Tonight's the night, when the centre of Dublin will resemble a vast camp for displaced persons looking for transport home, and they're as likely find a taxi as to have sex with an ostrich. This is common on Saturdays anyway. Anything out of the ordinary - a hockey match between Holy Child School, Killiney, and Loreto, St Stephen's Green, say - will cause a taxi drought lasting till dawn on Sunday, bedraggled girls hauling themselves on hands and bloodied knees up the rocky slopes of Killiney hill, with gallant exhortations - "Onward Oonagh! Bear Up Immaculata!" - from their hockey coach, Miss Witherspoon, ringing around their ears.
That's nothing to the calamity which befalls the city when anything biggish occurs, when taxis become as rare as condoms in a convent and the queues at taxi ranks resemble something you might have seen in Dunkirk, circa 1940, without the Stukas. If you want a bit of entertainment on such a Saturday, try ringing a taxi company. If you can get through - unlikely - you might be diverted by the controller who answers the phone.
"You want WHAT?" (The sound of a hand hitting a thigh in delight).
"A taxi? You want a taxi? Which month had you in mind? We've one free the first Sunday next March - will that do you?"
Daily Paralysis
It's sort of funny, only it's not. Dublin is now gridlocked into a daily paralysis. The Government tells us we shouldn't drink and drive, and then restricts the numbers of alternative forms of personal door-to-door transport, taxis, solely in order to protect the capital of those who have invested in taxiplates. It's a protected monopoly, and like all protected monopolies, supply is restricted according to the needs of the suppliers.
It is certainly not the only reason why Dublin is becoming one of the most unendurable capital cities in the EU to have to get around, but it's one of them. Another is that decisionmaking over traffic has been surrendered to large government-controlled bodies which are culturally and ideologically obsessed with Big Solutions involving Big Money, and, most of all, with Trams.
Why? Why this obsession with trams, when buses would do? The instinct seems to be: spend ten zillion pounds, instal trams, which are politically correct, call them Luas, which makes them very indigenously and Gaelicly correct, and presto, our problems are solved.
If only. What is the particular virtue of a tram (with hugely complicated and expensive power supply and tracking) over a bus, which carries its own power supply with it and which can use existing road surfaces with a little further investment? Why can we not have buses moving down bus-only lanes from the suburbs into the city centre?
And why do bus journeys all have to be long, and obsessed with destination? Why is it is virtually impossible to make short bus journeys around Dublin on cheap, circular, inner-city feeder buses that could ferry people speedily from O'Connell Street to St Stephen's Green, from Capel Street to Amiens Street, from Westland Row to King's Bridge?
That is the truly perplexing nature of Dublin city-centre transport. Why is there no cheap, tokens-only co-ordinated and quick bus service linking the railway and Dart stations, the theatres, cinemas and Temple Bar, down bus lanes which motorists enter on pain of instant electrocution and certain - and painful - death?
Taking Fares
Without fail, I walk down O'Connell Street faster than a bus (probably en route to Finglas) makes the same journey - in large part because the driver is taking fares at each stop. And just about the only city-centre-only bus route that I know connects Heuston Station with O'Connell Bridge, and its 90p bus fare down the quays is paradoxically both too little and too much. For the journey does not deserve that tariff; yet a £1 fare without change makes much more sense. It seems that CIE/Dublin Bus has been negotiating with the bus workers' unions for decades. And though we all sympathise with drivers having to cope with thugs on late-night buses, we still we have a monopoly bus service which is organised around the habits of management and the needs of the workforce rather than the requirements of the public. Indeed, I suspect the Luas scheme is attractive simply because it is new. Its management can write its own rules. It will go where it is needed, when it is needed, and quickly. But in fact, it is possible to achieve much of that now, using surface buses flexibly, wisely and well.
"Flexibly" is a word, but flexibility and monopoly are mutually exclusive concepts. While CIE was able to monopolise bus services from Dublin to the country, those services were expensive and inefficient and organised around the requirements of the bus service. Private hauliers found legal loopholes and started in competition, and drove CIE/Bus Eireann into improving the quality, timing and pricing of their services.
While Dublin Bus holds a subsidised monopoly on public transport in the capital, and while it has no commercial incentive to come to a sensible deal with the unions, it will never get better, because it doesn't need to. The answer is this: break the bus monopoly in Dublin - and break the taxi monopoly, too. Let Dublin breathe at last. (And thank God, I'm staying in tonight. I'm expecting this perfectly lovely ostrich . . . ).