packed buses...

There was an increase of fleet size in Dublin Bus at the end of 2017 by approx 30 buses to be used for increasing the reliability of existing services to reduce the likelihood of dropped laps by increasing running time on some services, as well as adding extra timetabled departures on a number of routes.

So far this year we've seen enhancements on 33b, 33d, 44, 44b, 65 and 65b in the first half of January, whilst in the last week or two we've seen the same on route 9, 15, 25a, 25b, 26, 46a, 66 and 67 and substantial increases of service levels on the 140 which were implemented this weekend.

There is said to be more changes to be made in the coming weeks for a number of other routes, including the extension of route 40D to Hollystown, a new route from Finglas to Broombridge and some increases on cross city routes but bills have to be agreed and approved with unions before these can happen and appropriate notice given.

In addition, by the end of the year the total number of vehicles used on the routes operated by Dublin Bus at present will increase from approx 1000 to over 1100 which should allow for substantial increases in capacity.

Also it's likely that a number of the current issues are not helped by the issues with the new LUAS line.

hardanro wrote: »

No, the article is not non-sense.
On finglas road, between 7:30 and 9 no buses are stopping (nevermind travelling like a cattle - you're lucky if you actually can get on a bus). And this is with all the bragging about new bragged increase service levels on 140, which didn't bring any improvement this week.
And, if the problem wasn't bad enough, 1 in 3 buses don't even turn up.

Certainly there are issues in some routes at certain times of the day - but I find it hard to believe the claim that the 40/40D/140 are not able to stop for an entire 90 minute period on Finglas Road - I have used those routes in morning peak in the last few weeks and whilst there are some heavily loaded buses, there are also a good number with spare capacity too when taking all three routes into consideration.

If buses are not running in early morning peak, presumably on their first journey after leaving Harristown, then this would indicate an operational issue on the side of Dublin Bus since these buses would start their day in the garage and then go direct to the 40/140/40D terminus and then operate out.

hardanro wrote: »

A tweet from this morning:

https://twitter.com/dublinbusnews/status/960795528303964160

I was also at the bus stop (Ardmore Hotel) around 8 am. There was already 15 people waiting and more coming. After the first 2 buses didn't stop (40D & 140) I realized that the situation will only get worse so I walk up the road.
I managed to get on a bus at 8:30 in Finglas village. The bus didn't stop to pick up other passengers until St Vincent School.

The new timetable on the 140 should have helped somewhat because since the timetable refresh there has been an extra bus added in AM Peak ex Finglas which has increased the frequency to every 8 minutes between 0655 and 0815

There is talk of further changes to the 40 group of routes in the coming weeks, subject to union approval on rosters, including a new route to Broombridge that should hopefully free up some capacity on the 40/40D/140 as it's likely that people taking local journeys will in part switch to this route.

suicide_circus wrote: »

Yeah it's never an issue with the 757.
Im sure dublin bus is aware if it. Plenty of Google reviews of the 747 Airlink stating that the bus didn't stop and just drove past. One issue is that some drivers stop picking up passengers when the luggage rack is full - probably a h&s thing but still irritating for those left at the stop!

I would simply vote with my feet - there are no shortage of services that serve the airport and if the 757 route is not suitable than consider the Aircoach services since the price is either the same or similar depending on where you are traveling from.

AlekSmart wrote: »

It's of interest that the NTA put's it's PR Guru out to bat when dealing with this issue.

An indication perhaps,of how it percieves the situation internally ?

PR people experienced and recruited to deal with the press, dealing with the press, who'd have thought they would actually be doing their job?

dfx- wrote: »

The whole plan for the Bus Network since 2009 is to do as much as possible with as little resources as possible. And we are still pretending it can work because there is no adapting from this policy.

Network Direct, which is the network we are all still working off, was designed to cut resources and it did it by joining routes together. So it joined random routes together into super long routes that don't work.

I'm by no means a fan of Network Direct, what they did to the 4 was terrible to the point that passengers completely abandoned this when Dublin Bus simply didn't care about that and many passengers like myself stopped using it, but on some other corridors there was massive oversupply of services and duplication which was not sustainable with non clockface timetables, similar services that were departing at the same time and then big gaps.

However I too am not totally convinced by these ultra-long cross city routes - certainly there was a need to improve the route network than it was before and properly co-ordinate timetables, but some of the routes are far too long and that has an impact on reliability and it's something that I hope BusConnects can address, as the noises made at the start are certainly promising in this respect but the proof will be in the pudding.

And we are working this network with new buses, but lower capacity buses because ten years ago, there was a need to reduce capacity.

The new buses have been able to coax people out of their cars because they offer a nicer environment that has helped shed in part the image that Dublin Bus has in the past with sitting next to someone smelly on the same seat with leaky windows, whilst also being able to provide WIFI, on bus information and also more lately USB Sockets. Sure to you and me we'd use a bus without these but there is part of the population who won't and a more modern fleet is part of the reason we're seeing a modal shift to public transport in the last few years.

Having two sets of doors can really decrease journey times and allow buses to complete their laps of a route faster by virtually eliminating dwell time, which is a massive problem in Dublin which will in turn increase the capacity provided per hour on many routes with the same amount of buses. However the problem is whilst we have the vehicles in Dublin for this at the moment to greatly improve these things we don't yet have the fare, revenue protection system or the operating environment which means we see nothing like the benefits that they can bring.

Then there's fuel economy (more cost concerns), environmental concerns, war on staff costs, tendering process (which is actually about lowering said costs, not customer consideration) before you get near concerns of customers or passengers.

There's no sign of the overarching and flawed principle of pushing resources to beyond breaking point going away. We are going to pretend it just needs tweaking.

I am supportive of the tendering program because no monopoly I have ever seen has been the most efficient or customer focused operation because they simply don't have to be. Hopefully it will shed some of the more outdated working practices from Dublin Bus and make it easier to introduce late running services rather than being blocked by unions and also making it easier to adjust timetables rather than having long drawn out processes where a timetable is created but it takes months to go live because of union disagreement on rosters.

Personally I think increasing the Dublin City bus fleet by over 130 buses in little over 12 months is a sizable increase and as the year goes on we should start to see the fruits of that, we've seen the start of that already, but of course there is still more that needs to be done and will be done as the year goes on based on the plans that are there.

Also you have to bear in mind that a sizable percentage of the current issues are related to the LUAS Cross City project being completed and traffic issues in the city center and Dublin City Council's ineptitude.