‘Shocking figures prove that Cork bus service in crisis’

The amount of cancelled buses in Cork city jumped from just under 1% at the start of the year to over 5% this summer, new data shows.

Of the 28 bus services in the city, just one — the 209A — did not have a worse performance at the end of the period than it did at the beginning, according to figures complied by the National Transport Authority (NTA).

Between January 1 and September 9, more than 3% of Cork buses did not operate as scheduled, with more than 10% of bus journeys on some routes not running at certain periods of the year.

The NTA tracks the reliability of bus services using a metric which is called “lost kilometres”, meaning journeys that were scheduled but did not materialise.

If a bus is cancelled, the distance for that journey is considered “lost” and it is calculated as a percentage against the planned journeys that were taken.

WORSE

A total of 3.21% of planned Cork city bus services did not run over the period for which data was provided, with the buses performing best in the first four periods, but then getting significantly worse afterwards.

Of the city’s 28 bus services, there was just one — the 209A from Ballyphehane — whose performance did not worsen over the time period.

The worst performing service overall was the 220A (South Mall to Fountainstown), where 10.56% of planned journeys were not undertaken, followed by 7.13% on the 202A and 6.96% on the 202 (both Hollyhill to Mahon Point), 5.98% on the 208 (Ashmount to Curraheen), 5.75% on the 220 (Ovens to Fort Camden) and 5.33% on the 203 (Manor Farm to Parklands).

The best performing bus was the 219 (MTU to Mahon Point), where just 0.3% of services did not run, followed by 0.53% on the 209 (Lotamore to Patrick Street), 0.55% on the 223x (South Mall to Haulbowline) and 0.62% on the 226 (Kinsale to Kent Station).

Some periods saw particularly high bus cancellation services, such as 14.28% of 202A trips and 14.12% of 202 journeys not running from July 16 to August 12, and 12.06% and 12.72% of journeys on the same routes, respectively not running in period seven, from June 18 to July 15.

DATA

The data, taken over four-week periods, shows that 0.77% of planned kilometres were lost in the first four-week period of this year (P1), but that it increased afterwards to 2.07% in P2, 1.25% in P3, 1.37% in P4, 5.21% in P5, 4.17% in P6, 4.75% in P7, 5.12% in P8 and 3.85% in P9.

The data was provided to Sinn Féin TD for Cork North Central Thomas Gould, who told The Echo the “shocking figures” back up what people have been telling him, that the service did improve earlier this year, but that once again, “we have been plunged into a crisis”. He said: “We have bus routes where almost 15% of services were not delivered. That doesn’t even account for buses that were late.

“The most frustrating thing for people is standing at bus stops while signs and the app tells them a bus is on its way only for that bus to never show up, leaving people late for work, college and school and missing appointments.”

The NTA recently told Mr Gould that the issues arise from driver recruitment, and that if Bus Éireann had not resolved the issues by January, “the NTA will have to take additional steps which may include reducing the size of the bus network operated by Bus Éireann.” Bus Éireann told The Echo at the time that, following a recruitment drive abroad, it had a full complement of drivers.

However, questions have arisen as to the company’s ability to retain them given that the company made the same statement in February of this year, and data shows bus performance started worsening again shortly after this.