Dublin Bus to get new tracking system to help address 'ghost bus' issue

Ellen O'Donoghue

Dublin Bus is to get a new tracking system this year.

The pilot for the new TFI-wide system is set to start this September to address the issue of "ghost buses".

Dublin Bus chief executive Billy Hann told Newstalk that the current system is 15 years old and doesn't exactly offer "real-time" updates on a bus's location.

But he said that they have been making efforts to improve the situation.

"The title real-time passenger information is a little bit misleading because it’s not quite real time, so if you think about it, if a bus leaves a depot, and you’re standing on a bus stop 45 minutes away, it needs a countdown to know when it’s actually going to be there, so there is issues around that," Hann said.

"There would’ve been plenty of people with the protests last week, standing at bus stops, and we had to divert those buses from the city because of the issues going on. Those RTPIs would’ve been telling us passengers, that there’s a bus arriving because we had so many to cancel."