Plans to reshape its confusing network of routes and slim down the size of its workforce might benefit Dublin Bus, but it will take a lot more to make it the public transport service the city badly needs

THESE DAYS, misery comes in large packages, from Anglo Irish Bank to volcano dust. But the mundane unhappiness of everyday life tends to be shaped by smaller things. On the level of day-to-day life, the quality of the bus service contributes at least as much as any other factor to the general sum of human content or discontent. Which is why the announcement by Dublin Bus that it is embarking on the biggest ever reconfiguration of its services was greeted by passengers with as much trepidation as excitement.

Dublin Bus was anxious to present its Network Direct project as a good news story. The plan will “provide a route network that is simpler and easier to understand, with more direct, regular, frequent and reliable services”. The plan is to make more use of quality bus corridors (QBCs), combine routes to make the service easier for passengers to understand, and place more emphasis on routes that travel across or around the city. These measures will, the company promises, deliver faster journeys and more frequent buses.

This all sounds wonderful, but Dublin Bus neglected to mention in its press release that the plan also involves taking 90 buses and 150 staff out of service, saving €12 million a year. Essentially, the company is proposing to deliver a better service with fewer resources and less money. This raises the obvious question of whether the plan is a development or a cutback.

Until we see how it works in practice, the answer is not at all clear.

There is, of course, no necessary contradiction between downsizing in an organisation and an improvement in the services it provides to its customers. If a company is grossly inefficient, cutting may well make it better. The problem is that Dublin Bus, in spite of all the myths to the contrary, is not a grossly inefficient organisation.

The Network Direct plan is based on a study of Dublin Bus commissioned by the Department of Transport from consultants Deloitte and published early last year. Dublin Bus actually comes quite well out of that report. Its wage and fuel costs were found to be “similar to the industry average in the UK”, where most services have been privatised. Deloitte found that “the scheduling of buses and drivers is generally efficient when compared with international benchmarks”.

And Dublin Bus is vastly easier on the public purse than services in comparable European cities. It gets 29 per cent of its revenue in State subsidies for uncommercial but socially necessary services. The equivalent in Lyon is 79 per cent; Brussels 68 per cent; Amsterdam 62 per cent; Zurich 57 per cent; and London 39 per cent. There is not a great deal of fat to be cut from Dublin Bus.

The Deloitte report did, however, suggest that services could be improved by the kind of reconfiguration that Dublin Bus is now undertaking. It described the current network as “overly complex with a significant amount of service duplication”. It is hard to argue with this contention. Some routes demand an almost Cabbalistic grasp of numerology.

Would-be passengers have to distinguish, for example, between the 15A, 15B, 15E, 15F and 15X or the 40, 40A, 40B, 40C and 40D. Some routes with similar numbers serve very different locations. Conversely, some locations are served by a bewildering variety of routes. A passenger intending to travel to Rathmines, for example, can choose between the 14, 14A, 15, 15A, 15B, 15E, 15F, 18, 65, 65B, 74, 74A, 83, 128, or 142. Somewhat more modestly, Blanchardstown has the 30B, 39, 39A, 39C and 39X.

In itself, therefore, reshaping the network makes complete sense. But there are serious qualifications to this general proposition. One of them is contained within Deloitte’s own conclusion: “a simplified network will provide the majority of existing customers with an easier to use and more regular bus service”.

The majority may benefit, but a minority will have to put up with a worse service. Concentrating routes along the main arteries and QBCs means routing buses away from many estates. Some people, in other words, will have to walk further to a bus stop. Those worst affected will be those with limited mobility, especially the elderly who have a disproportionate dependence on bus services. But Dublin Bus has no incentive to be particularly concerned with these customers: it gets a block grant from the State for free travel for pensioners.

The other reason for hesitation is the broader idea that Dublin Bus can downsize its way out of its current problems. For all sorts of reasons – economic as well as environmental – bus services in Dublin actually need to grow. Shifting people out of cars and on to public transport has been public policy for more than 20 years now. But it has never been pursued with more than half a heart.

The daily number of cars entering the city during the morning rush hours rose from 60,000 in 2005 to 64,000 last year. Bus passenger numbers peaked at 149 million a year in 2004, and have fallen since to below 144 million.

The Siemens European Green Cities Index ranks Dublin last of 30 cities for its transport infrastructure, with half the European average number of people using public transport. Partly because of its dependence on private transport, the city produces almost twice the European average of carbon emissions per head.

DUBLIN TRANSPORT HAS been caught in a Catch 22: the bus service has been slow because of congestion, which causes more people to use their cars, which causes further congestion, which makes the bus service worse. The recession – and the success of QBCs – have now freed up some of that congestion, creating the opportunity for the vicious circle to be turned into a virtuous one.

That won’t happen just by rationalising the network. Real-time information at bus stops, promised by Dublin Bus this year, will have to become a reality. The mirage of integrated ticketing for all public transport services, which has been appearing on the horizon for 15 years now, will have to take corporeal form. (A pilot project is promised for the summer.)

More QBCs will have to be developed. Above all, the idea behind Dublin Bus’s current plans that “less is more” will have to be replaced by a realisation that, in the longer term, more really has to mean more.