The S6 is bus route most often reported to no-show bus tracker for ghosting passengers

Scott Harmon uses the S6 bus to get from his home in Blackrock to his work at The Square in Tallaght, he says.

The S6 is better than the 75, which it replaced, Harmon says. And on his trip from Blackrock to Tallaght, the S6 is pretty reliable and punctual.

But on the way home in the evening from Tallaght to Blackrock, it’s so unreliable, it often takes him an extra half hour to get home.

There’s supposed to be an S6 bus every 15 minutes then, but a bus or two might be late, or not show up at all, he says. That stretches out his commute.

And the lack of good information on when the next bus might deign to show up and take him home after a long day of work makes things even worse, he says.

When Harmon gets out of work at 8pm, there’s no good way to tell when the next bus will be leaving The Square to take him home, he says.

There’s the TFI Live app, the digital display board at the stop, and Google Maps, he says. “There are occasions when all of them are wrong,” Harmon says.

The time until the bus is due just “ticks down to nothing and then nothing’s there”, he says. Classic Dublin ghost bus.

“I never go off the board, I rarely go off the apps, I just hope the time on the schedule at the stop is right” since The Square is one end of the S6’s route, he says.

Since we set up noshowbus.ie in mid-October, after hundreds of reports, it’s the S6 route that users have most frequently complained about.

Go Ahead Ireland, which operates the buses on the route, has not responded to queries about this sent on 2 December.

A spokesperson for the NTA, which oversees operators including Go Ahead and Dublin Bus, said it “acknowledges that while more and more people are using public transport services, performance does not always meet customer expectations”.

Frustration

Karl Brennan is what he calls a “frequent but irregular” user of the S6 bus, which he – like Harmon – says is an improvement on the old 75 bus that it replaced.

He lives in Rathfarnham and is a Shamrock Rovers fan so he’ll take the bus up to Tallaght to see them play, he says. And he uses the S6 to get to Tallaght and back for other reasons too, he says.

Brennan says the S6 might be late, or a particular bus might not show up, it’s just not very reliable, he says.

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.

Go Ahead also had a massive spike in 2022, up to 15.2 percent. That fell to 1.4 percent in March 2024, according to NTA figures, better than the target of 2 percent.

“Go Ahead Ireland must achieve a Lost Kilometre rate of 2 % or less each period,” the NTA scorecard says. “If this target is not achieved, financial penalties apply.”

The NTA does not appear to publish reliability scores for specific routes, so it’s unclear whether the S6 is better or worse than Go Ahead’s average.

It does, however, publish route-by-route punctuality scores. And the S6 does not fare well in those.

In May/June 2024, buses on the S6 route hit their stops within the required “on-time” window – 1 minute early to 5:59 minutes late – only 65 percent of the time, putting it among Go Ahead’s lowest scoring routes. The target is 80 percent.

“If the relevant punctuality Minimum Performance Standard for each period is not achieved, financial penalties apply,” the NTA punctuality scorecard says.

The S6’s reliability and punctuality are not a huge problem, says Brennan, the Rovers fan, as they are scheduled to run pretty frequently – every 15 minutes or so.

Worse, he says, is that there’s no way to tell when the next one might be coming, Brennan says. “There’s no relationship between the app and the actual physical delivery of the service,” he says.

“It’s very frustrating,” Brennan says. “This is the 21st century. We know the capability is there. They are so far behind the curve of the technology that is available.”

Questions about data

Between 16 October, when we launched our No Show Bus Tracker, and 3 December, people submitted 943 reports to it.

The tracker accepts reports of both cancelled buses and ghost buses. Among the reports, 203 were cancelled buses, and 740 were ghost buses – defined as buses that “on system but never arrived”.

Among the ghost buses, the most frequently reported route was the S6, with 48 reports.

In some cases, a person reported multiple ghost buses on this route. For example, the most frequent reporter flagged 11 between 8 November and 29 November.

When a bus is cancelled, but the company operating that 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”, then Transport Minister Eamon Ryan, then a Green Party TD, said in July.

Although Go Ahead operates this most-reported route, its buses aren’t over-represented among the reports of ghost buses.

About 20 percent of reports were about buses operated by Go Ahead. And Go Ahead operates roughly 20 percent of bus routes in Dublin.

Asked about the reports of ghost buses on the S6 route, the NTA spokesperson raised concerns about the quality of the data collected by noshowbus.ie, which is self-reported by bus users.

After looking at the reports publicly available on noshowbus.ie, which at any given time shows the previous two days’ reports, and consulting with Go Ahead, he flagged four that he says did in fact arrive.

Given the full list of (then) 40 reports of ghost S6es on 22 November (not including names or contact info of the reporters), neither NTA nor Go Ahead raised any further specific concerns.

For his part, Brennan, the Rovers fan, has his own concerns about the data – about Go Ahead’s data.

Brennan says he has complained to Go Ahead, giving specific dates and times of ghost bus incidents. Or, as he calls them, “Harry Potter buses, which magically evaporate”.

And they have just told him he was wrong and the bus actually did arrive, Brennan says. Which is extremely frustrating, he says.

“I know for absolute certainty that there wasn’t a bus there and that didn’t happen,” he says. “Because I was standing there at the bus stop.”

He says he’s requested video proof that the bus was there on that day at the time Go Ahead says it was. But Go Ahead hasn’t provided that.

The NTA scores bus operators including Go Ahead and Dublin Bus on their punctuality and reliability, and this can affect how many routes they are awarded to run, and how much they get paid.

“Both these organisations have an incentive to ‘enhance’ their data,” Brennan says.

Kathryne Del Sesto, who has also submitted reports to noshowbus.ie about ghost buses on the S6 route, says she is absolutely sure she saw what she saw.

Is there any way she could have been wrong, and the bus did arrive, maybe before she got to the stop or something like that? “No there’s not,” she said.

Sometimes there are multiple ghost buses in a row, as she is standing there at the stop. “I could have missed one bus that was a  little bit early, but I didn’t miss three,” she says.

Solutions

The NTA spokesperson said that when it comes to reliability, buses in Dublin “are in fact operating well”.

However, “There is an issue in relation to punctuality with some routes more affected than others,” he said.

“In the short term, NTA and the operators can address this where possible by adding additional services to a route, but this is always subject to the constraints of funding available and by the availability of vehicles, drivers and other staff,” he said.

In the longer-term, Bus Connects should give buses “much greater levels of prioritisation” on the roads, he said, so they won’t get stuck in private vehicle traffic and get delayed.

As for fixing the ghost bus problem, by setting up a system that can reliably show bus users when the next bus is coming, a solution might be on the way for that too.

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.

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

In the meantime, Del Sesto says she’s given up on the S6, as it’s undependable and untrackable. And at the stop where she used to get it, it was the only option.

“It’s so frustrating because you will check the real-time info and it says there are three of them coming,” she says. “And then you go to the stop and none of them show up.”

So Del Sesto walks a bit further now, to another stop, which is on several bus routes, so if one bus doesn’t show, another’s more likely to, she says.