The incidence of ghost buses – scheduled services that fail to show up – is a cause of understandable frustration to the travelling public and Dublin commuters.
The explanations advanced to date by the two operators in the Dublin market – state-owned Dublin bus and the privately-owned Go Ahead – are plausible but don’t seem to account adequately for the extent of the long-running problem which has become acute in recent weeks. Go Ahead attributes it to a shortage of mechanics while Dublin Bus points to problems with a 15 year old real-time passenger information system which does not always provide accurate information on bus arrivals. It is to be replaced over the next two years at a cost of €68 million.
The elephant in the room is traffic congestion in Dublin and its impact on buses in general, including those introduced as part of BusConnects, a multiyear project to redesign the bus network around a series of spine and radial routes.
Dublin is one of the most congested cities in Europe .The consequences for bus timetables are obvious and can only be exacerbated for the long cross-city and radial routes at the heart of the BusConnects project. Delays in rolling out bus lanes are another factor.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that one of the worst performing route for ghost buses is a radial route across south Dublin introduced as part of BusConnects. The S6 runs from Blackrock in South Dublin via UCD to Tallaght in West Dublin and is the most featured on an app which irate passengers use to report ghost buses.
BusConnects is an important and necessary project and part of the wider effort to reach our national climate goals. The question as to whether it may have underestimated the consequences of traffic congestion is one that the Minister for Transport Darragh O’Brien could usefully bring up with the National Transport Authority when he meets them next week to discuss the issue. So is the slow progress on rolling out the whole project and the need to speed up the introduction of the new real-time information system.
