lean, bars to hold onto, and fold up seats.

8. Put 2 doors in the buses - one for going in at the front, one for going out towards the back/middle. Much time is wasted when everyone that wants to get off the bus has to be let off the door before the people waiting can get on.

9. At every bus stop put maps of Limerick showing all the routes highlighted in different colours. Don't have every route necessarily going through town - have more routes using orbital roads along the lines of the UL-Raheen via Childers Road route.

10. Widen the Childers Road.

11. Publicity campaigns informing the people of great changes made and the ease of taking the bus.

12. More bus shelters.

13. Get property developers of ever expanding suburbs in places like Annacotty and Raheen contribute towards the extension of bus routes into their estates. We can't have everyone relying on the car, the roads just can't accomodate them all for a start.

14. Many of the less-used bus routes stop at 6 o'clock. I believe they should stop at 7 or 8 at the earliest, as this will give people who work until then to catch a bus home. Perhaps one of the reasons why some bus routes are so underused is because they are so infrequent)

15. Run loads of extra buses on big match days in Thomond Park and the Gaelic Grounds, especially from park and ride facilities. Perhaps include free use of public transport for the day of the match in the price of the match ticket.


To conclude, I believe that the solution of Limerick's bus problems (and, indeed, traffic problems) is to convince people that have the choice about whether to drive or not that the bus is a better option. I believe this could be achieved through implementing the 15 measures I have outlined above.

sorry, force of habit with the text speak.

as for the whole waterford bus thing, i just got into a rant about bus eireann and couldn't be stopped!!!