Bus drivers veer towards dispute with bosses

With traffic a bit lighter than usual, some Dublin buses have been moving too fast – and having to stop and wait along the route to get back on schedule.

This has worsened friction between some drivers and controllers at Dublin Bus, which threatens to spill over into industrial action, a union representative says.

There’s a little screen in each bus – the “PressIt box” – that displays how many seconds or minutes off schedule a bus is at any given time.

If the bus is moving along its route too swiftly and gets ahead of time, the driver is supposed to stay at a stop for however long it takes to get back on schedule.

If the driver doesn’t, their controller might get on the radio and have a word. In April 2023, bus driver David Murray said this can create a “level of bullying”.

Sticking rigidly to the schedule can also leave passengers in a hurry frustrated, sitting on a stationary bus at a stop for several minutes when they need to get somewhere.

And it can lead to more cancelled buses and “ghost” buses, especially on longer routes, says bus driver Owen McCormack.

Because if the buses don’t make up time when the roads are clear, they’ll fall behind when they hit traffic – and if they get to the end of their route late, their next run might well be truncated, or cancelled, McCormack says.

Now unions SIPTU and the NBRU have sent around a notice “advising drivers, for safety reasons not to operate their radios while in service”.

“The company have chosen to set themselves on a confrontational path, and we’ll have to deal with that through the IR [industrial relations] processes, you know,” says NBRU Assistant General Secretary Thomas O’Connor.

“And wherever that ends up, it ends up. We have to represent our members,” he says.

Asked about the brewing conflict, a spokesperson for Dublin Bus said “This system is designed to improve punctuality and reliability of journey times, thus aiming to provide a positive customer experience for passengers across the bus network.”

The National Transport Authority (NTA) has responded to queries sent Friday about this conflict.

Sticking to the schedule

The NTA has said in the past that keeping buses on schedule is good for passengers, allowing them to plan their journeys.

After all, who’d want to show up at a stop at the right time and find the bus has already left?

So the NTA sets performance standards for punctuality for bus operators like Dublin Bus – which operates most routes in the city – and its competitor Go Ahead.

For most routes, the standard is that the bus should arrive no more than 5 minutes 59 seconds late, and leave no more than 1 minute early. Operators have to make sure a certain share of their buses hit the punctuality targets.

If they don’t they risk financial penalties  – or worse, Dublin Bus Human Resources Services Manager Keith Graham told the NBRU Branch Secretary Brian Young in a 31 October letter.

“You will no doubt be acutely aware of the impact of not meeting our punctuality/excess wait time metrics, and the subsequent fines and potential for losing routes,” Graham wrote.

However, this effort by Dublin Bus to meet the NTA’s punctuality standards can have a negative impact on passengers, says McCormack, the bus driver.

On a cross-city route if the roads are clear going into town, the driver may well end up waiting again and again at stops to stay on schedule, he says.

Then if there’s more traffic going out of town, towards the end of the route, the bus might get further and further behind schedule, and hit the end of the route late, he says.

Depending on how late, it might either be cancelled altogether, or sent “special” back back into town, skipping all the stops along the way, and re-start the route part way through, he says.

Meanwhile, people who want to catch that bus can be left standing on the side of the road, to wait for the next one.

And, if that bus isn’t removed from the real-time passenger information system (RTPI), the digital signs at stops, and the apps, might be telling wannabe passengers all the while that it’ll arrive to pick them up shortly.

McCormack, the bus driver, says the NTA has set up the wrong incentives for the bus operators.

“They make the rules, change the rules, and get to blame the operators for any failings with no real oversight on them and the role their rigid timing system plays in poor services,” he says.

Punctuality and reliability

Most people (80 percent of 3,146) were either fairly satisfied or very satisfied with bus services in Ireland, in a 2023 Transport for Ireland survey.

But of the 11 percent who said they were fairly/very dissatisfied, 56 percent said the key reason was “Not punctual/unreliable”, another 20 percent said “Does not show up, turn up, stop”, and another 13 percent said “Infrequent/Inconsistent”.

In Dublin, both Dublin Bus and Go Ahead have been missing the NTA’s punctuality targets, but not by much. And same with the NTA’s reliability targets – both Dublin Bus and Go-Ahead have been missing them, not by much.

But the perception of their performance is probably much worse, says Dublin Commuter Coalition spokesperson Jason Cullen.

“The bus operators, you know, there at 94 percent on most routes 96 percent but you know, you ask the person standing at a bus stop, and they’ll say it’s 50 percent or lower,” Cullen said.

Since we launched our No-Show Bus Tracker on 16 October, we’ve had 531 reports of buses in Dublin city that passengers were counting on, which didn’t show up.

Of those, 404 were ghost buses, meaning they were on the real-time passenger information (RTPI) system – the digital signs, and the apps – but never showed.

The rest were buses that passengers were waiting on but were then cancelled on the signs and apps.

Graham Ó Maonaigh was waiting for an S4 in Milltown at 7.40pm on 24 October. The RTPI system said it was to arrive in two minutes. But it never showed up and just disappeared from the system, his report said.

Victor Medina was trying to get from Sandymount to a rugby match in Terenure, on 19 October, and two S2s in a row were cancelled. He ended up having to get a taxi to get to the match on time.

When people find, over time, that they can’t rely on the bus they need, and they have other options, they might well abandon them, says Cullen of the Dublin Commuter Coalition.

“My partner was taking the 63 down to Dún Laoghaire and hop on the train, and you know that was not turning up on a frequent enough occasion that she stopped getting this bus,” he says.

Better information

Medina says what he wants is to be able to check an app when they’re getting ready to leave the house, see when the bus is coming, and go catch it.

But it doesn’t always work like that, he says.

“It’s hit or miss,” Medina says. “During the week, they’re more reliable. Then, on weekends, it’s more of an adventure.”

Ó Maonaigh says he uses the buses in the same way. “When I’m pulling on my shows I’ll spin up the app and see what bus is coming when,” he says.

That usually works out for him because where he lives in Terenure, there are a lot of different buses to choose from so there’s usually one he can catch when he needs to.

He also says transport tracking apps over the years have improved.

He recalls a friend setting up a webcam in 2002 aimed into Pearse Street Station, showing the times for Dart trains coming and going.

Things have come a long way since then, and the bus tracking apps have been improving in recent years too, he says.

However, he’d like to see them stop measuring how long it’ll be before the bus arrives in fake minutes, and switch to say how many stops away the next bus is.

“Just continually showing that the bus is two minutes away for 10 minutes is useless,” Ó Maonaigh he says.

Further improvements in the information bus users can get are on the way, according to the NTA.

In December, it awarded a €68.5 million contract to Trapeze Group UK Ltd to bring in a new automatic vehicle location (AVL) system.

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

If all goes well, the roll-out of the new system will start in late 2025 and be complete by late 2026, a spokesperson for the NTA said by email on Tuesday.

Regardless of whether users are checking what time a bus is due to arrive at their stop and going there then, or just checking the app when they’re ready to go to see when the next one’s coming – it’s important for the buses to stick to their schedules so they don’t all get bunched up together, Ó Maonaigh says.

And if that means the buses stop to wait along the route sometimes, that’s just something passengers will have to get used to, Ó Maonaigh says.

“People need to get used to the bus journey taking 20 minutes – regardless of traffic, it’s not going to be 10 minutes,” he says.

Cullen, of the Dublin Commuter Coalition, says that in the end, the problem is traffic. “It’s just too many cars on the road for the buses to move on a stable pattern,” he says.

UPDATE: This article was updated at 15.29 on 8 November to add comments from a Dublin Bus spokesperson, received that day.