Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The problem we have is that all of this sounds great on paper. The data may show things are improving and capacity is improving. I know, for example, the late-night buses are a big attraction and capacity on them has improved and people are taking them up. Some of the routes are definitely better. However we are still dealing with a lot of traffic congestion in the city. For example, yesterday evening I travelled to the Phoenix Park and it took me an hour and a half to go 5 km. I was going to the protest at the ambassador's residence. It was crazy and I should have walked. Nevertheless, this gives an example of how bad traffic congestion is. Buses get caught up in this because we have not seen the infrastructure and improvements in bus lanes required to make BusConnects the great success it is meant to be. It is like having trains without the train tracks. We have all these trains but no tracks to put them on. At present for many people it is a pure disaster, particularly for people doing regular journeys, as I said earlier, to school or to work or to access the village where they can shop or socialise.

I also have real concerns about the way the National Transport Authority effectively runs Dublin Bus and Go-Ahead Ireland and tracks their performance so it can produce all the data that looks good on paper. The reality and experience for the passengers is very different than the data produced by the NTA. Supposedly a bus is meant to operate every 12 minutes but, in reality, there are gaps of about an hour at peak times because of the issues I have just mentioned with the corridors and traffic congestion. Because of the NTA's key performance indicator when the driver comes along after people have been waiting for an hour instead of 12 minutes, he is expected to wait at every bus stop until exactly the time he is meant to leave. If this does not happen, Dublin Bus and Go-Ahead Ireland are fined very heavily by the NTA. Companies are running bus services but what they are really doing is watching the level of fines instead of looking at the service they should be delivering to the passengers waiting on the streets.

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