Ms Dervla McKay:

We operate the 120 and 126 services so I thank the Deputy for his kind comments regarding the drivers and his own personal use of the service. As a general rule, our Dublin commuter services actually perform extremely well from a reliability point of view. From the start of this year, in terms of the lost kilometres that we control, we have actually operated 99.6% of those services. Of our total kilometres operated since the beginning of the year, it is 99.4%. We see those operating very well from a reliability point of view but we still see challenges around that congestion piece, which we have all mentioned and talked about in the committee meeting today with respect to reliability.

For us, on those services we get some key pinch points going through the likes of Maynooth and other towns that were mentioned. We can get caught up quite badly, and thus it makes us delayed in getting into the city. We made some changes to those services and put in some additional capacity on 26 November last year, which is not that long ago. That has performed really well. There is a 54% increase year on year from 2022 to 2023 in terms of passenger growth across the six services we operate in their different iterations. So far this year, we have also seen those services continue to grow. It just goes to show that you can run those services at least reliably, and there is a good bit of work still to do on traffic congestion.

On the ghost bus issue, as the Deputy is aware, the app is not an operator app but we feed into that. Our control teams, when a service is disrupted for whatever reason, mark the service as cancelled and that then feeds through to the app. If the scheduled time is, for example, 12.30 p.m., if it is not actually picked up or tracking and then when it is counting down that means it can see it. Where it disappears, it may be that there is a last-minute cancellation but the control team should absolutely be putting that in so, at least, the customer knows and can make informed decision on whether to wait for the next service or make alternative arrangements. However, we do drill it home that if there is disruption to the service for any reason, they mark that. At least for our services in that area, it is very much about the punctuality rather than reliability. With regard to our own staffing in that area, it is extremely good and we have a full complement of staff in our Naas depot - hence, why the reliability is so good.