Mr. Tim Gaston:

The Senator is spot on that we are playing catch-up. There is a deficit of infrastructure, bus stops and appropriate bus stops across rural Ireland. It is not straightforward. We do not look for a lay-by at every location because then we would be getting into land purchase and all sorts of issues. On the other hand, we must be cognisant of the safety aspects of this as well. The NTA produced a guidance note for local authorities some years ago. It was around the time the responsibility for signing off on the location of bus stops moved from the Garda to the local authorities. There are, therefore, a number of parties involved. We involve the local authorities, and we have to. It is appropriate to do so when deciding where we want to put the poles. We work with the operators, including Local Link, to ensure the location best serves the local people using the buses. Then we put that pole and some hard standing in place, engage a contractor to do so, or look to the local authority to do that. We have had some success in the past 12 months or so because we had significant funding coming in that direction and we have now started a national programme. However, there are something in the order of 15,000 bus stops nationally and we have addressed somewhere in the order of 1,000 of them in the last while. That is not fast enough and we need to find ways to speed that up. At the minute we are in the middle of putting together a new programme where, jointly with the local authorities, we will identify where bus poles are needed and speed up the roll out.

At the same time, the information on the bus pole is important, because, as the Senator said, not everybody has the app or access to TFI live information on the websites and so on. We usually take a service level agreement with Bus Éireann to maintain the information on those bus poles, because many of them are shared between it and Local Link or maybe private operators. We look to Bus Éireann and contract it to maintain the information on those carousels because timetables change as things need to be adjusted. There is, therefore, a programme, but I cannot suggest for a minute that rural Ireland has fantastic bus infrastructure because it does not and we fully recognise we are playing catch-up.