Bus reform means fewer services in areas of capital

Children’s hospital in Kilmainham also to have its routes affected

KILMAINHAM, home of the new National Children’s Hospital in Dublin, is to have its bus routes affected as part of the Bus Connects plan – meaning longer walks to catch services.

The controversial plan will means people’s gardens reduced in size and footpaths dug up to accommodate bus lanes.

Now new details show the plan will lead to diminished services in Rathgar, south Dublin city, and Howth, north Co. Dublin.

The plan has already led to protests in parts of the city.

The National Transport Authority published interactive maps and a route comparison table yesterday highlighting the proposed changes.

It said some people in the Kilmainham/Inchicore area, close to the new National Children’s Hospital, will have longer walks to get a bus.

It said the complicated layout of the area made a smooth bus route impossible, no matter how much it tried.

Due to the changes in the Kilmainham bus routes, Mourne Road and Keeper Road in the Drimnagh area will no longer be serviced but the NTA said they are ‘all are within easy walking distance of Luas or other frequent routes in the proposed network’.

Addressing the areas of Kilmainham, Rialto, Inchicore and Islandbridge, the NTA said: ‘This is a very complex area where the street pattern and natural barriers defeat all reasonable routing schemes.

‘We sought to reduce the tangle of current routes to create simple frequent patterns, even if people had to walk slightly further to them.’

The areas affected are close to the National Children’s Hospital currently being built next to St James’s Hospital. There will be a new bus route running close to the hospital. For Howth, the NTA said it will likely scrap the current direct bus route to the city as Howth has a direct Dart service.

‘Due to this forthcoming improved level of service, it is not justifiable to provide a competing bus service to Dublin City Centre,’ the NTA stated.

Howth will instead be serviced every 15 minutes by the N6 route, which will travel to Raheny before ending at Dublin City University’s Glasnevin campus.

The announcement of the Bus Connects plan last month sparked anger among residents across Dublin as it was revealed that land from people’s front gardens would be seized to make way for wider bus lanes.

The land will be seized under the Compulsory Purchase Orders, with the NTA saying they would pay ‘tens of thousands’ of euro to compensate homeowners.

With a public consultation process under way, an interactive map has gone live on BusConnects.ie to help the public understand the proposed network.

An NTA spokesman yesterday said it has received a lot of feedback, both good and bad, since the public consultation began.

‘It’s a good opportunity for anyone in the Dublin area who has an interest in the matter to have their say and that consultation is ongoing until September,’ he said.

‘The overall network redesign is being designed so that the majority of passengers will actually have a reduction in their journey time.

‘That may at times require interchange but will lead to an overall more efficient and quicker bus journey.’

The proposals will benefit students in the city as the plan includes a number of cross-city routes servicing colleges.

DCU’S Glasnevin campus will be serviced by routes from Howth, Blanchardstown and the Docklands, as well as a city centre route via the Swords Road.

Meanwhile, University College Dublin will be serviced by two city centre routes via Stillorgan Road and Merrion Road, and will also cater for students and staff travelling from Tallaght, Palmerstown, Blanchardstown and Ballymun.

The new system will be based on ‘Spines’ coming out of the city centre and replacing many smaller routes with more frequent services on busy roads.

The ‘A spine’ through Rathmines, Rathgar and Terenure would be the most frequent allday route – one bus every three to four minutes.

‘All are within easy walking distance’

EVERY couple of weeks I drive to Coleraine to spend valuable time with my elderly mother. I take the same route every time, a journey that takes me around three-and-a-half hours.

I passed my driving test when I was 17, so have now been driving for more than 40 years. I love driving. And preferably alone. There’s nothing I like better than setting out on a long journey with only the radio or an audio book for company. Dennis Lehane’s Live By Night, a riveting 19-hour-long listen to a tale of betrayal and redemption and treason and triumph in Prohibition-era America, is my current travelling companion.

I drive a lot. Apart from the 600km round trip to Coleraine every couple of weeks, I also drive a 52km return trip from my home in Greystones to my office in Ballsbridge every day.

And when it comes to my driving experiences, you wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen on the road, in terms of driver behaviour.

Which is why, alarming as it undoubtedly is, I am not hugely shocked by the statistics thrown up by this week’s Allianz survey. That 25% of surveyed drivers admitted to using social media while behind the wheel of a car is totally unacceptable. But is it surprising? I don’t think so.

Offence

Even though we know that such behaviour is against the law, that being caught texting or emailing means a mandatory court appearance and an automatic €1,000 fine for a first offence, drivers continue to flout the law. And get away with it.

I was driving behind a car a couple of weeks ago on a reasonably fast road. All was fine and then, suddenly, the car took a lurch over the white line. It was only luck that no car was coming in the opposite direction.

The driver corrected the vehicle, pulling it back to its rightful position, and we carried on. Suddenly, it happened again. Once again the car was pulled back into line.

It’s not the first time I have witnessed such driving. And nobody can tell me that it isn’t happening because the driver’s eyes are glued to a phone while texting or emailing. Or, as this week’s survey illustrates, scrolling through Facebook, using Snapchat or googling. What kind of idiot, you’d have to ask, thinks that that is acceptable?

Using a mobile phone while you drive – just having it in your hands, that is – makes you four times more likely to crash, according to the Road Safety Authority.

And texting? Well, that ups the ante to a whopping 23 times more likely. As for googling and scrolling through Facebook, well, the mind simply boggles at the risk involved.

When we think of major road accidents, we think first of alcohol abuse or speed as the cause. Certainly excess speed and drink driving are two of the greatest scourges when it comes to road safety, causing all kinds of heartbreak for families the length and breadth of this country. But now social media can be added to the list.

And yet all of them – alcohol, speed, social media interaction – are part of a wider problem: one of selfishness and ignorance, and one which points to the fact that far too many people who are driving shouldn’t be, because they really don’t know how to do it properly.

Selfishness

They simply don’t know the rules of the road and so they have no respect for what is involved, or what, more pertinently, is actually mandatory, in order to get safely from A to B.

If someone doesn’t know that to tootle along in the middle lane of a motorway when cars in the inside lane are going faster than you are is wrong, then why would they have any awareness of speed limits or realise that picking up their phone and sending a text is not on?

For there they are, in their little driving bubble, oblivious to the outside world. In a place, physically, and mentally, where their only concern is for themselves, with no awareness of what is right and what is not, and with absolutely no respect for other road users.

They are nothing more than selfish idiots who shouldn’t be allowed behind the wheel of a car.

I mentioned Ms Lipstick here some years ago. Ms Lipstick was a woman I encountered one Saturday morning on the motorway just beyond the Applegreen service station at Lusk. I was heading north and doing a steady 110/115kph or thereabouts in the inside lane when she overtook me. Whizzed past me, actually, and when I glanced to my right, I saw that she had her right hand on the wheel while her left was applying lipstick with the aid of the rear-view mirror. While she drove at a speed in excess of the 120kph speed limit!

Everybody makes mistakes on the road. But driving like Ms Lipstick, or driving with a young child in the front seat (I’ve seen that lots of times on ‘back roads’), or googling and checking Facebook aren’t just mistakes. They are serious and punishable offences – and rightly so.

I’m no paragon of driving virtue myself. I’ve made mistakes. I had a couple of penalty points for a while because I had slightly exceeded the speed limit on a road where the speed is different on one side of the hill from the other. It’s a hill I drive up and down every day, however, so I should have known that.

Responsibility

As a driver it’s my responsibility to know. And I’d be lying if I said that, as I drive north on the motorway, I haven’t occasionally found myself glancing down at the speedometer only to discover that the needle is a little north of the 120kph mark.

So it’s a case of stepping immediately on the brake and pulling myself back into line. Even if it’s a straight, empty road ahead. Why? Because that’s what taking responsibility on the road involves.

Road deaths are up this year, with the Road Safety Authority’s figures recording that from January to the end of June, some 78 people lost their lives on Irish roads.

There were also more than 14,000 people caught using a mobile phone at the wheel in some form or other during the same period.

How many of those, you’d have to ask, have been sufficiently punished for that behaviour? For so many people nowadays the loss of €1,000 by way of a fine would be easier to bear than the loss of their mobile phone.

So what about some kind of confiscation punishment for all those appalling drivers who are prepared to risk the lives of others with their texting and googling?

We used to blame the drinkers and the speed merchants for all the road carnage. They are still to blame, of course. But nowadays you don’t have to stagger out of a pub and get behind the wheel to cause death on the road. Checking your ‘likes’ on Facebook is enough.