Circle Line cancelled

[Thomas Ralph]

Circle Line has announced that it is cancelling all its GDA bus services as of next Friday with the loss of 100 jobs, after Dublin Bus started new routes and "saturated them" with buses in competition.

[Yes I know it's a rail forum, but it's probably relevant to some people]

[Mark Hennessy]

Originally Posted by tralph

Circle Line has announced that it is cancelling all its GDA bus services as of next Friday with the loss of 100 jobs, after Dublin Bus started new routes and "saturated them" with buses in competition.

[Yes I know it's a rail forum, but it's probably relevant to some people]

Completely highlights the utter failure of the DOT to actually legislate for anything.

The current set up benefits neither a private operator nor the public.
My preferred situation is where an operator stumps up a huge bond (to stop them running away) and agrees an SLA with the DOT and can get on with exclusive access to their routes.
I cannot see how 10 operators down one corridor can ever work, Dublin is just too small.

I guess another solution would be to have one operator run all of the city buses on a tender bases (the French municipal model).

This is another example that FF and the DoT mandarins don't give a damn about public transport.

On a more parochial note, Morton has help for years the introduction of new services from DB to the town he is based in Maynooth (where I live)

[Thomas Ralph]

Well, I have some sympathy with DB as they have to run the routes irrespective of whether they're commercially viable or not, whereas other operators can come in and cherry-pick good routes (see Aircoach) and avoid the useless ones (route 18 comes to mind).

[Thomas J Stamp]

Yes, I heard the lad from Mortons (or is is Dualway) who operate this service on the radio. He mentioned that Dublin Bus have a bus every 1.2 mins to compete with him.

That is impossible. That's 100 buses, if you assume a 120 min round trip, to get bus A from terminus into city and back again. That's assuming we're talking about one route - let's say the 25A.

But their route goes on a long windy way and crosses several BAC routes, all of which go to the city centre (albeit some of them go along part of his route to get there)... so is he saying there's a bus every 1.2 min at every part of his route? Or, at one specific part? ---- say Lucan where there may well be 66's, 67's and 25's all stacked up ---- if not, that's hundreds of buses.....

Dosnt add up..

[Donal Quinn]

they run past our offices here in clonskeagh and had very little competition from the rare no. 11 route which was definently not made more frequent in response

they had several flaws - mostly their fault

They made no attempt to promote themselves - very hard to find info on timetables and routes. even the drivers didn't know. - no promotional material on buses - no material dropped into all the officecs on the route

no integrated tickets - not their fault but they would have had alot more custom if people on annual tickets could have hopped on

They didn't give change or even a receipt for change - not nice to drop in 2 euro and get nothing back.

basically they seemed like a country bus operator chancing their arm running an urban service - no chance with that attitude