Stall The Ball

Head Rambles has written a piece on commuting in Ireland. Never has the expression "That's so true it's not funny" been so apt.

I live 35 miles from the GPO in Dublin. I can travel the first 28 miles in 35 minutes on average and it rarely exceeds 40 minutes. The remaining 7 miles takes 1 hour 20 minutes. That’s 5.25 miles per hour.

But on the plus side I charge extra for anything inside the M50, I can use broadband to remote in to work (something most people out my way can't do) and the private bus services around here are excellent. The Bus Eireann scheduling is bananas, you either get into Dublin for 7:15 or 10:10. Useful or what?

But what I’m really curious about is how much all this costs. If you use a private car you are clocking up 400 miles per week, 20K per annum just commuting. Add ordinary trips to shops, day trips etc and you are looking at 90K mileage on your car after three years. Have a guess how much a dealer will give you for that as a trade in. Add in fuel costs, 50 to 60 Euro per week.

So what’s the alternative? How about public transport? Years ago I worked in Cambridge. They had a brilliant system called park and ride. Not a new concept you may say so why was it so brilliant? Because it worked. Dotted around the city were park and ride car parks, think of each number on a clock being a car park. As you went in you paid for a ticket that entitled you to car parking for the day and transport for the day on the buses. The car park had a security man wandering around to keep an eye on things, he even took note of other drivers who threw there door open and dinged the side of your car! CCTV was standard; the buses arrived every 5 minutes during peak time and every 15 minutes at other times. Let me say that again. They arrived every 5 minutes, not scheduled to arrive every 5 minutes but actually appeared every 5 minutes.

You got on the bus showing your ticket, went into town, caught other connecting* buses and got into work. When you got back, your car was still there intact and you drove off.

Imagine if we did something similar in Dublin. Put car parks dotted around Dublin a few miles outside the M50. Big car parks, with security and real live security people. Would you use them? I would.

*Connecting buses is a strange concept. Effectively bus timetables are arranged so that travellers arriving at a terminus will have other buses waiting to take them else where. In Ireland we have the technology to do this; it just seems to be used to make sure the connecting bus has left 4 nanoseconds before you arrive. I haven't figured out the logic used to achieve this but I have worked out the algorithm used for general bus time keeping which looks something like this.

IF $Person = "EARLY" THEN $Bus = "LATE"
IF $Person = "LATE" THEN $Bus = "EARLY"
IF ($Person = "ONTIME") AND ($Weather = "BAD") THEN $Bus = "LATE"
IF ($Person = "ONTIME") AND ($Weather = "GOOD") THEN ($Bus = "ONTIME") AND ($Ticket = "ATHOME")
IF $Person = "MISSED BUS" THEN $NextBus = "LATE"