Driven round the bend by buses? I’m lucky it’s a rarity

GRANTED, I’m no expert on the service provided by Dublin Bus. I occasionally jump on the 15B or 77A when it is raining, or if I’m simply bored of retracing the same old route on foot into the city centre. But despite never learning how to drive, I still don’t have anything like the same sort of knowledge or experience the typical regular passenger would. Believe me, there are perfectly valid

reasons for this. Growing up in

the Seventies and Eighties in what then seemed like one of the capital’s more farflung suburbs, I distinctly remember the local bus service being completely unreliable and haphazard.

There was more than one occasion when my mother left the house for a shopping expedition into town on the No.44, only to return empty-handed two hours or more later. It invariably turned out that she’d been waiting at the nearest stop for a

series of buses that simply never arrived.

The upshot was that I made myself a promise years ago that I’d always try to live within walking distance whether I needed to be in terms of work, amenities and social outlets. Fingers crossed, I have managed to stick to that so far.

As it happens, the 44 is one of the routes at the centre of the BusConnects controversy. I’m told the service has improved greatly over the years, as it seems to have

done across much of the network. But this new blueprint has all the hallmarks of a plan that was sketched out on a beer mat at closing time.

It’s all very well if you can hop on a bus if one happens to pass your front door at a convenient time. But I wouldn’t like to be organising my life in accordance with the timetables. Nor would I fancy relying on the BusConnects masterplan to make my daily commute go any more smoothly.