Waited for a bus in Dublin and it never showed up? Please tell us.

It’s a common and frustrating experience for bus users in Dublin, which puts some people off taking the bus to get where they’re going.

You go to the bus stop, and your app and the digital display show your bus is coming in nine minutes. Eight. Seven. The number of minutes ticks down until finally you’re told the bus is “Due”.

But no bus arrives, and the “ghost” bus disappears off the app and digital display. You’re left to wait – sometimes for a long time – for the next bus, or find another way to get where you’re going.

These ghost buses, and the (announced) cancellation of buses due to drive shortages and other reasons, leave bus users stranded and frustrated and make them late.

They also give the bus system a reputation for not being a reliable way to get where you’re going, at a time when there’s a push to get people to ditch their cars and switch to public transport, cycling, or walking, to reduce carbon emissions, pollution and traffic.

We – and others – have been reporting on ghost buses and cancelled buses for years, but we haven’t been able to find the data we wish we had on the scope and details of the problem.

So today we’re launching a new tool, a No-Show Bus Tracker, at noshowbus.ie, and asking you to help us gather that data. Please use the tracker, and share it widely.

Ghost buses and cancelled buses

Dublin Bus, the main operator of buses in Dublin, has struggled to hire and retain enough drivers.

People don’t want to work long shifts, split shifts, night shifts, erratic shifts, Thomas O’Connor, assistant general secretary of the National Bus and Rail Union (NBRU), said in March 2023. But the bus companies are asking for more of those kinds of shifts as, say, more night buses are added to the system.

The unemployment rate in Ireland is low, O’Connor said, and there’s lots of demand for drivers, and so some are choosing to leave the bus companies and take a lower salary for a job with a more family friendly schedule.

Meanwhile, as the NTA pushes to roll out more phases of BusConnects, the need for more bus drivers just keeps increasing. And the lack of drivers is holding back the roll-out of the bus network redesign.

The National Transport Authority (NTA) scores bus companies on reliability by keeping track of the percent of kilometres of route that they should have operated but didn’t.

For Dublin Bus, this spiked around July 2022 at 7.4 percent, and then fell to 2.4 percent in March 2024, according to NTA figures. But that’s still above the target of 2 percent.

When a bus is cancelled, but Dublin Bus doesn’t take it off the real-time passenger information system (RTPI), which feeds data to the digital displays at bus stops, and the apps, then that becomes a ghost bus.

Apps like TFI Live “cannot display a service as cancelled if it has not received the appropriate cancellation message from the operator and as a result it reverts to showing the timetabled time that the bus is due to arrive at a stop”, Transport Minister Eamon Ryan, a Green Party TD, said in July.

The NTA last December awarded a €68.5 million contract to Trapeze Group UK Ltd to bring in a new automatic vehicle location (AVL) system.

If all goes well, the roll-out of the new system will start in late 2025 and be complete by late 2026, an NTA said last month.

“The solutions to be implemented by Trapeze will address both ‘ghost buses’ and ‘disappearing buses’,” an NTA spokesperson said last month.

Gathering more data

The NTA regularly publishes data on the reliability of buses run by operators Dublin Bus and Go Ahead.

But that data has its limitations, which is why we’re launching noshowbus.ie to gather our own.

We want an independent source of data. The bus operators have an incentive to make their reliability data look good to the NTA, to avoid financial penalties for failing to hit targets, and to help them when they bid to operate routes.

We want more complete data. In the reliability data published by the NTA, the measure they use is the number of “lost kilometres”.

This figure “does not include bus services (whole or partial routes) which could not be operated for reasons outside of the control of Dublin Bus (for example, road closures due  to a major event, extreme weather resulting in unsafe road conditions etc.)”, the NTA says.

That is fine if the data is being used to measure whether bus operators are meeting NTA targets and expectations, but it doesn’t capture the full extent of people’s difficulties in getting where they are going on the city’s buses.

We’d also like more granular data, showing exactly where and when there was a ghost bus, which could help identify who has failed to remove a cancelled bus from the real-time passenger information system, and so maybe prevent that from happening again in future.

The NTA reliability data shows lost kilometres for the system, and for each bus route, for – roughly – each month. Our No-Show Bus Tracker could show that a 13 bus ghosted passengers along its route from 8am to 8.30am or whatever on 15 October.

What we’ll do with the data we gather

We plan to use the data we collect here in our reporting, to write articles on the scale and details of the problems with ghost buses and cancelled buses.

Right now, whatever you put in the form at noshowbus.ie, goes to an Airtable form only accessible to me.

If you choose to give us your name and/or contact information (which is not required to submit a report), we will never make it public or share it with anyone without your permission.

Although I, or one of our other journalists, might use it to contact you as part of our reporting on these issues, and in that conversation might ask you whether they can quote you by name in an article.

We hope to add more features to nowshowbus.ie website in the near future, including a dashboard so you can see a summary of the reports we are receiving, showing where and when we are getting the most reports of ghost buses and cancelled buses.

And maybe we should add a live feed of reports as they come in, so bus users can see which buses are ghosts?

It would also be possible to generate a weekly email of all reports submitted to us (without names and contact info), and send that to the NTA. We’ll have a think about whether that would be a useful thing to do.

One step at a time though: please use our No-Show Bus Tracker, and help us get the word out about it so other people will do.