A poor bus service is tipping some university students to get driving licences, they say

Shiv Suresh said he started driving himself to University College Dublin (UCD) last fall at the start of his third year studying law and business.

“You could say that I prefer to drive in for two reasons,” said Suresh. “To save time, and because I don't have a good time with the bus.”

Even before he drove himself, his parents usually dropped him off at campus, he said. It takes about 20 minutes, less than half the time – even if he arrives late and can’t get on-campus parking, and has to go to his backup lot at a shopping centre nearby.

Now Suresh is about to enter his final year. He’ll be driving to campus in the fall when classes resume, he says. 

He’s commuting from Knocklyon, a south Dublin suburb about 15 kilometres from the southeast Dublin campus. 

Sometimes, through his earlier college years he tried to take the 175 bus to class, and missed class, he says. 

In November 2023, when that route was replaced with the S6 as part of the BusConnects redesign of the network, he said that was a “downgrade”.

That bus route, operated by Go-Ahead Ireland, is the one that people have submitted most complaints about so far this year, to our no-show bus tracker, via noshowbus.ie.

A spokesperson for UCD said some students – like Suresh – moving from bus to car isn’t reflective of the overall trend at the university. 

UCD is served by more than 20 city and regional bus routes on a daily basis, they said. And, “generally, there is a downward trend of students driving to campus as their primary transport mode – from 20% of students in 2016 to 13% of students in 2025”. 

Still, any shift from taking the bus to driving is exactly the opposite Dublin City Council’s current development plan seeks to achieve. It aims to shrink the number of people getting around by private vehicle from 29 percent to 17 percent.

The National Transport Authority (NTA) meets regularly with bus operators Go-Ahead Ireland and Dublin Bus, and has changes in the works to improve the reliability of buses in the city, a spokesperson said.

Student drivers

Nationwide, the number of people who travel to college by car is way up, over the past few decades.

Just 4 percent of students would drive in 1986, rising to 28 percent in 2011, and falling a little to 24 percent in 2022, according to data from the Central Statistics Office.

Unsurprisingly, within the four Dublin local authorities, students living in the city drive least to campus (8.6 percent). Those living in the South Dublin County Council area drive most (22.4%), shows census data. 

Suresh says when he was at secondary school in Switzerland, he took the bus. The buses showed up “like clockwork”, he said. The bus was the fast and economical decision there. 

The bus in Dublin, though, is a different story, he says. The S6 bus is now his only bus option to get to class, he says. 

But “It doesn't come very often. I guess whenever you go and wait for it, it's always like, delayed or it just doesn't show up. So I'm not really bothered to wait for it,” he says.

His parents told him to get his licence, he said. He did. Now he drives instead.

Libby Brennan, a student who commutes on the S6 from Wicklow, said she is trying to switch to a car too. 

“I am learning to drive, thank God. But then UCD’s parking is a whole other thing,” she said. 

Commuting has been a nightmare, she says. She got soaked a couple of months back, she says. “It was lashing rain, and my socks were wet, my shirt was wet, through my jumper around my coat, I was soaked. My notebooks were wet.”

A class, and stress, divide

There’s actually a bit of a class divide though in who drives to UCD and who takes the bus, says Louise Irving, who also lives in Knocklyon and commutes on the S6. 

She has a few reasons she doesn’t drive in. 

She is studying sustainability and wants to be environmentally sound, she says – but also, realistically, getting a licence and a car is expensive. 

Lessons, theory test, driving test, she says. “That's before insurance, that's before a car, that's before you have to even pay for UCD parking.” she said.

She is “very middle-class”, she says.

“But a lot of these people come from very wealthy families. Have been given cars by their parents,” she said. “Or live in the nice kind of D4 areas, so their commute into college isn't nearly as difficult as mine.” 

She studied engineering at TU Dublin for a year before switching to UCD, she says, and she noticed her old classmates took the bus way more.

“Which is ironic to say the least,” she says. “Because, yeah, you think sustainability students would put more emphasis on having a decent transport system.”

Without a better bus service, she just has to deal with the consequences, she says. “Missing my lectures or, you know, missing other important things and it causes, like, a lot of stress.”

Toedor Sponar, who moved to Dublin from Brno in the Czech Republic, said that when he arrived he used to take the S6 six days a week. 

But when they didn’t turn up again and again, he started to give up. “That kind of made me feel like I wanted to turn to driving,” he said. 

He has a licence. He didn’t make the switch, though. 

He studies environmental policy so didn’t feel great about driving in a city, he says – and there’s the cost too.

“So I'd rather walk or take a bike and bike the whole distance,” he said, and “I'd obviously prefer to take the bus.”

Sponar said that it’s not just university. He looks bad when he is late for work too, he says. 

“It would definitely improve the quality of life for everyone around if the buses were actually reliable,” he says.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.