Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am fixated on those southern orbital routes because they are a dramatic change and provide a very good-quality service. I am sad in that I like to count the numbers as I watch buses go by. The public flocks to good public transport. I am told the routes are really taking off, with the numbers doing very well. I had a meeting with the board of Dublin Bus two weeks ago. What came out of it is that we have enough buses. We have to electrify them all and we must think about how we use our depots. Included in that, going back to Donnybrook or Ringsend, both in my constituency, is considering whether we could build over the bus stations If we have electric buses, we will not have the fumes or the same noise. There are really good continental examples. Ringsend depot is built on very valuable land beside Grand Canal Dock. We should be building above the bus depot there. We should retain the depot because it is an important part of the public infrastructure but we should get housing in at the same time. From talking to people in Dublin Bus, the critical thing will be turning around bus times more quickly. If we can give BusConnects the real priority we want to give it, then it is not the number of buses but the speed of the buses that is the key metric. Getting the speed up should be the focus rather than necessarily having to put more buses into a gridlocked system.