BusConnects Dublin - Bus Network Changes Discussion

Honestly, kinda baffled as to why it was even introduced. After all, the H Spine runs roughly every 7-8 minutes while the DART is every 10 minutes all day. Any extra capacity along that corridor wouldve been a waste, as the H9 has clearly shown

Getting the N4 yesterday in East Wall and I can see that the bus stops along East Wall Road and East Road are a bit of a mess. Going westbound there's a bus stop on East Wall Road beside McDonalds but there's no eastbound stop on this road for the same route - there's certainly plenty of pavement space they could requisition in front of Aldi for a lay-by. I'm hoping they intend to put one there as part of the cycle lane build-out. Also, a stop westbound on the East Road has been placed opposite Centra effectively moving the existing 53 stop on that street ...yet they've left the old 53 stop in place, is this stop now out of date and no longer being used? I don't know. You'd hope that they'd be removing redundant stops at the same time as introducing new ones. Also, there's another stop on East Road for the 151 just near the junction with Sheriff Street and, even though the N4 goes right past it, it doesn't stop there for some reason.

The N6 route display has already gotten is woeful destination name of "Drogheda Mall" fixed and now displays the much more apt "Finglas Village"

Got both yesterday

Had to wait at the Point for like 15 mins for the N4. Decent ride, though I noticed East Wall had that odd setup described above. Also, it was kinda annoying that the bus kept stopping at Collins Avenue every 2 mins or so. Loadings seemed alright on the bus that I was on, and also for the five to six N4s that passed us in the other direction, and can see them massively increasing once DCU reopens

Not really much to note about the N6. Drogheda Mall display wasn’t great first impression, though trip was kinda cool wandering through the different areas of Ballymun. There were single digits on the stretch I went on though again, I can see loadings increasing for it as more people gets accustomed to this route

On a related note, I am kinda surprised they didn’t cutback on the 220. I get that the Blanch changes aren’t until at least 2 years from now, however the 220 gets mainly used in Finglas and Ballymun.Given the level of service offered by the N4/N6, that should be enough to justify curtailing it to Finglas Village to allow interchange or at the very least reducing the schedule to a few departures a day, especially considering the long run times it has

Wow. I would lose my mind if I had to run around that loop when you can see the station SO CLOSE to the N4 stop.

A new entrance to Killester Dart is a total no brainer and looks easily doable from satellite view on Maps....

Went back to have a look at the N4 Mon-Fri timings.

I constructed a whole new timetable, taking the following:

1. current departures from termini. No issues there.
2. running times were split into the timing bands that DB used themselves. 5.30-6.30-7.30-8.30-9.30-11.30-14.30-15.30-16.30-17.30-18.30-20.30-24.30-27.30-end
3. selected a number of stops en-route, twelve of them in fact.
4. took the current timings between those fourteen stops (12+termini).
5. reapplied them, but instead of appplying them to the departure from first stop, I applied them to when each bus reaches which stop - i.e. vertical running time application instead of diagonal.

The result? DB's timetable has running times of up to 1h51, 34 and 39 minute gaps in opposite terminus arrivals, and nine counts of buses overtaking an earlier departure. In my version, the longest running time is 1h49 (and at a different time of the day than the current 1h51), and the biggest gap between arrivals at final stop during f-10 is a single count of 17 min. Needless to say, there's no overtaking.

I would recalculate the duties, but I'm not in the mood to deal with 67 of those, and I wouldn't be publishing the results of that anyway. In fact, I think the running boards could be rehooked completely given the adjustments here, and who knows, maybe a few duties shaken off the bill altogether - not a minor consideration to take here considering the driver shortages across industry, but that's another topic altogether.

Not sure why they bothered keeping the 220. They could have extended the 236 to Ladyswell Road altered it to serve Corduff and made it an all day route instead.

The N4 and N6 are the only real 220 replacements in the Finglas area though

Yeah, even without the roadworks it's hard to get in/out of the Centre when it's busy - the traffic on the road between the hotel and eBay can get mental. I don't know if that is being addressed when the "bus interchange terminal" is eventually built - I think there was mention of a bus lane in one of the plans, but none of that is happening just now.