20% cut to fares for all public transport operators from April

The solution for Cork is obvious, just make it a flat fare.

Currently there are two fares, €1.35 up to 11 stages, €1.55 for 12+, just split the difference, make the flat fare €1.45 and install a right hand validator.

You could then offer a 90 minute ticket, by having leap add 55c if you tag on a second bus (or train) in 90 minutes.

BTW for those from Dublin, who might not know, many if not most bus routes in Cork aren't long enough to have the long fare or most people only travel half the route into town. Unlike Dublin where the "short" fare is seldom used, in Cork the €1.35 "short" fare makes up the vast majority of fares and is basically the default on most routes. Most people in Cork just ask for a ticket, they don't state destination or fare like you would in Dublin and drivers just normally give it by default.

With so little difference between the two fares in Cork and most people use the short anyway, it really doesn't make sense not to just combine them into a flat fare.

I was down in Cork over Christmas and there were a number of glaring problems with ticketing in Cork (and I assume the same in Limerick, etc.) compared to Dublin:

1) No right hand validator, which really slows things down.

Even people with 24 hour, 7 day, monthly, yearly, tickets etc. have to interact with the driver. Complete and utter madness!

2) The drivers ticket machine is WAY slower then the Dublin Bus drivers ticket machine!

It takes at least a good 20 seconds per passenger and multiple button presses by the driver. I believe the ticket machine is first looking for the 24 hour,etc. tickets and the driver has to wait until non is found before they can put it into the mode to issue a purse ticket! Of course this wouldn't be necessary if there was a right hand validator.

3) You can't pay for a childs ticket on an adult leap card.

What?! I only discovered this over Christmas, I had been asking for a childs ticket on my Leap card like you can do on Dublin Bus. Finally a driver told me you couldn't do that in Cork and you needed a child Leap card. Looking back over my ticket history, it looks like drivers had previously either charged two adults tickets or just one adult ticket and let my little one on for free.

This is all very stupid because of how it slows things down. If you are a parent with three children, you have to get threee child leap cards so, make sure they are all topped up, have each child present their card to the drivers ticket machine and then wait the 20 seconds or so to be issued a ticket!

It makes no sense at all and just makes it all so painfully slow!

4) No 90 minute fare

Get two buses in Cork, it costs €2.70, but in Dublin the same cost only €2. How is that fair?

And shouldn't it cover commuter rail too? Going from lets say Carrigtwohill to UCC, which might involve the train + bus, costs €4.35, while in Dublin, going from Dalkey to DCU, a trip of the same distance, costs just €2!

5) No daily or Weekly capping

What is there to say, we should obviously have these. Sure there are the 24 hour and 7 day tickets, but you have to buy these up front, which isn't as good as automated capping. Just set the daily and weekly cap to the same as these tickets, easy!

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The implementation of Leap card and ticketing is a complete mess in Cork. WAY worse then Dublin. It is like they just chucked Leap support in, without really thinking about it and it has resulted in slower boarding times, which is a major loss for Leap/NTA and the people of Cork.

“Under this Structure, fares are to be made up of a combination of a boarding charge plus an incremental fare based on the distance of the journey.”

That sounds like how fares operate in Amsterdam and something I’ve been proposing for years!

Basically it works something like this, if you get on a bus spin Amsterdam:

• pay €1 boarding fee
• pay 20c per km travelled
• if you get off the bus and on a second bus, you don’t pay the boarding fee, you just continue to pay 20c per km.
• you can also swap to tram or metro paying the per km fee but not the boarding.

Sounds complicated, but it is all done automatically with their version of the Leap card. Basically when you tag on, it charges the maximum fare and then when you get off you tag off and it refunds the difference based on distance travelled. Kind of like how leap works on DART now.

of course what is weird, is that instead we will have a hybrid model, the current 90 minute fare in Dublin City and then this per km system outside of Dublin. Not that I’m complaining, the 90 minute ticket at €2 is great value.

This new per km thing sounds more like a way to standardise how much fares should cost, rather then an actual fare system like in Amsterdam.

I wonder are they planning to drop the short fare?

Will they bring the 90 minute €2 ticket to Cork, etc. and within 25km of them?

It looks bad that the 90 minute fare is only in Dublin, makes the NTA look very Dublin centric.

“But heigh ho we now have the NTA who know much more about running bus, tram and train services than CIE could ever dream of.”

Well since the NTA arrived they have absolutely transformed the Cork city bus service. It is night and day improvement.

• Forced BE to move from all single deckers to mostly double deckers with a resulting big increase in capacity
• Big improvements in frequencies on many routes
• Replaced all the bus poles and bus shelters which were in an absolutely horrifying state with nice shiny new ones
• Introduced RTPI
• Introduced Leap card

Far from perfect, still a lot to do, in particular the lack of the 90 minute ticket and other ways that the leap card is badly implemented on the BE buses. But there is no comparison compared to the pre NTA days.

Frankly Bus Eireann were a disaster and couldn’t organise a piss up on a bus, yes the NTA are vastly superior to them in running bus services.

“The NTA have already committed to time based fares in the regional cities once the new BusConnects networks start to roll out. They’re essential given the premise of connecting services.”

Great, but they need to pull the finger out and just do it. They need to roll out the 90 minute to Cork, etc. today and the short fares to all routes in Dublin. They need to stop waiting for the network to roll out, the network roll out is taking too long and there is no reason that the fare changes need to wait for it.

“Well I always got the impression that longer distance services were the priority for BE and city services were always an afterthought whereas for DB city services were always the sole focus of the company. That's the reason why city services in Cork were always poor under BE at least imo.”

Oh BE’s long distance services were/are terrible too. Just look at their Expressway service between Cork and Dublin. Use to take 5 hours, no toilet, no Wi-Fi and last departure was 6pm between the two largest cities in Ireland, laughable stuff. Needless to say the private operators like Aircoach completely blew them out of the water with a vastly superior service and the people of Cork couldn’t have been happier with these services.

These private services were licensed by the NTA.

BE’s long distance services around the country, whether Expressway or PSO or pretty terrible.

I suppose some would argue that where BE’s focus actually is, is on the commuter services into Dublin. They basically don’t care about either the city services or the long distance services in the rest of the country, just the Dublin area commuters. But then you’d remember how bad some of those commuter services got that the NTA had to pull their license and awarded some of those routes to GAI.

While the NTA are far from perfect, I think some folks on this forum are in denial in just how poor the CIE companies are in operating their services. The biggest issue that I see with the NTA is that they have so much to do, because the CIE companies were so poorly run for decades. The CIE companies were run look something out of the 1950’s and the NTA are trying to achieve in a relatively short time, what should have been gradually done over the past 70 years but wasn’t.

BTW this is no attack on the individual drivers of BE, etc. who in my experience are mostly great folks, after all you can only drive the bus given, to the schedule given, etc. I’m talking here about how management ran these companies and operations.

"Also look at the Expressway routes that BE still operate all the routes that are unattractive to private operators. Privates are only interested in Dublin-Cork/Limerick/Galway all the others aren't profitable to operate a regular service."

I'm not sure that is really true, look at the private operators in Donegal operating all sorts of local services that BE wouldn't operate and look at how Aircoach stepped in to operate the Galway stopping service when BE dropped it.

"Tbf in many respects BE is a different company to the one that refused to put deckers in rural cities for years. You can see that in how they've been able to compete in tenders against private operators."

Very true, they have vastly improved and I'm delighted to see it.

But I'd argue the root cause of this was the NTA and the manner in which they started tendering licenses and added competition. I believe BE loosing the commuter routes to GAI light a fire under BE's managements ass. They realised they would lose a lot more contracts if they didn't start improving their services.

Frankly I'd pin the improvements we have seen in DB on the same thing, them losing some routes to GAI and the threat of loosing more if they didn't improve.

If the NTA didn't exist and BE/DB still had their monopoly, I'm certain we would all be suffering from the same old crappy service.

Well the obvious answer to that question would be to fully break up CIE, so that DB/BE/IR are fully separate companies and then let them compete for tenders with one another.

I’m not suggesting that at all! Please don’t misquote me like that.

I was just suggesting fully separating DB/BE/IR from CIE and each other. They could all continue to be 100% state owned companies.