All About Buses Dot Com
Daragh | April 28, 2006I’m delighted to inaugurate my membership of the Dublin Community Blog as one who, despite being up from what many jackeens conceive amorphously as “down the country”, is very fond of our nation’s capital. So many great bars to prop up, bookshops to spend hours in, eateries to grow fat in, galleries and museums to stroke one’s beard in. And all the best bands come here.
In order to get my foot on the property ladder, I have had to leave the southside where I was formerly wont to make my lair and come north to take up residence in the vicinity of the national cemetery. And it is here I have encountered the 40 bus service. It was never like this on the southside kids.
The 40 runs along a QBC – quality bus corridor – which is capable of delivering your humble narrator to O’Connell Street in about 15 minutes on a good day, and it would be great were it not for one or two little problems. The first of these is capacity and the second is the weird timetabling issue which means that during certain times of the day, the buses seem to enter the Twilight Zone. I have rather, ahem, flexible working hours, but according to my girlfriend only one 40 goes to Stephen’s Green in the morning, that is to say is cross-town, which sucks, especially as, by the time it gets down to where we are, it is choc full of commuters from Finglas and simply wafts past on a noxious cloud of diesel fumes. Hundreds of apartments are being built and occupied along the N2, but the service hasn’t remotely caught up. Perhaps it hasn’t changed at all. Frustrated workgoers can watch three buses pass them full after 7.45 a.m. and not catch one until well after eight.
At other times of the day, one can get to the bus stop and read on the timetable that the next bus will supposedly have begun its journey 15 minutes ago and be due to arrive in five – the journey time this stop being 20 minutes. But it doesn’t show. Over 25 minutes later, the next bus comes. Why does one leave early and the other late? Beats me. After this massive, frustrating hiatus in the service, it is a regular occurence to be passed by a full bus (surprise, surprise, the passengers built up at the stops) whereupon three more come along in convoy. The last two will be completely empty for the trip to town. Why weren’t they staggered? What are the drivers up to at their terminus?
I often wander to the nearby 19 and 83 services instead which run in a much more clockwork fashion, not least, I suspect, because they’re on their way to the southern ‘burbs. While a lot of the drivers on the 40 route seem quite sound and friendly, others are appalling. They drive like lunatics and in a rough and jerky manner. I have never heard a driver address a passenger in Rathmines, Ranelagh or Ballsbridge the way I’ve heard them speak to some over here. I had a right hop off a particularly ill-favoured fellow one day for the outrageous disrespect he showed to an elderly woman. What a prick. Perhaps people on the northside don’t deserve the same level of respect and customer service as those in the even numbered post codes.
But back to the capacity issue. For the Celtic Tygger has penetrated even unto Finglas and its ambitious, restive population needs buses in great numbers to get them to and from their places of employment. While it is in no way reflective of the range of occupations which Finglasians undertake in this great metropolis of ours, there is a graffito on one of the vehicles regularly servicing the 40 route demonstrating how the basic tenets of free market liberalism to which Irishmen and women now hold dear have not been lost on the young people on the city’s north western marches. This graffito takes the form of an equation which states simply and with economic elegance:
hard work + happy customers = €uros
It’s accompanied by a picture of a stick man smoking a fat, chronic blunt.
Diligent economic actors need more buses, but I won’t hold my breath. The Minister for Transport has said the bus capacity in Dublin is to be increased by 60% and that it is hoped this expansion in service will be achieved through private sector investment. Bring it on say I. Perhaps a bit of competition will focus the minds of the worst elements on the 40 and other benighted routes. However, the Minister appears to be refering to the opening of new routes. Dublin Bus will continue to service their existing routes exclusively rather than to face competition along them.
I’m saving up to buy a push bike.
Bonus Link for bus anoraks – The All About Buses dot Com Forums
After this massive, frustrating hiatus in the service, it is a regular occurence to be passed by a full bus (surprise, surprise, the passengers built up at the stops) whereupon three more come along in convoy. The last two will be completely empty for the trip to town. Why weren’t they staggered? What are the drivers up to at their terminus?
Well, if I were a cynical group of bus drivers sharing the same route (and I’m not suggesting there are any in Dublin) I’d bunch up too, taking turns in each run along the route to go in front. Why? Because it’s a pretty sweet number just driving the bus and not having to deal with passengers and all that.
My current pet gripe with buses is when you’re waiting at the bus stop for bus X. Bus Y comes along, followed by bus X. Because bus Y is at the stop, the driver of bus X often just steams on by and ignores the stop.
That’s a bit of a problem on Cavendish Row on Parnell Square, Dick. I had to run into the street to get the 46B to stop just because there was a 122 already at the stop. Hey guys, these are different bloody routes!!
A mate of mine got into an altercation with a driver who was second or third in a “convoy” when the guy got snotty that he hadn’t got on the bus in front. Following a frank exchange of views, the driver coughed “asshole” into his hand when my chum was disembarking. It was like being back in school!
You know, except on a bus.
[...] I’m delighted to have become a contributor to the Dublin Community Blog. I know it’s very fashionable to knock the place, but I really enjoy living here and am looking forward to posting about all the things there are to do and see on the horse-dunged cobbles of the metropolis. Of course, the city has it’s problems and it is inevitable, given my propensity to indulge in what was referred to in Sideways as “neg-head downer shit”, that I will tap the odd irate posting into Wordpress. Check out the blog and maybe even think about how, as the play of Dublin life goes on, you too might contribute a verse. Summer’s here and the city is coming alive. In the meantime, I leave you with my biography cum apologia as a Dublin Community contributor: Copernicus is a Dublin-based civil servant and law student (at least until after he fails his forthcoming exams) who has lived in the capital for five years and two and half months. Although he was born a startlingly beautiful child in the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street Dublin 2, Copernicus does not consider himself a Dub. Not a wet week in the world, he was transplanted post haste to Munster where he was reared on the creamiest milk produced by contended Fresians on a cud of lush Golden Vale grass, fatted on Kerry lamb each spring and derived many boyhood-enhancing minerals from the swift, clear waters of the Shannon whose music may be heard in crystal cadence over the rocks at Doonas Falls below the ancient Limerick keeps and raths of his Norman and Gaelic forebearers. On attaining a tender but serious three years of age, he entered Tullyvaraga Playschool to begin a programme of education which continues unabated some 29 years later at the Honorable Society of King’s Inns. However, he has always been a poor scholar and continues at his books more in hope than expectation. Copernicus maintains blogs at The Midnight Court and Cruiskeen Eile and as made guest contributions to Fústar dot org to relate dark tidings on freemasonry, Christmas monsters and the inscrutable doings of the wee people. He received a best commenter nomination at the 2006 Irish Blog Awards and he would have won it too if it wasn’t for these pesky kids. Despite an aristocratic mein and sedulously cultivated patrician air, Copernicus prides himself on being approachable and often condescends to respond enlighteningly to those members of the lumpen proletariat who comment on his posts. [...]