Public transport -the commuter and taxpayer will loose

dublin | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Sunday March 26, 2006 03:06 by Jim Travers jimtravers at eircom dot net

Its time to think before we jump

Before we jump do we really need to stand back and see exactly what we are doing. We all have our concerns and arguements about public transport but are we really sure that our political leaders are carrying out their objectives in the interest of the Irish people. When one of your parents is gasping on their last breath and cannot recieve or are refused the tretament they need to survive , just think about it, your hard paid taxes built a Luas or a defunct computer voting system or a,or a, or a, and need I go on.
If you believe the private sector will solve all your woes then I'm afraid you deserve all you get.

It is understandable as to why people should be annoyed with the our public transport service, but to place the blame on the bus service itself is a typical attacking mode of someone who does not have either all the facts or is not prepared to listen and accept all of the facts. Let me inform you about our public transport service from a professional viewpoint while at the same time being neither one way or the other about peoples concerns.

It is a myth to believe that the people involved in the provision of public transport are doing their utmost best not to provide the service. Buses are delayed, postponed or whatever for reasons the general commuter either does not want to know about nor does not care about so long as a bus apears.

For example, I had the pleasure of witnessing a gleaming clean bus leaving a garage last Monday to pick passengers up on Eden Quay. By the time the bus reached the Crumlin Road the bus was like a skip full of rubbish, as the driver called into his garage to report that the bus had to be taken out of service because some brainless idiot decided to empty the contents of his stomach onto the floor of the bus. Fights,dirt, sickness and assaults on passengers or drivers all combine to delay or postpone the completion of a bus on its route.

Now lets take into account traffic, road works, demonstrations and above mindless political idiots who probable have never stepped onto a bus (unless it was for a photo call) in their life and probably never will and are now dictating, overruling and determining what is good for you and I, with no regards to the professional opinions and guidence from those who work in the public transport sector every day of the week. Luas, another massive disruption to services that Dublin Bus was asked to take up the and solve the problems while the Luas was under construction. And do not forget, what happens in the city, with regards to delays, filters out beyond the boundaries of the city limits.

If we look at our capital city, ( forgetting about the fact that Dublin is a part of Ireland and not a country in itself) after years of economic growth our city is as congested now as it was in the days of recession. Our secondary roads are in an atrocious state while our local authorite continue to seek more and more places to erect road signs that appear to have very little relevance to the area in which they are placed. We are grinding to a halt, our city council traffic flow system has been halted by a minister who knew what was on the table but shot it dead when it was about to be implimented.
Now we have a port tunnel that is incapable of handling vehicles that are required for our future needs. Now we have both a minister and a local authority telling an industry that is keeping the economy moving, that they cannot move goods into Ireland because our planners got it once again completely wrong. Wow........ireland is now a huge economics force that can dictate an opposite process that is different to the rest of the globalised world. The only thing in ireland that produced any sort of professional quality standard that was admired by our people and the rest of the world was EUROVISION and that was staged and presented by our public broadcasting service.

The private operator Dualways who ran a bus service called the 613, from city centre to Rathcoole via wherever suddenly withdrew the service because ............it was not making money. But what about those people who gave their loyalty to Dualways........hard luck, go back to Dublin Bus. Dont forget, when your daughter or son is waiting for a bus to take him or her home safely,it will be a Dublin Bus that they will step on..........all the private bus services finish when your childs fare does not make up a reason for them to get him or her home. The private guy finishes between 7 or 8 o clock at night because all the cream has dried up. When the private sector wanted part of the peak service they wanted it on the basis of not providing a service after peak hours.I bet you did not hear any politican or councillor standing up in defense of the commuter and screaming blue murder a the private sector? And do you know why? Because the private sector will tell them they cannot interfer in the internal affairs of a private company. So go away or give us more money.

So getting back to your complaints about our public transport service. Yes there is a need for improvement and yes ther are problems will the delivery of service but if anybody believes that the private sector will deliver a better service taking into account our current road infrastructural conditions, traffic congestion and political lunacy then they deserve to be robber of their hard earned cash for the provision of a sub standard service that the will emerge from the control of our public transport system being handed to the private sector.

The people who will suffer when the private sector takes over the running of our public transport service will be the most vunerable people in our society, the old, people with disabilities and young children. Scare tactics, making people nervous, I think not. Look at the UK as a classical example of how public transport should not be. Where there's money to be taken then the private sector is waiting and able to provide a service. But in circumstances where certain routes do not make financial sense to a private company, they simply withdraw the service.The government is crippling the progress and ability of Dublin bus to provide a service that is second to none.

The CIE group has provide the people of this country with a public transport service that is steeped in political interference and political mismanagment. When something goes wrong then call in the Chairman and give him a good telling off about the concerns of the public and their demands for an efficient public transport service. But do these politicians admit to the public that their collective stupidity,incompetence and lack of a committed interest in the welfare of the public is overshadowed by their desire to secure financial brown envelopes and political donations that benefit a selective few and a financially well off section of our society.

Do not be under any illusion, the introduction of the private sector in the provision of public transport is not, and will not be in the greater interest of all people who use public transport. It has been proven in the UK ,where politicians fully admit that the privitisation of public transport services has not improved the quality, reliability and cost effective use of public transport by the public. If anything it has cost the tax payer far more money to secure the services of private companies like ARRIVA for a second rate service that continiously increases its charges while at the same time reduce its services. Is this what the Irish people really want? If anybody believes that any Irish Government minister can provide Irish citizens with a toip quality service that does not involve corruption, brown envelopes, delays, bad planning and over costing then we as a people really deserve to be screwed to the hilt. Our history has shown us that once you put a politician in control of the finances of the state( the people) then finger dipping and back hand operation will be as commons as the air we breath. Look at the Luas.... 1 Billion Euro and unless the line is continually extended, it will become a white elephant in a very short period of time. In other words it will, in time, cease to be a local city short hop on hop off rail service but will become part of an expanded rail system. What has the Luas done for the city? It has causes greater traffic congestion and the slower movement of vehicles in and out of the city. From an environmental point of view it has increased environmnetal pollution due to the fact that traffic is clogging up the city.

Our secondary roads are an ABSOLUTE AND TOTAL DISGRACE but we as a nation of people have allowed our political leaders to squander money while our families and loved ones die because they cannot either afford to pay for medical treatment or are not high enough on the priority list in order to secure treatment. Forget about your religious or political affiliations and just remember that when your mother or father is lying on a hospital bed, in a corridor for hours on end.......just remember a god damned Luas train is running up and down a LINE THAT WAS FINANCED FROM YOUR HARD EARNED AND PAID FOR TAXES ,WHILE YOUR PARENTS ARE LYING FIGHTING FOR LIFE OR CRYING OUT FOR HELP.

SO BUGGER OFF ABOUT YOUR Fianna Fail or Labour or whatever party you support, when it comes down to your wife,child, mother,father, its them you think about first and to hell with the rest. But there's no point in suddenly changing your political allegiences because you are in crisis, because this is how politicians work.......they promise you everything and give you nothing. They tell you "if they were in power".........and when they are in power they ignore you and continue on in their bleeding of the system. You say you cherish your right to vote but you vote the same system of failure to the people, that is only made visible by a different face or an alleged political philosophy and no more.You find belief and correctness in the private enterprise ideals but still you worry about the security of your employment and uncertainty of your future. You find contempt for those who live and exist in the social welfare system but still your shiver with fear in case you fall into that social class. You promote and support a system that makes every individual vunerable to exploitation and abuse while at the same time see yourself as being beyond the influence of others to fall. You worry about your morgage, you worry about your childrens future, you worry about your own future and still you support ideals and politicians that promote the decline of your very existance.

It does not matter if your a Fianna fail, Fine Gael, Labour, Green or Sinn Fein supporter. It does not matter if you are Muslim, Jewish, Catholic or Protestant . What matters is that all our political leaders have failed to provide the Irish people with the most basic requirements in order for them to be able to justify their own existance. When a politician tells you something is good, what he or she really means is that it is not good for the people but good for their own self gratification or financial gain. When the Celtic Tiger finally comes to an end the only visible signs of an ecomnomic boom will be a tram line and a spike in the middle of the city and this in itself is an insult and a disgrace to the historic events that took place in the fight for Irish freedom.

So getting back to public transport..............beleive me it is not in anybody's interest that the private sector takes control of our public transport system. It is nice and upper class to say"I travel by private bus" but just remember, there will come a day when the money in your pocket will be directed more and more towards paying for the privlidge of saying its private.....just look at the VHI.

There is a simple answer to our transport problems

1. Expand the Quality Bus Corridor network
2.Provide Dublin Bus with a greater number of new buses.
3. Allow Dublin Bus to expand its bus services without having to go through endless reams of red tape that takes projects years to come to fruition.
4. Allow Dublin Bus and CIE to expand and upgrade its service without any political interference.
5. Allow the private sector to have an input into the provision of public transport services but do not give them the control of the public services.
6. Better co-ordination of road service repairs and construction between all services concerned.
7. Better Garda enforcement of road traffic regulations.
8.Address the problems associated with taxis in and around the city.
9. impliment the contra-flow bus plan proposed by a Dublin Bus employee many years ago, but still politicians and local authorities pick on its contents biut will not give the proposer the pleasure of saying IT WORKS.

If people think that the private sector will provide a far better public transport service then i am afraid they are really badly informed and under a cuckoo illusion of better days ahead. A Finaan Fail politician recently said that there are over 5000 buses within the private sector available to enter as transport public service vehicles. What the politician failed to tell you was that the vast majority of the buses available were either decommissioned by Dublin Bus and sold to the private sector or were buses imported from the UK where they were rejected as being unsuitable for use as public service vehicles. This can be seen around the country where buses provided by some private operators stretch as far back as 1968. And you child commutes in these vehicles.

There are things that the private sector do far better and more efficient than the public sector. But if you want a public transport service available at all times for all of our people irrespective of the time, peak hours or distance or aquardness of location then the public service can only deliver a service that places transporting people to the desired location purely on the basis of a public transport service and not profit. When profit comes into the equasion then you have a Dualways sinario and to which the public will eventuall have to pay the price. Dublin Bus gets 50 million euro from government each year to provide a transport service to all the people, irrespective of their ability to pay and with no disregard to disabilities, age, colour or creed.

No matter who we are we all want an effective and efficient public transport system. So who is stopping us from getting one? Its not the unions, they would only love to have more members that brings with it more strenght. Its not the people, they have been forced to pay for public transport services our of their hard earned money.....a money they could use on their families. So who is stiffling the progress of our public transport service as well as our health and educational services.
I ask you that? Put everything aside..ask yourself , What has the Celtic Tiger given me as a citizen of this state..............its not security...........we are under more pressure now than when we were in recession.............its not availibity of social services, if we need them...........its worse now than before the boom.........................its not peace off mind because we are all living from day to day.I................ITS OUR ABILITY TO BORROW AND GIVE OURSELVES AN UNREAL BELIEF THAT EVERYTHING IS GREAT AND EVERYTHING WILL GO ON FOREVER......................BUT THE DAY IS COMING WHEN WE WILL HAVE TO PAY IT ALL BACK. And while you and I tighten our belts or climb poles to promote our political canditates, just remember they will be living off the increases and pensions they secured for themselves as a right while you and i are told that in this fluid economy nothing is guaranteed for certain...............to hell with you for believing this.

Tell that to Ryanair if your not in the acceptable majority. And do not also forget that when all those loyal private enterprise gurus who hailed Ryanair as the saviour and promoter of private enterprise and a friend of the public, then spare a thought for their new liuggage charges, disability charges and on occasions refusal to carry those with disabilities as well as the overworking of its personell that places every passenger in danger due to fatique and exhaustion........all in the name of profit.
Its a low cost airline..................but at what cost.

You do not realise what you've got until it gone.

London transport is a testament to what a public transport should not be.

Its time to tell our political leaders that they are not representing the people who elected them. They are not working in the interests of all the people and they most ceratinly are not committed in making a better place for Irish people to live. Its time to stop this privitisation nonsense and think more about giving to the people rather than taking from them.

Our young people have never lived through days of poverty and hardship and lets hope that in the interest of the stability of the state they never have to experience. Our educated political representatives have a lot to answer for.

Tell your political representatives that public transport services belong to the people and the people alone.