"Green" policies are destroying this country

You might aswel just keep the nta websites as your favourite or use google search bus connects or driver recruitment for example. Dublin Bus and Go Ahead have to hit certain service levels or they get fined.

It is expensive alright, but a necessary expense for many. There's over 2 million cars on the roads. Outside of urban areas with functioning PT, cars are a necessity. The less well off (whatever they are) would make up a good cohort of car owners.

TBH, your attitude is a bit snooty looking down on the "less well off" as some sort of lepers unable to have a car.

Many of the carers in urban areas may be on bikes, but outside of that they all in cars. My grandmother had 3 different carers in her day and all drove around. The 4 Filipino nurses 3 doors down from me and living 2km from the local nursing home have 3 cars outside their rented house. And local link goes the route but not at the times they start/end, nor does it serve the elderly who these nurses routinely visit

Its clear you are making up stuff. Your example earlier of a 30 minute bus route becoming a 15 minute service and the frequency doubling as a result of these changes was laughable. There will be no additional services provided directly as a result of these changes. There aren't even dates for implementation of future phases of busconnects and you're suggesting that frequencies will double when these changes are introduced when nobody else is. Surely such a rise in bus capacity would be trumpeted from the rooftops.

.

There is a huge challenge getting staff for home care packages in the greater Dublin area and the biggest barrier is transport.

People with care needs somehow haven't figured out that they need to organise themselves at convenient intervals along bus routes, how very inconsiderate of them.

"Traffic doesn't evaporate" - incorrect, it does and is a well documented phenomenon.

Wrong again on metro. Metro systems alone do not remove cars, Paris and London (and dozens of other cities) have had extensive metro systems for over a century and all also had chronic car congestion until they took steps to reduce the number of cars using their streets. Regardless of having a metro or not a strong bus network is also required and cannot be provided without taking space from cars and giving it to buses.

So who is right, RTE or cgcsb?

Mixed and conflicting information here, and if JD is right, 26 weeks away from enforcement.

Lol OK, still no

Any evidence of this? Transport models predict increasing number of trips to thw centre and that's what was seen in cities that took on similar measures, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo etc.

What information? Where is the announcement re extra bus services? Even now you are saying "could increase service frequency". Could is a maybe. Are they or are they not increasing bus services directly as a result of these changes? The answer is no.

Firstly, you don't know where I live. But I can tell you my car is parked on the street, I've no back garden, no possibility to have a car charger, opening the door lands me on the footpath and from my window here I can see a few tree tops over the houses cross the road. Also, there's no national PT only the local link service which only passes twice in the morning, and twice in the evening. I definitely have to have a car - 100%.

Everyone in Dublin has to pay high rent because demand out strips supply (unless you live in one of the many deprived shitholes overrun by wasters). Despite the protestations of all, that rent is being paid. If you want to live in Dublin, you gotta pay higher prices for that. It's a balls, and it shouldn't be like that, but it is the way now and noone has been able to offer up a solution to change it. Cars are and can be expensive to run, but aren't unaffordable. Plenty of cheap cars, with cheap tax and if you go the EV route, you have cheaper driving too.

Traffic will reduce if there is a viable alternative or the demand for the journey is removed.

These bus changes achieve neither, in any meaningful way.

I would be very confident thst post implementation of these bus gates, Dublin will still rank very poorly in terms of city centre car congestion.

That will be the evidence of whom is right and whom is wrong here.

Paris and London have metro populations of 12 million each vs 2 million in Dublin.

Imagine what their traffic would be like if they both closed their undergrounds...

An Underground and/or congestion charge is the only way to significantly reduce car traffic inside the canals.

Anything else is just window dressing.

I have a bike for leisure purposes, but hasn't been used in a while. Neither am I looking for a cheaper option. And no one, rightly is stopping me nor am I complaining about anyone doing so. Overall, your reply is irrelevant to anything I've said.

On the possible bus frequency changes, are there tenders out or contracts signed for more buses? Hopefully there is.

I don't agree that traffic volumes will drop significantly if the changes come in. I'd be more in the camp that other routes will get busier. My thinking being that if the buses that run today aren't being used by motorists, why would there be a sudden switch to them because cars are no longer permitted in a section of the city? Wouldn't those drivers be already using buses to avoid the car congestion?

Yes there's more buses on the way. "More in the camp that other routes will get busier" so the wrong camp then according to all local and international research on the topic. The adjacent routes are already at max link capacity so they can't get busier.

why would motorists switch mode? Because the bus will become a faster option for many journeys as a result and cycling will become safer and a much faster option for many journeys.

Traffic can always increase. You can model anything. It doesnt result in a universally accepted outcome.

As I said previously, the proof is in the pudding and I am very confident that the bus gates will not reduce the traffic volumes significantly through the city centre.

I know plenty of car drivers in Dublin. Not a single one of them has any intention of not using the car as they all have small kids and use it to ferry them around. Ergo, they use it to goto work.

A lot make cross city journeys from outside the canals(dont travel in a straight line into the city centre) which are journeys that are just not suitable for buses, especially on roads that are 90% shared with the same cars they could be driving.

The bus gates might reduce the road share to 88%. Big deal. It aint going to add 20 mins to an average car journey.

And even if it did, it wouldnt stop them driving.