[ireland.com] Gridlock costing CIE €80m a year - NBRU

[Navan Junction]

Gridlock is costing the CIE €80 million a year according to the National Bus and Rail Union (NBRU).

The union claimed the Government's lack of transport policy to wean drivers away from their cars meant the gridlock was set to continue.

Liam Tobin, General Secretary of the NRBU told delegates at the union's annual conference in Donegal Town that people were driving an average of 16,000 kilometres a year to work, compared with 8,000 kilometres a decade ago.

Mr TobÃ*n also criticised the Government for not fully integrating a public transport smart card.

He said: "It was 1999 when the then Minister for Transport, Mary O'Rourke, announced that a smart card for integrated ticketing would be introduced. Seven years and €42 million later the smart card is still only valid for Luas and a couple of private bus operators."

"This fiasco is on a par with the electronic voting machines, except in this case hundreds of thousands of commuters are affected every day, not just once every five years when an election takes place. Whatever else it is this integrated ticketing system is certainly not smart."

© The Irish Times/ireland.com

[Mark Gleeson]

All I think needs be said the word strike which hangs over every public transport development like a dark cloud. Maybe I'm bit cynical

[Donal Quinn]

[ireland.com] NBRU costing CIE €80m a year

that sounds more like it

[Thomas J Stamp]

there was some gridlock there two weeks ago on the railways.

[Kevin K Kelehan]

BTW

This is a very serious issue as Bus Eireann and Dublin Bus both require more busses and drivers not to mention running earlier services from outlying commuter towns such as Virginia, Tullow and Carrickmacross to absorb queing times that busses face every day.

The €60m covers the cost to the company what about the cost to the commuters in having to get up an hour earlier and arrive an hour later.

A former acquaintance was in Navan last year and had 2 hours to kill and being with another man of similar outlook they found a bar serving all drinks for €2; the strange thing was that the bar was empty come 10pm. I wonder why?

[Thomas J Stamp]

Well, Kevin, all jokes aside I done this to death on Athy and other postings.

This issue was alive even as far back as 1999, I remember talking to a BE driver then who simply couldnt understand why there wasnt a bus lane from the Lucan Spa all the way into the city. (I think it finally arrived a few years ago). A lot of the buses that come in from the "outer surburbs" become intercity when they get to Bus Aras and there was some serious problems with the intercity timetables untill the main roads were made bus lanes. I think there may be still problems with this. There are simple ways of solving these issues, Im sure that there is no need (now) for a bus lane on the nass road from Nass to the Potin Still but there was before and it never got done.

[Kevin K Kelehan]

My favourite Bus Eireann story was my trip to Carrickmacross where the bus took an hour and ten minutes to clear the M50 and an hour from there to Carrickmacross. There are problems on both the main routes and closer to the City Centre; I can have a fairly distanced view of this as an occaisional user of Bus Eireann; thousands of others are not so lucky.