So nothing really changes? And costs go up.

You said what I wanted to say more eloquently *steals post*.

But the system of privatisation works in Sweden. I lived in Goteborg, where the transport system was privatised, yet still managed to deliver an affordable, high quality system of public transport which would put our transport services to shame.

To be fair Kevin, this is Ireland. Yes I agree fare structures and integration needed to happen 10 years ago, but privatisation won’t work for the interest of the public in regards to public transport here.

You have to remember that in countries like Sweden there is higher population density because people live in apartments. Ireland’s obsession with houses means the population is more spread out so it’s harder to provide a profitable service for everyone.

I had a quick look on wikipedia. Gothenburg has a population density of 1200/km squared and Dublin has a population density of 4,588/km squared. Both have approximately the same population size at a half million. Why could Gothenburg pull off a successful system of private transport and Dublin fail at achieving the same feat?

the geography of where people live is very different to UK we have a lot of small rural communities close to each other on main routes granted private company’s will only go where the profit is so competition is needed and no price fixing between them, I’m on a private bus right now I have the option of using the public service but this bus saves me 30 euro a week so for rural route I think privatization could work but the state should keep the more profitable city services

I was just about to mention the Matthews bus. I would always prefer that over a bus eireann bus. They are always clean, free wifi, quicker and an all round better service. And the buses are all relatively new compared to some of the ones bus eireann are still running.

At the moment train cost return before 09.30 am from Laytown to Dublin is €20, Matthews is €12.
Bus Eireann do not offer a service and Matthews can make a profit from something Bus Eireann were not bothered with in the first place. Great service !

And one other thing worth mentioning I think – about 3 winters ago (maybe 2) during the bad snow and ice when the local council ran out of salt/grit – the owner and senior management of Matthews Coaches personally came down from Inniskeen with a tractor, a trailer load of grit and a load of shovels and actually gritted the road by hand themselves between Laytown & Julianstown to ensure their service was maintained for their customers! I was really impressed at this commitment – albeit a good PR exercise too….

Can you see the Bus Eireann suits out with their hats, coats, gloves & shovels?!?

Don’t think so….

you seem to forget the last bad snow , it was dublin bus who kept the buses running all day everyday while the other operators pulled their services.
Mathews may be quicker from laytown to Dublin but from 1st hand experiance on the M1 speed limits is not what they keep when flying past.

I didn’t say anything negative about Dublin Bus! :-/

Secondly – all Matthews busses are fitted with speed restricters AND THEY were the first to introduce and still use drivers breathalyser machines that won’t allow a driver start a shift until he tests negative for alcohol!

Pretty impressive attitude to safety too hey?!? ;)

@ John. The buses are fitted with speed limiters set to 105kph however this does not stop many many Mathews drivers disregard the 60kph zone on the m1 roadworks. Mathews bus drivers are some of the most aggressive and dangerous drivers on the road. They pull out into the outside lane which is illegal for a with a restricted speed limit to do and they have a total lack of respect for other road users. The thoughts of more Mathews drivers on the road sends shivers down my spine.

Hi there, thanks for that… Here…. I look like I am from their PR dept. or something – I’m defo not! I don’t know about speed limits in certain restricted zones by certain drivers at certain times – and I’d wonder do you really know either… Surely your comments are a massive generalisation? They may be reckless at certain times… but I’d say no more or less than any bus driver working for any company??? No? My comment to a previous commentator was simply that they couldn’t speed (as he suggested) on the motorway because as you correctly point out, the equipment is restricted to 105kms p/hr. and the M-way limit is 120kms (maybe less for larger vehicles – I’m not a bus driver so I don’t know….) anyway – I’m just saying they offer a good reliable service a ta fair price from my locality to the city! That’s all – no more/no less!

Sean Quinn could provide the service in Cavan!

Well ‘apparently’ he nor his family are doing much else!

Dave, i think the Quinn’s are too busy hiding their money from the banks and the courts to care about anyone else, lol.

Are you on smack? Of course ‘the law’ will protect me. You can’t get fired without cause – just try getting rid of someone who is underperforming, you have to jump through hoops. Even where a company implements a scheme of compulsory redundancies, it is covered by the law. We don’t live in pre Industrial Revolution times. Workers have rights under the law and unions are obsolete. All they do is cause “mé féining” and ineffeciency.

Re thumb that you bunch of PB4P voting muppets.

*Red not re

who said anything about cheaper…

But Virgin have lost the Contract for the Rail network Now.

Looking at what Aircoach did for airport commuters, I’d welcome it

@Michael. yes but Firstgroup got the contract instead, another private company. It’s true they are only concerned about making profit so if we did privatise, I’d like to see more than one to encourage competition. Having more than one would make sure they don’t slack behind on technology (wi-fi for example) and up keep of buses and stations

There’s a massive difference between the Rail and Bus networks, the bus networks that are profitable will be fought over but the less profitable ones like the rural routes or outlying city routes will end up just like they have in the UK, expensive, unreliable and in most cases CUT. Anyone who has experienced the UK privatisation of the bus networks will tell you this. City routes are easy to run and make money, rural and semi rural usually are only kept running with the help of local authorities who subsidise these ‘unprofitable’ services and in many place with govt. cuts to local authorities many of these bus services are being withdrawn because the local authorities have cut their funding. Bus companies who take over routes do so to make money so don’t kid yourselves that any of these companies will want to keep services that don’t make them money. Ireland already has a pretty poor public transport system, privatising the bus networks will just make it worse and even poorer. What’s needed is a proper continental style integrated public transport system which is fully backed and funded by government and local authorities not some wild west system where any bunch of cowboys can run bus companies many of them competing for the same routes like in Manchester for example and whole areas are left with out any services at all. By the way Daniel, Virgin trains are not exactly customer friendly either and they are certainly not cheap! One of the great lies of all this privatisation was that it would introduce competition into the market and as a result lead to cheaper fares, complete bullshit! There’s NO competition as such and the fares in the UK are the highest in Europe and the whole system of bidding for these franchises has been shown to be complete farce and a shambles. There’s no doubt Irish bus services are in the dark ages but maybe it’s the management of these services that need looking at, same for CIE, Irish Rail etc all semi state quangos full of unproductive and overpaid management who seem to do very little for their big generous salaries and gold plated pensions.

Michael, the company that got the contract has now had it terminated due to flaws in the tendering contract and Virgin Rail have ban asked to continue providing rail services for another 9 months once its current contract runs out in December

An article published today said “The news comes two weeks after the government acknowledged that the controversial decision to award the £900 million ($1.45 billion) concession to rival operator FirstGroup FGP.LN +0.95% PLC was based on a flawed tender process. It canceled the contract citing “technical flaws” in the bidding process.”

“The flaws in the process involved the way in which inflation and rail passenger numbers were taken into account. They were uncovered when officials were preparing for a court case instigated by Virgin Rail, which had been due to start Thursday.”

So Virgin Rail lost the contract through some dodgy dealing, and not because of their performance.

We already have that. :-|

Not true. It will if it’s done properly. Take a look at Scandinavia.

Why should we compare to London for something like this , we have a are completely different country for something like transport , why not look at places around the world for comparable “best practice” instead , Sweden was mentioned , Gothenburg has more in common with us than London , or look at the Germans and how they organise transport , of purse we should explore if we can organise transport better with a combination of public and private , picking successes from other places us mire useful than scaremongering and picking the failures as examples.

and also during that winter Dublin bus used all there maintenance staff to grit the roads around the city centre to make sure busses could get up Parnell square.

Dave – do you have any evidence to support the thesis that Bus Eireann, Dublin Bus etc have any profitable routes?

Yeah bob, I carry the entire statistics of Bus Eireann and Dublin Bus in my back pocket. Do you have any evidence that they don’t have profitable routes?

The way I know that there are profitable routes for Dublin bus is really very simple. Look for the routes with the biggest and newest buses and the most buses. i.e. The 46A is a profitable route, because they have the newest buses, therefore they receive the more investment.

Dave, you understand that investing a lot of money in something doesn’t mean the route is profitable. Profit is revenue – cost of sales… The reason routes like the 46a get the most buses and the shiniest, newest buses is that the people who live along that stretch tend not to treat the buses like a toilet/ashtray/smoking lounge/sketch pad… If the monged out junkies on some of the routes with crap buses stopped vandalising them, they too might get newer, shinier buses…

The 46A is one of the heaviest and most frequently served routes. Thus it is logical to provide the triple axeled extra capacity buses they bought in 09/10 then it is any other model. 125 people per bus is better for such a busy route than older models.

But by logic of getting better equipment surely they would have the new 2 door buses? By logic of it’s volume it should also ALWAYS have had 2 door buses or bendy buses to handle the passenger load.

Instead i’ve mainly seen the new 2 door buses on routes like the 7 which is a similar coridor but not as busy off-peak…

Distribution of the fleet is not as route centered as you might think. It can also depend on which Shed got which order of buses, and when.

If 46A was the flagship route then why have they not turned it’s mostly exclusive right of way into a Bus Rapid transit line with Priority signals and even larger buses? Lack of money and resistance to change thats why.

Lynn: 122 is a perfectly viable route and could pay for itself out of fares. Pass holders do not travel for free. Dublin Bus is paid a significant fee for carrying these passengers. DB itself says it needs subsidies for its busy peak routes as much as the smaller routes.

The problem is that DB’s operating costs are extremely high, twice other of similar companies in Scotland, at least.

state pays less than a 3rd of minimum fare price for all travel passes

If that isn’t an arguement for upping the capcity of the 46A at peak to BRT quality with signal priority i don’t know what is. :-P

Dublin bus should help provide more Park and Ride facilities around the city and allow private companies feed to such sites at corelating times on bus scheduals.

DB after all caries the city, some 500k per day. The Luas is 190,000 on both lines and all branches. The Dart barely 90,000, on a good day. DB deserves all the help, infrastructure and competitors it can get in order to serve core passenger needs and routes. Some of that “mature” capacity can be covered by Private companies willing to fill a few routes off-peak/ key profitablity.

It seems wastefull that the 46A has 26 additional buses for its route that are idle off peak. Unlike a train or tram they can move those buses at least twice between rush hours. Additional capacity /infrastructure and comeptition would shift those buses elsewhere.

People’underperforming’?What kind of an excuse is this?We are humans not machinery…

I get bow every day from the bus driver on my way to work in Seoul. The first time it happened I imediatley thought of my experiences on Dublin Bus!

The Luas, which is not strictly speaking a completely privatised service. It is a public-private partnership.

Do you think if it is private that there will be no traffic, no illegal parking, bus lanes will be clear, people will have their fare ready, there will be no accidents, no protest marches, I could go on. Maybe the private bus will have wings.
no, runing times wont change but frequency will and god help the people who live on the less busy routes.

The private companies hire people for a very low wage and zero unions.The employee is ‘flexible’ and disposable at the will of his -her boss.

What’s wrong with that Caroline? I am a flexible worker, who has no union, but I am as protected as anyone else, because of something called ‘the law’. Here’s a link to the Citizens Information website (admittedly it’s for the article on NERA, but it outlines lots of pieces of legislation available to evey single worker) http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/enforcement_and_redress/national_employment_rights_authority.html

Now, why exactly are private operators bad?

With competition there’s choice, the choice might be between a private bus and a public bus, competition is rarely a bad thing.
Employees in the private and public bus companies have the choice to use their skills with the rival company if they think they will benefit.
User of the route have the choice which bus service to use, for any reason they want, thats the fantastic thing.
Competition brings choice, this is a basic part of a free society, I value choice and freedom highly, unlike central planners.

On a side note, unions for public sector should all be abolished and only allowed for private sector.