Is transportation in the Dublin the worst in any European capital?

mikemac2

urban sprawl wrote: »

Berlin Tegel airport has no rail connection.

True

urban sprawl wrote: »

Schoenefeld is on the rail line but is very much a second tier airport.

For a capital city the worst airport I've seen in Europe after Warsaw Modlin. Schonefeld is a dump belonging to the 1970´s

whiskeyman

cdeb wrote: »

There's plenty of European capitals without rail links to the airport. Cardiff, Prague, Bratislava, Luxembourg, Tirane, Podgorica, Zagreb, Belgrade, Budapest, Ljubljana, Nicosia, Tallinn...

Vilnius has a rail connection, but it's something like every 90 minutes, so there may as well not be one.

.

Many of those listed above are far far smaller than Dublin airport in fairness.

We are in the top 11th regarding volume.
Just below Paris Orly (has light rail) and Copenhagen (has rail link).

https://www.dublinairport.com/latest-news/2019/05/31/dublin-airport-was-eu-s-11th-largest-airport-in-2018

Samuel T. Cogley

I walk 1 minute to the DART station, where there is a DART every ten minutes, get off at Tara, walk 5 minutes to the LUAS which is usually just pulling in and get off a few stops later (lazy I know) and I live in an 'undesirable' area of Dublin. On a bad day my commute with waiting is 45 minutes door to door.

Very much depends where you live.

goose2005

wakka12 wrote: »

By 'european'capital in these threads they always mean western europe

Im sure tirana,skopje, Sofia and Sarajevo among others dont have better public transport than dublin

I live along the green line luas and not far from Dart either and only 5km from town so busses arent a bad option either. So for me Id say dublins PT is decent but I dont see how somebody living in north dublin could say its anything other than ****.. But even at that I find Dublins PT shockingly expensive so I jsut cycle everywhere.

Sofia has 308 km of trams, 193 km of trolleybus and a 2-line metro with 34 stations.

cdeb

whiskeyman wrote: »

Many of those listed above are far far smaller than Dublin airport in fairness.

For sure. I'm not arguing our transport is brilliant here. But I hate random internet whines about how crap everything is which are laden with errors. A discussion like this surely needs to have facts involved. These aren't small capitals like Reykjavik. These qualify as major cities without rail links

Samuel T. Cogley

cdeb wrote: »

For sure. I'm not arguing our transport is brilliant here. But I hate random internet whines about how crap everything is which are laden with errors. A discussion like this surely needs to have facts involved.

Checks to see if we're still in After Hours...

Elemonator

It's certainly the worst I have experienced out of all the European capitals and even some nondescript cities in European countries.

The best I've ever seen, just a few days ago for the billionth time, is Berlin. Very cheap tickets, which cover tram, regional train, U-Bahn (metro), S-Bahn (light rail, similar to a DART and runs underground on parts of some routes, and bus. It is a huge city and I was able to reach corners of it in an average of 20 mins as the lines go everywhere and the longest I waited for a rail type of transport was no more than 5 minutes. Services run 24hrs. They also have these electric Vespa like scooters, stand up electric scooters and bikes also that don't have to be returned to a bikes station and can be left anywhere inside the map area displayed on the phone app and where they aren't causing a obstruction. The end result is very little traffic in Berlin also.

Here you are doomed either by Dublin Bus being stuck in traffic the whole time, prohibitive cost, or having to wait an hour for a bus/train. In addition to this, we have no 24hr transport links or rail connection to the airport. We are still talking about building our FIRST metro line decades later. It's gone beyond a joke.


I've been to some tiny Spanish cities and they have a frequent bus service that is dirt cheap.

In the words of German tourists I've met numerous times in Dublin, our public transport system is "****".

z0oT

goose2005 wrote: »

Even places like Kharkiv and Yerevan have metros.

Pyongyang has a metro too. I was on it once.

cdeb

goose2005 wrote: »

This is Chisinau, Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe, and yet its trolleybus network is probably better than anything Dublin has

Even places like Kharkiv and Yerevan have metros.

Kharkiv is twice the size of Dublin. Yerevan is another ex Soviet city and they got metros once they hit a million population to make up for, you know, people coming along in the middle of the night to whisk you away to the gulag.

A trolleybus is just a bus. Here's the Dublin Bus route map.. Doesn't look worse than Chisinau to me.

Rubberchikken

inefficient at times. not always the most polite drivers.
vastly overpriced. sharing with some very peculair people.

bus corridors a joke. traffic lights that make little sense.

cdeb

Elemonator wrote: »

In addition to this, we have no 24hr transport links or rail connection to the airport.

Aircoach is a 24 hour service

Ken.

Mod-Thread moved to the Dublin City forum. Please read the local charter before posting.

Calina

In my experience yes, pretty much. The reasons are complex over time but typically the country spends as little as it can get away with spending on public transport infrastructure.

The issue with the airport and the lack of a rail connection is pretty much that all of the bus systems are unreliable. 747 cannot be called an express in either direction, aircoach is often full and the local services like the 16 take ages at best. And this on a route with soi disant competition.

There seems to be no integrated approach to moving people around the city. When I left, the place still did not have fully integrated ticketing, good if that has changed but it is still way behind. Luxembourg is about to make public transport free, Tallin has already. But Dublin's ticketing system is archaic and expensive. It actually wasn't worth my while to buy a commuter ticket at all because the cost of a monthly ticket was more than twice what I spent on bus tickets if I tried to commute by bus. Sure the leapcard reduces the cost but not massively. Plus point is it should have reduced dwell times a bit but...In terms of attracting people to switch from private to public, it just isn't there.

Oddly, experience in London is mixed too..A lot of engineerjng closures at weekends the last few times I was there. That is a function of age and years of under investment though and the routes are comprehensive. You can pay by wireless touch too.

mulbot

cdeb wrote: »

There's plenty of European capitals without rail links to the airport. Cardiff, Prague, Bratislava, Luxembourg, Tirane, Podgorica, Zagreb, Belgrade, Budapest, Ljubljana, Nicosia, Tallinn...

Vilnius has a rail connection, but it's something like every 90 minutes, so there may as well not be one.

The notion that trains here break down "way way too often" is absolute nonsense, in my experience as someone who commutes by rail.

Lots of cities have trams that slow down in the city centre. It's because - wait for it - it's a ****ing city centre, and it's crowded.

The Luas lines do link up - certainly there's underground networks in Europe with "linking" stations which are far farther apart than the two minutes it takes to walk from the GPO to Abbey Street.

There's problems with Dublin transport alright, but putting out some of the daft comments that have appeared in the first two pages of this thread really doesn't do the posters concerned any credit at all.

Tallinn does have such a transport system from the airport.

cdeb

Apologies; you're right. (And I should have said Larnaka, not Nicosia)

Still, the overall point stands.

strandroad

cdeb wrote: »

The Luas lines do link up - certainly there's underground networks in Europe with "linking" stations which are far farther apart than the two minutes it takes to walk from the GPO to Abbey Street.

The Luas is not an underground network though, it's a bog standard tram with a fancy name. They don't need linking stations, just plain stops, and any random mid-sized European city would have dozens of lines with multiple crosschange stops and junctions.

A Shropshire Lad

I dont know if Dublin Bus do any training in the area of customer service but some of their drivers are pig ignorant. Not a great impression for some tourists who have just arrived in the country

Idbatterim

dublins transport, given the size and growth of the city, are a disgrace! Two glacial, limited capacity light rail lines and the dart launched in 1984...

disposableFish

cdeb wrote: »

Aircoach is a 24 hour service

It's terrible though.

Wait an hour in the freezing cold at 2am and then hope you actually get on because there's 80 people that want to get on one coach.

strandroad

cdeb wrote: »

Aircoach is a 24 hour service

It takes 90 minutes to travel 25km.

mikemac2

What did people do before air coach? Just wondering

The 16 certainly wasn't 24/7

Was it a golden age for taxi drivers?

Chinasea

far too many people travelling for free and heaps bunking. Shambles. Everyone should pay something.

disposableFish

Chinasea wrote: »

far too many people travelling for free and heaps bunking. Shambles. Everyone should pay something.

Sounds like you're angry about something and are trying to shoe-horn it in somewhere...

Free travel passes aren't a problem for public transport, they help - the government pays for their use and it's actually a major revenue stream for PT companies.

Chinasea

I fail to see why so many travel for free, and not only that a high percentage claim they need to have a carer travel with them free also. Absolutely farcical. Yeah, this is a nonsense.

All should contribute.

ligerdub

wakka12 wrote: »

By 'european'capital in these threads they always mean western europe

Im sure tirana,skopje, Sofia and Sarajevo among others dont have better public transport than dublin

I live along the green line luas and not far from Dart either and only 5km from town so busses arent a bad option either. So for me Id say dublins PT is decent but I dont see how somebody living in north dublin could say its anything other than ****.. But even at that I find Dublins PT shockingly expensive so I jsut cycle everywhere.

Do they? I'm not sure they do. They don't for me anyway.

I'm not sure if you've ever been to Prague, but it's not a huge city and it has a fairly superb underground system. It absolutely smokes Dublin for service.

Sofia has 3 metro lines, Sarajevo has a fairly extensive network of trams and will probably be adding a metro. I don't know much about Tirana and Skopje, but there's nothing to suggest they are any worse than Dublin.

Also....typical that the person living in the most pampered area in Ireland for public transport thinks that it's decent.....the very fact that it's only "decent" says it all. Try living in Blanchardstown or Lucan and see what you think. Not only that you have all these options on the doorstep and you don't even use them! If you're not to use them with all that choice then how is anyone supposed to think it's anything other than rubbish across the board.

disposableFish

Chinasea wrote: »

I fail to see why so many travel for free, and not only that a high percentage claim they need to have a carer travel with them free also. Absolutely farcical. Yeah, this is a nonsense.

They're given to people like OAPs and those who receive disability allowance or the carers allowance you* mentioned.

There's plenty of barriers hindering disabled people from living their lives and working - this helps remove one.
...and in general they're people who've gotten the sh!tty end of the stick, is it so wrong to make things a bit easier for them?

Carers allowance helps people who are caring for people in their(the person being cared for) own homes. The alternative to this is those people being in nursing homes or hospital at much, much greater cost to the government than what it pays out to carers. It's a tough gig and you should be extremely grateful to them.

Chinasea wrote: »

All should contribute.

Everyone does, that's exactly how taxes work (and yes, everyone pays taxes).


*(edit: sorry, you were referring to accompanied travel. This is assessed at a higher level - only those with more severe issues get it. People who benefit from having someone there to make sure they're ok and nothing happens them and help if it does. People who might not leave their homes if they didn't have the security of someone else there. C'mon now, have some humanity).

killbillvol2

ligerdub wrote: »

Do they? I'm not sure they do. They don't for me anyway.

I'm not sure if you've ever been to Prague, but it's not a huge city and it has a fairly superb underground system. It absolutely smokes Dublin for service.

Sofia has 3 metro lines, Sarajevo has a fairly extensive network of trams and will probably be adding a metro. I don't know much about Tirana and Skopje, but there's nothing to suggest they are any worse than Dublin.

50 years of communism should sort us out then.

ligerdub

killbillvol2 wrote: »

50 years of communism should sort us out then.

Was I making the point as to why? No. The point was made that nobody would include Eastern Europe and perhaps it mightn't be up to the same standard as Dublin, which it seems is not a valid hypothesis.

Last Stop

The biggest problem with Dublin’s transport system is the chronic underinvestment over a number of decades and continuing to this day.

The funny thing is, due to this lack of investment, it would still be relatively cheap to fix the problems and build arguably one of the best networks in the world with a number of tram lines (Dublin is the perfect size for trams), a metro and 2 high frequency commuter rail lines.
You’re talking about around 20billion all in but when you compare it to London who are spending 18billion on one rail line, it’s not that bad. Spread over 30 years it works out even cheaper.

Unfortunately due to NIMBYism and those in rural Ireland (its not an us vs them situation) we get a fudge with a redesigned bus network and a perpetually delayed metro.

mikemac2

mikemac2 wrote: »

For a capital city the worst airport I've seen in Europe after Warsaw Modlin. Schonefeld is a dump belonging to the 1970´s

Tbf Modlin isn't the main Warsaw airport, it's more of a glorified shed that they slap a bigger city's name on to make it sound somewhat less remote: see also Paris-Beauvais, Frankfurt-Hahn, Charleroi-South Brussels (that last one really takes the piss, it's like calling Shannon airport "South Dublin" or "North Cork").

Warsaw's main airport (Chopin) is fairly decent.