Salthill bus service is brutal.

cgcsb

Squeeonline wrote: »

Wading in here...

I'm not sure that it is entirely out of their control. This ted talk https://www.ted.com/talks/jonas_eliasson_how_to_solve_traffic_jams?language=en showed that a small reduction in the number of cars drastically decreased the "traffic".

If BE ran a decent service (or if private companies could compete) that people could rely on, it might reduce the traffic significantly.

That's kind of self defeating, they can't run a decent service without sufficient road space and people won't use it because it's not a decent service. You have to break the link somewhere to end that cycle. Put simply there needs to be more bus lanes and car bans. Dublin City Council is leading the way on this, soon it'll be virtually impossible to drive through Dublin City Centre with most of the space handed over to buses, luas, pedestrians and cyclists.

ben.schlomo

baldshin wrote: »

Yes the traffic is awful and causes delays which CIE can't help. The problem is the timetables though. For example, the 409 bus is scheduled every 15 minutes. However, there's no way in hell it can stick to that frequency at peak times, so why not adjust the timetable to reflect that? Overestimate the time it will take to get in and out of time. That way at least people know what time they need to be at the stop instead of showing up at the current time and waiting ages!

The real time trackers at the bus stops are never right either, it seems as though they're just calibrated with the timetable and not the buses themselves.

Another thing that bugs me on the 409 is when you see multiple buses behind each other. It's not rare to see 2, or even 3 of them one after another on the Doughiska Road, meaning that there's gonna be a 45 minute wait for a bus after those 3 have left. Why don't they have the common sense when leaving town/Parkmore to not all leave at the same time if one or two of them have been delayed. That way they can get back on track with the timetable.

Broad generalisation is broad.

the untitled user

My understanding is that a large part of CIE's problems stem from the rigidity of staff contracts. In my own experience, most of the time you see severe delays or missed buses on the Galway routes it's because somebody is due their break, but whoever was to replace them got delayed.

This has always been a problem, but I don't think CIE can't really modify staffing arrangements to suit timetables as they would wish, at least under the current employment arrangements.

The other component is probably just incompetence on the administrative side of things. Many staff don't even know of the extistence of certain routes (e.g. Knocknacarra to HP/Boston which has no official timetable afaik) so expecting any kind of 'problem solving' capability when faced with a difficult time table schedule is probably beyond most people's competence in the office.

ciano1

The 405 is a joke these days, 3rd time in the past 2 weeks the 1:40 just didn't show up. Traffic wasnt even particularly bad today!

Straight Talker

Im a frequent user of the 405 and 403 routes and i find the buses to be fairly reliable.My only issue is the odd rude driver.

Mrs OBumble

My sense is that 403 is the only route where the real-time displays and data in the app are based on where buses are. (Based on lots of observation of the 405, a bit of 409 and 401, even less of 402 - and none on 404, 407, 410).

Others all seem to be based on timetable extrapolations only, and these are not adjusted to take account of likely traffic volumes at the time.

Thargor

I know its never a popular post on the Galway board but do you really need a bus to get in from Salthill? A bike will get you into town in half the time for free.

Stevolende

403 was the first service I saw a 'No real time Information' message on, on the stop near the Ballybane library. At the tiime I thought th esystem was broken or something, hadn't thought that what the message conveyed was actually positive.

I thought the system was initially being talked about as having some kind of location transmitter in the actual bus, is that what a GPS actually equates to? Device sends signal to satellite and receives additional location information back as to where its destination lies in relation to it? Which should mean that other devices can pick up location information signal?
Which relies on some upkeep to make sure signal device and receivers are calibrated properly. Heard something on QI recently saying that without maintenance a standard GPS system gets way off true over passing time.

Still wondering how a bus that cost a quarter of a million can be sounding like it's groaning within a few months.
& thinking about injecting funds into the system the last big funding bought was it 6 new buses, or 8 and didn't appear to have much change afterwards out of €1.5million

what_traffic

See following article published today on the Connacht Tribune.
http://connachttribune.ie/bus-eireann-put-through-its-paces-by-city-councillors/

Whereisgalway

what_traffic wrote: »

See following article published today on the Connacht Tribune.
http://connachttribune.ie/bus-eireann-put-through-its-paces-by-city-councillors/

Counsellors Making sound bites