Bus cuts plan shows contempt for people

More emphasis on basic services and less on monumentally expensive projects would make for better public transport, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE.

LEAVE ASIDE the bare necessities of life like food and shelter. Leave aside the tangled emotional thickets of love and affection. Otherwise, what is the single biggest cause of mundane misery for Irish people? Buses. Or rather the absence of buses.

Waiting for the bus that doesn’t come isn’t traumatic. It doesn’t cause you physical pain or leave you emotionally scarred. But, repeated over and over, day after day, it is a powerful source of cumulative depression. Standing there, in the Irish weather, with a hypodermic wind injecting a metallic chill in your bones, you feel wretchedly, desolately forlorn.

The misery isn’t just about the waiting, though there is something peculiarly unpleasant about the combination of tension (will I be late for work?) and stasis. It is about the casually contemptuous message of powerlessness.

This is a public service that you’re paying for twice, through your taxes and your fares. It is, literally, a connection to your city, your society, your country.

And when it doesn’t function, your society is telling you something. It is reminding you that you don’t really matter, that even in the small, apparently banal things of life, you are a person of no importance. Public transport, in this respect, is a function, not just of an economy, but of a democracy. A decent service is a form of public respect. A bad one is a form of public disregard.

It is a fact of life that buses matter more to people in housing estates than to those in leafy roads. Hence, of course, the extraordinarily low media profile of Dublin Bus’s plans to take 120 buses off the road and cut services to both old working-class housing estates and new commuter suburbs. Because it disproportionately hits the poor, the elderly and the ordinary working Joe and Josephine, the story has been largely reported on as an industrial relations issue. The reality that something cruel and stupid is being done to people and communities is barely present.

To understand how the cuts in bus services will be distributed, you have to grasp the bizarre logic that dictates that those who depend most on these services are first in line for cuts. The priority in transport policy is to get people to shift from cars to public transport. This is fair enough in itself, but it has a weird consequence.

If you don’t have a car, you depend on the bus anyway. So you don’t really matter. What are you going to do – walk? Thus, the more you need Dublin Bus, the less it needs you. The more choices you have (which is to say, the better off you are) the more Dublin Bus needs to keep you sweet.

Thus, when services come to be cut, the axe falls heaviest on working-class communities. Similarly, areas with large numbers of elderly people, for whom Dublin Bus receives a fixed State subsidy, have a low priority because these older people are neither shifting from cars nor do they constitute a source of possible extra revenue.

In response to a 3.5 per cent fall in the number of passengers, Dublin Bus is in the process of cutting 10 per cent of its fleet. Though the detail of these cuts is still unclear, the pattern suggests that Ballymun (routes 13 and 13A), Finglas (40), Ballyfermot (78A), Tallaght (77), Whitehall and Ringsend (3) will be among the hardest hit. If for example, the Ballymun route loses, as planned, three buses and seven drivers a day, services fall by a third. Given that Dublin Bus is also optimistically cutting the allocated time for each journey, (largely, one suspects, to make the timetables look better) it is very likely that even the scheduled services that survive will be subject to worse delays.

None of this makes sense. We’re supposed to be aiming for a target, according to the Oireachtas transport committee, of having 80 per cent of Dublin commuters travelling by bus by 2010. Such targets are a joke when we have one of the lowest public subsidies for bus services in the EU. Making the service worse in order to avoid a €31 million deficit this year will simply discourage those commuters who do have a choice while punishing those who don’t. All we’ll get is a vicious circle of cuts, fewer passengers, less revenue, more cuts and still fewer passengers. In social terms, what this means is that as well as being hit by mass unemployment, people in working-class estates are also being physically isolated from the city. They will live, not in suburbs, but in reservations.

We need to get away from the “fur coat and no knickers” mentality that dominates transport policy. Big, glamorous and monumentally expensive projects like Metro North would be fine if they were coming on top of a decent basic public service. In a time of crisis, scrapping the metro would save at least €5 billion.

A billion of that should be used to increase bus services and reduce the gross national product of petty misery. Otherwise, we’re on the road to nowhere.