Mr. Billy Hann:

Certainly from a Dublin Bus perspective - and I assume it is the same for all operators - if we had dedicated bus corridors, provided they are not being congested by people who should not be in there, we can get predictability on our services and into the traffic patterns and run times of those buses. The unfortunate part is we do not have enough dedicated bus corridors and our buses are generally in traffic with everybody else. As we all know, the difficulty with that is that certain routes could maybe be done in 15 minutes in a particular period of the day, and that could be over an hour at another period of the day. We are trying to develop profiles and run times for buses based on that variable, and it is extremely difficult. As a result, picking a time that actually works from a punctuality point of view, and trying to hit all our bus stops and times, is really difficult.

If one takes the rail network, which is on a fixed network and is free for them to go and do what they need to do, that is what we would like from a bus network in an ideal world.