Maeve O'Connell (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)

The Minister of State highlighted some of the issues. Deputy Currie also highlighted the issue of ghost buses and the unreliability of the app. Deputy Timmins also highlighted this issue as well. It is also very frustrating that there is not one single accessible platform. There are effectively five different apps that people might find themselves having to interact with to plan their journey. There is the journey planner, a taxi driver database and the Leap top-up. It is really extraordinarily complicated, particularly for someone who is new to it or not digitally savvy, for whatever reason. Addressing this type of issue really needs to be important if we are going to encourage people to rely on public transport and give up their car and move to public transport. Even if it is only part of their journey and they do use other forms of transportation, if that part of the journey becomes unreliable, and people cannot rely on or navigate the apps, all of these things will be barriers to trying to get these transformations and modal shifts.

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