A Christmas Tale: My (re-)introduction to Irish Public Transport #1

[apwhite]

After living in Germany for 9 years, a country where public transport generally starts at 4.30 am and finishes at 1am, a country where one travel ticket for 2 EUR will let you change transport modes as many times as you want to get to your destination within 90 minutes, a country where you can get the 550 km from Frankfurt to Berlin in 3:30 hours whilst sipping a freshly poured glass of beer, brought to you by a waiter in the subdudely lit restaurant car of a sexy white train, I arrived back to Dublin at the beginning of this year.

Everything looked all shiny, spanking new cars on the road, metallic Luas gliding and honking by, SeaCats speeding off to Hollyhead and Dublin busses without rust! Ain't progress wonderful?

But on one of my first trips around Dublin I was brought back to the horrors of Irish Public Transport with a bang...

* A true story *
All I wanted to do was get from Blackrock to Parnell square and back again. Easy. I decided to do it by bus to save me the walk to the Dart station. First mistake. After bravely standing at the bus stop for 15 minutes a bus approached. A 45. First problem - where does it terminate? "An Lar" is a great f**king use in a medium sized 1.5 million inhabitant city.

I hopped on and waited to be surprised and see where the journey would take me. My first surprise was the fact that I handed 2 EUR to the driver and he issued me a ticket, I was about to ask where my change was when he told me the 2nd half of it was a receipt... Anyone know of other countries (not including those muppets in the UK) where exact change is required to travel??

The second surprise was the amount of bloody bus stops on the route. 10 seconds after leaving Roches Stores we were stopped again at a bus stop where there are no visible houses in the vicinity - a large wall behind it, Blackrock park in front and minimal housing left & right. This carried on ad nauseum. Does anyone know Dublin's bus stop per km ratio??? It must be the highest in the world. We carried on through Booterstown and Ballsbridge and I quickly observed a quirky phenomenon - bus leapfrog, it seems as if one bus is always overtalking the other. It stops at the next busstop and the bus behind it then has to swing out to overtake and the fun starts again. I know of no other country where this happens...

Anyway we made it as far as Bewleys hotel when the fun started. A lot of people wanted to get on and there was a throng waiting to get off. I always understood that God had invented the world with 2 types of doors - the IN door and the OUT door. But obviously Dublin Bus knows better so we all waited while the people squeezed by each other. A tourist family from Scotland got on and asked the driver for 2 adults and 2 kids, the driver told them the price and told them exact change, no notes. How the f*ck are you expected to have 5.30 (or whatever) change in coins in your pocket for a bus journey? They managed to scrape it together (even with wee Hamish donating 60 cents from his hard earned pocket money).

The ride went smoothly for about all of about 20 seconds until the RDS. Then the driver just stopped the bus and told us to get out. I thought he was throwing a hissy-fit due to excessive bus-leapfrogging but I quickly learned it was simply the end of his shift.... Heh????? Imagine your denist half extracting a mouldy molar and him then telling you that he has to clock off... There is a dentist next door that will carry on from where he left off. Also another world first for me. I presume those weirdo European bus drivers have to be slave-driven to complete the journey before they can clock off...

The rest of the journey was uneventful and we made it into An Lar. And in the 30 minute journey I was already planning an open letter to Dublin Bus. But wait, I had to get back to Blackrock, the fun was only beginning.... TBC