Ms Anne Graham:

On BusConnects, Deputy Catherine Murphy asked about the reliability of bus services, which is an issue throughout our bus system at the moment. We are seeing a reduction in kilometres operated of an order that is not acceptable at the moment and we are not happy with the level of lost kilometres, which is impacting on the reliability of the services. It is an operational issue. We are finding that driver absences are at a level that, even post Covid, we do not feel is acceptable, and it is impacting on the delivery of services.

Driver recruitment is also an issue during this period of effective full employment in Ireland at the moment. All operators are finding it difficult to recruit drivers and the attrition rate for drivers in our bus operators is also very high. All of this is impacting on reliability and we have a number of actions with the operators to try to improve the recruitment timeline for drivers, but we are also looking at our service levels and seeing whether there are places - the Deputy already has identified some for us - where we might move services from one alignment to another to improve the reliability of those services. Even during the summer months, where the demand is not as high as it would be in September, we might reduce services to improve the reliability, given our operators are struggling with driver resources. That is an issue we are tackling with our operators at the moment. The contracts are structured such that they are not paid for services they do not operate, which we thought would be a sufficiently strong incentive to ensure we would get that level of performance, but at the moment, unfortunately, they are all struggling in this space. We have to apologise to our customers because the service is not at the level of reliability at which we want it to be.

On the delivery of the C spine of BusConnects, Deputy Catherine Murphy asked us to look at the lessons to be learned, which we will do, and we will also look at how quickly we can rectify aspects of the services. In terms of the underlying growth in passenger numbers that we have seen over the implementation of the C spine, it has grown by 11% to 12% above what would be a normal growth and recovery after Covid. There has certainly been a good response to some of the services and changes, while recognising there remain some issues on which we will need to revert to the Deputy in regard to how we will respond to them.

I think that we covered Deputy Leddin's question about the electric bikes.