Dublin Bus Network Review

BenShermin

jenizzle wrote: »

Dunno what it was to prove other than to get a bus service for the 3 grannies from there that want to make 10am mass in Dun Laoghaire.

and to make the fare paying passengers on those buses late for work:rolleyes:. Thanks for explaining that.

Cookie_Monster

jenizzle wrote: »

The impression I got from the write-up in the Southside People was that the route down Kill Avenue was blocked, and then people walked along side the bus through the Farm. They've done this twice and the second time they forced two busses down this route. Dunno what it was to prove other than to get a bus service for the 3 grannies from there that want to make 10am mass in Dun Laoghaire.

to any driver encountering these retards, just refuse to move it rather than give them them smug satisfaction of bullying you into changing your route. not to mention radioing for the Gardai

Stuff like that is just thuggish behaviour and should be treated as a serious threat to staff and passangers by DB and an GS.

The_Wrecker

Cookie_Monster wrote: »

to any driver encountering these retards, just refuse to move it rather than give them them smug satisfaction of bullying you into changing your route. not to mention radioing for the Gardai

Stuff like that is just thuggish behaviour and should be treated as a serious threat to staff and passangers by DB and an GS.

And for those that dont get to turn right at Bakers heading for the noggin. Remove 46a from the front and stick up something like 33 for the photographers!

ardmacha

These protesters seem to be blissfully unaware that the 63 route now goes through Oliver Pluckett Road (Monkstown Farm)

Dublin Bus is quite capable of providing a service without informing people that it exists.

Stevek101

ardmacha wrote: »

Dublin Bus is quite capable of providing a service without informing people that it exists.

Protesters conveniently ignore that this service exists.

ardmacha

Protesters conveniently ignore that this service exists.

Perhaps. But Dublin Bus are not well able to oppose protestors etc because there is a lack of public concrete data on who goes where and exactly how many people are facilitated or inconvenienced by a change.

CIE

A bus going from nowhere to nowhere is not a service. The old route 58 used to run via Monkstown Farm, but who rode it? It's gone now. What was done to route 63 seems to follow the same error as was done to route 47, before it was corrected by extending it to the city centre.

DART feeders overall are ill-conceived; look at route 111 for example. Started out as a high-frequency route, and now is down to four or five trips per day. And does anyone remember route 113, from Blackrock station to Cabinteely, basically duplicating the 45 along Deansgrange Road and Clonkeen Road?

I wonder what's keeping route 44B alive. I couldn't see that anyone was using the bus from Ballyedmonduff or Barnacullia three decades ago, never mind Glencullen, and the Ballybrack loop is still in the middle of nowhere. Never mind the fact that the roads via those villages are dangerously narrow, even for the old Leyland Leopards, and I'm left wondering that the NRA hasn't assigned a standard road width for lorries to pass each other safely at least; the roads are exactly the same width as decades ago. (I once rode on this route when a Van Hool-bodied Atlantean was assigned to it; that was a very interesting, even harrowing journey once we got past the wide part of Woodside Road onto the narrow parts.)

thomasj

What have these people done with the 39/a timetables on a Sunday evening from town?

The Aston quay timetable has 39 leave at 25 and 55 and 39as leaving at 00 and 30 with a 20 to 25 minute wait. A joke compared to the old 15 minute frequency from Hawkins street.

I had just missed a 39a last night and had a 30 minute wait. 2 37s passed!

What a joke! :mad:

AlekSmart

What have these people done with the 39/a timetables on a Sunday evening from town?

Thomasj,perhaps unwittingly, makes a very valid point here.

The current Network Direct "Improvements" (and the "Team" really still do percieve these as such) are the work of a small dedicated group of individuals.

This somewhat secretive process has featured a high degree of "Information Centred" adjustments derived from electronically gathered information which the company places great stock in.

However,these systems also appear to generate several anomalies such as 45 minute gaps on 8 minute headway services and entire sections of routes without anything approaching advertised service levels.

Thos customers directly and continually effected by the ND changes really DO need to keep their "Comments" flowing to the Network Direct "Team" directly (!!).

The individual garages have little or no say in the situation developing on the ground.

Polar101

thomasj wrote: »

What have these people done with the 39/a timetables on a Sunday evening from town?

I reckon if you complained to Network Direct or DB, they'd tell you that "buses leave terminus every 15 minutes" as that's what printed on the timetables.

Whether that's useful from a passenger's point of view, or has anything to do with reality, is another matter.

Cool Mo D

What we really need, is public access to the Dublin Bus GPS data. Then someone can put together a "real" timetable for any route, by analysing bus position data over a few weeks.

You would also be able to calculate rush-hour average waiting times for a route, say if someone wanted to get on a 145 in town between 4pm and 6pm, you could tell them to expect to wait 25 to 40 minutes (for example).

This would be more informative for customers, and put pressure on Dublin Bus to fix its rosters.

markpb

Cool Mo D wrote: »

What we really need, is public access to the Dublin Bus GPS data. Then someone can put together a "real" timetable for any route, by analysing bus position data over a few weeks.

It won't happen. You can be sure DB will claim commercial sensitivity.

OctavarIan

markpb wrote: »

It won't happen. You can be sure DB will claim commercial sensitivity.

Most big cities in the US have this system and it works amazingly well. For example in Chicago you can see any bus on a map in real time. Dublin Bus have no excuse bar the fact it would further highlight their shoddy organisation. It wouldn't even be that expensive to implement.

Was waiting for over an hour today for a 67, they're supposed to be every 30 mins. With a GPS system in place I could have at least gone for a coffee out of the cold for a while instead of freezing at a bus stop.

markpb

OctavarIan wrote: »

Most big cities in the US have this system and it works amazingly well.

Most cities in the US have lots of things we have. They have decent bus operators for a start.

Cool Mo D

markpb wrote: »

Most cities in the US have lots of things we have. They have decent bus operators for a start.

You must be joking.

Most bus services in the US don't run after 6pm, or on weekends, only cover a fraction of the city, and barely cover 20% of their operating costs with fares. Outside a handful of US cities, buses are for the poor and homeless.

KD345

Surly these gaps in the schedule will be highlighted when the 1000 real time passenger displays are switched on soon. It's all very well having a printed timetable at a stop but that will mean nothing when the shiny new pole tells you your bus is actually 40 minutes away instead of 10.
Perhaps a few cameraphone photos of these displays by passengers sent to the relevant people might bring about some change.

I see that the new braille equipped signage has been fitted to the now defunct stops used by the 51a on Clonliffe Road in Drumcondra. Is that not a bit wasteful?

Telchak

Karsini wrote: »

I see that the new braille equipped signage has been fitted to the now defunct stops used by the 51a on Clonliffe Road in Drumcondra. Is that not a bit wasteful?

The cost of putting in ones on unused bus stops probably wasn't much on top of the few thousand they had to do, and the stops are gonna be there for years and might be used again at some point

stop

Karsini wrote: »

I see that the new braille equipped signage has been fitted to the now defunct stops used by the 51a on Clonliffe Road in Drumcondra. Is that not a bit wasteful?

Not nearly as wasteful as putting in new kerbing at defunct stops used by a 14a routing on Palmerston Road in Rathmines. The stops are even listed on the website map, even though the Palmerston Road route has not been used for some time (1 year+ methinks?) now.

stop

stop wrote: »

Not nearly as wasteful as putting in new kerbing at defunct stops used by a 14a routing on Palmerston Road in Rathmines. The stops are even listed on the website map, even though the Palmerston Road route has not been used for some time (1 year+ methinks?) now.

They did this in Marino too, a couple of stops which were upgraded for the 123 are now out of use.

CIE

Cool Mo D wrote: »

You must be joking.

Most bus services in the US don't run after 6pm, or on weekends, only cover a fraction of the city, and barely cover 20% of their operating costs with fares. Outside a handful of US cities, buses are for the poor and homeless.

What cities are you referring to? Most major cities have buses running all night on a great many routes. Even suburbs have services going well into the evening hours. These cities have farebox recovery ratios of 40 percent on average, as well, sometimes greater.

And "the poor and homeless" quite often can get a subsidy to buy a car and receive rental assistance for housing, provided that they are not on drugs and are actually trying to get back on their feet.

Cool Mo D

CIE wrote: »

What cities are you referring to? Most major cities have buses running all night on a great many routes. Even suburbs have services going well into the evening hours. These cities have farebox recovery ratios of 40 percent on average, as well, sometimes greater.

And "the poor and homeless" quite often can get a subsidy to buy a car and receive rental assistance for housing, provided that they are not on drugs and are actually trying to get back on their feet.

Any US city outside the North East coast, West Coast, or Chicago has absolutely pitiful public transport.

For example, Tucson, Arizona is about the size of Dublin, but has 20 million public transport trips a year. Compare that to 120 million Dublin Bus, and about 30 million each for DART and Luas each.

Or take Kansas City, which is bigger than Dublin, but all their public transport combined carries less people per day then just the Luas. More than half their bus routes are either weekday only, or have no Sunday service.

CIE

Cool Mo D wrote: »

Any US city outside the North East coast, West Coast, or Chicago has absolutely pitiful public transport.

For example, Tucson, Arizona is about the size of Dublin, but has 20 million public transport trips a year. Compare that to 120 million Dublin Bus, and about 30 million each for DART and Luas each.

Or take Kansas City, which is bigger than Dublin, but all their public transport combined carries less people per day then just the Luas. More than half their bus routes are either weekday only, or have no Sunday service.

Tucson has half the population density of Dublin. Kansas City has a quarter of Dublin's population density. On top of that, Dublin has a lot more far-flung suburbs feeding traffic into it than either of those cities, and no deserts. And the timetables of both cities are easier to read than DB's timetables...

CIE

Karsini wrote: »

They did this in Marino too, a couple of stops which were upgraded for the 123 are now out of use.

How's service in Marino since they got rid of the Brian Road/Croydon Park Avenue routing? They still have that narrow single-lane part of Phillipsburgh Avenue where not even two City Imps would have been able to pass each other, never mind two double-deckers...funny how they keep those primitive road configurations, but it's feasible by contrast to build an extension of Cork Street to bypass the Coombe...

Cool Mo D

CIE wrote: »

Tucson has half the population density of Dublin. Kansas City has a quarter of Dublin's population density. On top of that, Dublin has a lot more far-flung suburbs feeding traffic into it than either of those cities, and no deserts. And the timetables of both cities are easier to read than DB's timetables...

That's not really the point though. The vast majority of Americans live in places that look like suburban Kansas City. The bus service there is absolutely typical of what you will get across the USA.
There does exist excellent public transport in the USA, but it is an exception, only available to some parts of a few urban areas.

CIE

Cool Mo D wrote: »

That's not really the point though. The vast majority of Americans live in places that look like suburban Kansas City. The bus service there is absolutely typical of what you will get across the USA.
There does exist excellent public transport in the USA, but it is an exception, only available to some parts of a few urban areas.

The vast majority of Americans...?

Here is a population density map of the contiguous 48 states of the USA. It indicates where the "vast majority" of people in that country live. I would say that a city that compares more closely to Dublin would be Washington DC, even though that city's population density is 85 percent the size of Dublin's (Kansas City's is 12.6 percent the size of Dublin's).

angel01

Been getting either the 4 or 7 recently from O'Connell Street, I have given up trying to get a 4 because they are never around but usually am on a 7 and I see people trying to get off the bus by the 2nd or 3rd stop and they usually give up :eek:, by the 3rd stop, the driver can't let anyone else on...

It is absolute madness

SparkyTech

angel01 wrote: »

Been getting either the 4 or 7 recently from O'Connell Street, I have given up trying to get a 4 because they are never around but usually am on a 7 and I see people trying to get off the bus by the 2nd or 3rd stop and they usually give up :eek:, by the 3rd stop, the driver can't let anyone else on...

It is absolute madness

Trying to get a 4 or a 7 to Merrion Sq. in the afternoon is complete potluck, they either come together after 20 mins or not at all. Ive given up and started waiting for a 13/a. Least I know one is going to come every ten mins without fail.

Cool Mo D

CIE wrote: »

The vast majority of Americans...?

Here is a population density map of the contiguous 48 states of the USA. It indicates where the "vast majority" of people in that country live. I would say that a city that compares more closely to Dublin would be Washington DC, even though that city's population density is 85 percent the size of Dublin's (Kansas City's is 12.6 percent the size of Dublin's).

Washington DC may be more similar to Dublin, although it is much, much bigger, but most Americans do not live in places that look like Washington DC. I have no idea what your map is trying to show, but my point is simply that most Americans live in sprawling post-war suburbs (which exist in every single part of the USA) with little to no public transport. Good public transport in America exists in a limited number of places, but most Americans by far do not have it.

Stevek101

I've been told that there'll be revised 37/38 timetables in January.