Dublin Bus has announced a city wide ‘review’ of their entire route network.

Under the guise of providing a more efficient and easier-to-use bus service, the company are actually implementing yet another round of savage cuts to the city’s bus services.

Last year they cut over 120 buses from their fleet and laid off hundreds of bus workers.

At the time, the company claimed the cuts would not affect services as less traffic congestion meant fewer buses were needed to provide the same level of service.

In reality, as pubic transport campaigners and bus-workers pointed out, the city needed MORE buses, not less.

Whole areas and new estates are left with no public transport service at all.

The complete bankruptcy of the Greens in government was shown clearly when they uttered not a word of protest at those cuts, which saved the company the relatively paltry sum of €21 million.

Savage

Little over a year later, the company are again preparing to savage the bus service in the city.

They are peddling the lie that the ‘network review’ is an attempt to provide a more ‘efficient’ service.

In fact, almost 100 more buses will be lost.

Routes that were not cut last year now face severe reductions in their bus numbers.

The company is attempting to dress up the cuts as an attempt to improve the service by amalgamating routes from the south side of the city with routes from the north side.

For example, the number 40 route to Finglas will be combined with the number 78 route to Ballyfermot to create a new ‘super route’ across the city.

However, in total, the new ‘super routes’ will now have far fewer buses operating on them than the previous two routes had.

City-wide

Across the city the picture is the same.

In some areas, routes that have always serviced particular estates are now being withdrawn, forcing people to walk for 10 to 20 minutes to main roads to get the bus.

Dublin Bus management say this will allow them to provide more high-frequency services on the main roads.

In fact, it is designed to cut the routes’ journey times and thus reduce the number of buses the company operate on that route.

If anything, such moves will discourage people, especially older people or those with restricted mobility, from using the service.

Agenda

In some areas the agenda is clear and no amount of PR can obscure it.

Last year the company cut services in Ballymun on the number 13 route and from the number 7 route on the south side.

But they claimed that the numbers 4 and 4a would be unaffected and provide an excellent alternative service in the same areas.

But now they are scrapping the 4a and cutting 14 bus runs from the remaining number 4 route.

On Sundays, passengers will be left with one bus every hour servicing a route that goes throughout some of the most populated areas in the city.

Non-union

Side by side with this savage attack on public transport comes the attempt by some private, non-union bus operators to use the courts to force Dublin Bus out of certain profitable routes.

The Swords Express recently won a high court case that could force Dublin Bus to stop operating some services in Swords and elsewhere.

Other companies are now threatening to take similar cases.

They are hoping the courts will interpret European competition laws in such a way as to stop subsidised states services competing with non-subsidised private operators.

The effect, if unchallenged, would be to allow effective privatisation of services in some areas.

Already, Dublin Bus management are trying to use the case to justify withdrawing from some areas.

Fightback

Transport Unions and the public need to fight now to retain every bus and service that Dublin Bus operate.

A campaign by bus-workers and passengers could stop these cuts and highlight the hypocrisy of the Greens.

Projects like Metro north have more to do with the needs of Fianna Fail’s friends in developers Treasury Holdings than public transport. Instead the government could be forced to fund the transport system that most people actually use at the moment; the bus.

If the Greens are serious about saving the Planet from global warming they must explain how scrapping 200 of Dublin city buses in a year is going to reduce our CO2 emissions.