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LAST UPDATE | 8 Nov 2022
DUBLIN BUS AND Go-Ahead bus has today apologised for a deterioration in their their Real-Time Passenger Information (RTPI) systems and cancelled buses in recent months.
Acting Chief Executive of Dublin Bus, Andrea Keane, told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport that “the reliability of RTPI systems has unfortunately deteriorated in recent months” due to both software issues and a shortage of bus drivers.
The committee was told today that some of the new BusConnects routes might be delayed if the driver shortage continues, said the National Transport Authority (NTA).
Two phases are already being delayed, which will in turn, knock on to later phases of the orbital route rollouts, committee members were told today.
Bus driver recruitment crisis
Dublin Bus has 2,800 drivers, but currently there are 150 vacancies. Around 290 new drivers have been hired this year. Go-Ahead said it has around 500 drivers, but around 45 driver vacancies.
Go-Ahead said it takes four weeks to train a driver before a test, which is down from six weeks thanks to the Road Safety Authority, though the bus operator said there are a number of other issues in relation to paper work that is holding up recruitment.
When asked about the roll out of new BusConnects services, Anne Graham, the Chief Executive Officer of the NTA, said “these are planned services, it really is down to whether driver resources are there”.
She said the service improvements will not be rolled out if it will impact on the current services already in operation.
“It may be the case that these will be delayed as we have had to delay other BusConnects routes due to the shortage of drivers,” she said.
Graham said the NTA will try and get them up and running as soon as possible.
Tim Gaston, Director of Public Transport Services at the NTA addressed a question posed about at 24-hour route connecting DCU to the city centre.
He said this would be a service connected with the BusConnects A and D Spine which he had had hoped would be running this year.
Delays in BusConnects
Unfortunately, this is not going to be achievable as they are already rolling back on phase five “entirely because of driver issues”, he said, which will have a knock-on impact on other phases for next year.
Gaston said he is hopeful the F Spine route may be deliverable in 2023.
In her opening statement, Keane told TDs and Senators that Dublin Bus apologises to customers who have been impacted due to the “significant problems” caused by RTPI systems “not performing as [they] should”.
Dublin Bus currently operates three separate RTPI systems: the Dublin bus app, the Transport for Ireland app and the on-street signs.
These systems operate independent of one another, it is understood.
According to Keane, these three systems have suffered software problems in recent months, with changes being implemented by Dublin Bus in September while the National Transport Authority (NTA) implemented changes in October.
Alongside technical issues with RTPI systems, Dublin Bus has also faced driver recruitment challenges, which has lead to the cancellation of some services.
“The technical issues with the RTPI systems have unfortunately coincided with the current driver recruitment challenges,” Keane will say.
“As noted above, this has resulted in the company having to cancel some trips due to these driver recruitment challenges. These cancelled trips should be removed from the real time system in a timely manner, but in some cases, this was not happening.”
“The inaccuracy of the data on the on-street displays in recent months was as a result of the higher than normal cancellation of services due to lack of drivers as well as a technical fault,” Anne Graham, the Chief Executive Officer of the NTA, said today.
‘Ghost buses’
Graham added that improvements made to the system will reduce the presence of “ghost buses” on the RTPI system whenever a driver is unavailable.
Go-Ahead Ireland’s Managing Director, Andrew Edwards, also apologised for bus service issues.
He told TDs: “It is absolutely accurate to say that Go-Ahead’s services have suffered along with those of other operators over the past number of months.”
Edwards will also detail that Go-Ahead was hit with a cyber-attack in September, impacting on the company’s IT systems.
“Furthermore, in September of this year, Go-Ahead Group suffered a cyber security incident which impacted operational IT systems in the company’s bus businesses, including software used to schedule drivers and services,” Edwards will tell TDs.
“This came at a time of increasing service demand with schools and colleges returning, increasing road traffic and changing weather conditions – important day-to-day issues associated with that time period.”
Impact of cancellations on customers raised
A number of TDs raised examples of the impacts that cancelled and delayed bus services are having on customers, with Dublin North West Paul McAuliffe stating one of his constituents has received a formal warning from his employer due to his lateness, which has been caused by cancelled buses.
Another constituent had to pay an additional fee to the creche she uses as she was late to pick up her child.
Green Party TD for Wicklow Stephen Matthews said one of his constituents works in a restaurant in Bray had to use whatever wages she earned that night to pay for a taxi home as the last bus back to Enniskerry never showed up.
The chair of the committee Kieran O’Donnell asked why planning wasn’t done earlier if it was evident that recruitment was an issue. The NTA said the recruitment issues and the subsequent delays and cancellation of services were not a surprise to them, as they are in regular contact with the bus operators about the difficulties they are facing.
For not meeting their contractual obligations, both bus operators have been fined around €1.1 million.
TDs also asked why there are not more park and ride facilities available along other routes, other than the M50. The NTA said plans are underway to roll out more park and ride facilities, with a location already identified, subject to planning, along the N11 in Wicklow.
The committee was also told that the procurement process for ‘tap-to-pay’ fares on public transport is underway, but the NTA has said it will be at least 2024 before it is rolled out in Dublin.
Speaking at the COP27 climate conference today, the Taoiseach said that he believed that the issue of buses not arriving had “improved dramatically”.
“Generally bus services, in terms of timeliness, have improved. We have a target to have all buses, energy efficient and electric. I’d like to see that happening sooner than the anticipated target date of 2035. I think we need to bring that forward. And those are practical things we can do.”
With reporting by Christina Finn
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Three separate systems for real time information? What the actual . I guarantee you that noone with any actual IT expertise was involved in the decision making process here
I’m sure a bunch of middle management got to eat some VERY expensive lunches though.
@Terri MacDonald: Do you have a link to these “facts”? ……. and no, I don’t work for Dublin Bus.
@Fr. Fintan Stack: What facts? It’s clearly conjecture. Although it’s conjecture informed by over 30 years working in IT and extensive experience of how certain companies/organisations do business. I may be sure of it, but I never stated it as fact. I’m more than happy to be proved wrong if anyone has such facts, but that is unlikely as the oversight for these kinds of decisions is usually as murky as the decision itself.
Can’t blame the drivers, who drive. Making big plans again no staff.
@Mary Nugent: the car before the horse as usual.
@Mary Nugent: in some ways yes you can blame the drivers. My wife trained to be a Dublin Bus driver, but quit after she realized there was a tier system in place, the long service drivers got all the plum shifts and bank holidays, highly unionised aggressive work environment from the unions
@Michael: Or maybe your wife couldn’t handle the job itself. Working as a Dublin Bus driver has always been based on a seniority type system. Every driver has started at the same level and, unless promoted, progressed in their grade through their service. I’m sure this was explained to your wife as she went through the application and training stages. If she felt victimised, there are procedures in place to investigate and potentially solve these issues. To blame drivers who worked for terms and conditions that have been in place for years is really nonsense at the very least.
@Paul Linehan: sounds simple but never is . Generational families in Dublin bus. Hard to maneuver around that when there’s a problem . Same issues in other State organizations. You wouldn’t believe it
@Aunties: I’ve no doubt that nepotism and favouritism is alive and well in Dublin Bus. Tell me a company in Ireland that hasn’t got that going on in their ranks. Fact is you still can’t blame the drivers for the things Michael is trying to highlight.
@Michael: most state and semi state jobs are worked on seniority ..you always have to start at the bottom and weight your time that’s the problem with the snowflake generation… They want to come into the job as the manager…
@Paul Linehan: I agree
@Michael: old contract drivers get the pick of the work. I know 1 driver who goes sick if he is given a roster that would involve working more than 6 hours!!!
@Michael: your wife thought she was going to start in a new job by getting the ‘plum’ routes ahead of people who’ve been working there for decades?
@Mary Nugent: the NTA are whom are rolling out the new bus routes, it’s the NTA that needs to do a recruitment drive for bus drivers, offer of free training for example.
@Mark G: That’s BS of a high standard. Should Dublin Bus drivers accumulate a certain amount of days sick leave, they are monitored and disciplined. Continuous breaches of the welfare scheme criteria could lead to dismissal….l. I’d say your friend is an imaginary one.
Pay a proper salary and make the job more attractive and recruitment would be easier.
@Rab C Nesbitt: how will management get the huge wages if you pay the plebs more?!
Will someone think of the senior management!!
@Rab C Nesbitt: Absolutely.
Three separate independent systems suffering the same issue simultaneously?
Not buying it. Doesn’t work like that at all.
This is somehow like when all the banks had the same issue despite having separate individual issues.
Somebody is lying.
@Sequoia: assuming the raw data is coming from the same source, which is very likely, then it can certainly happen – its just that they’re not saying where the actual issue lies. What’s not clear is why all these systems show different results for the same data. I’ve regularly gotten wildly different results from the app on my phone and the RTD at the bus stop.
@Terri MacDonald: Raw data may be from a single source but whatever validations are being applied must be different to get different results.
Or perhaps not all the functionality can “read” the data correctly. Let’s face it, three different interfaces, trying to sort the same raw data? Can’t be easy. Someone is missing something as they’re clearly not excluding what they should be.
Shame they couldn’t let us know which one has the most accurate data so we can at least play the odds.
@Sequoia: Had a little look at the datasets. It used to all come from here (https://data.gov.ie/dataset/real-time-passenger-information-rtpi-for-dublin-bus-bus-eireann-luas-and-irish-rail?package_type=dataset), but this seems to have been deprecated, and now comes from here (https://data.smartdublin.ie/dataset/gtfs-r-real-time-passenger-information).
This would suggest that the dataset itself is at the core of the problem.
You couldnt make this up.Government want us out of cars,Dublin City Council want pedestrians ,cyclists and buses only in the city,they bring in BusConnects etc etc etc….but the bus service is breaking down. Unbelievable, third world performance as usual,
Get out of your cars and take the ghost trains !
@Conor Flood: the ghostbusters got rid of them.
5 out of service 145 Buses passed me by last friday night between 6.40pm to 6.55pm THEN 3 buses came at 7.pm together on the N11 at stop 3145 and No change from €3 euro to go to stillorgan.#Not Good enough…
@Larry Rawson: Get yourself a leap card. Your fare will be a flat 90 minute €2 charge and change won’t be an issue.
@Paul Linehan: I hadn’t used buses since the 80s
Truck driver and bus driver shortages right across Europe purely because of over regulation and poor pay and conditions. Its beautiful being a professional driver right now. Everyday I demand more because for 25 years wages were stagnant. 25 years of back pay. Oh and it turns out that it is after all a skilled job. If people here knew who they were sharing the roads with they would not cycle or drive. I met a truck driver in Cork last week. 2 days of driving a truck I had to back it on the loading bay for him he could not do it. Got talking to him nice chap I think from Lithuania and he was told he would receive training. Zero training keys of the truck and minimum wage for one of the largest companies in Ireland.
I think there is a mistake in this article. Dublin Bus, according to someone I spoke with in their customer services, do not operate the Transport for Ireland app (which is awful). They also don’t operate the street signs. Street signs are, I believe operated by the city council. At least that’s what customer services told me. So sometimes when Dublin Bus cancel a service, their app updates the cancellation, but the street signs and TFI app which run a different software don’t pick this up. So perhaps DCC and NTA need to be made accountable too.
@Kárl: nothing to do with DCC
@Kárl: Which is exactly why you end up with three different pieces of functionality, none of which can validate against each other.
Same thing happening in Galway the last few months too.
How much has been spent on CONsultants on this so-called Next generation ticketing? Millions, that still can’t accept tap payments and GPS real time information, if dominos can show me on the map on the app where my delivery is so can the NTA it’s not new technology, Time for accountability from this quango!
The privatisation for profit model of bus services in a country as small as Ireland (the size of a city in UK) privatised public transport seems to be hitting predictable bumps in particular literally leaving vulnerable public transport users , like my neighbour who is in a wheelchair, out in the cold. Never had this level of problems with Dublin Bus.
Problem is waiting on tests and booking cpc case studies and theory test when you go on to book test nothing available in your area Dublin bus and bus eireann should have there own tester in house to speed up things for driver recruitment
@Keith Hannon: Dublin bus and bus eireann definitely should not have in house driving testing. It could lead to the standard of licensed drivers falling in trun putting passengers and public at risk. Hire more RSA driving testers start testing 7 days a week.
@barry moore: they dont have in house driver testing you do an RSA driving test in a test centre like everyone else
What is the problem. We have apologised an lessons learned.
When you look around at some of the problems in public transport (not them all obviously) the big common denominator here is IT. Check-in desks, seat res at Irish Rail, Real Time Data, on-line booking, etc.
None of these companies are IT companies, they are transport companies, with a couple of techies on their pay roll, who wouldn’t be up to speed on these new systems when they are introduced.
When these systems are sold, they are the latest and greatest thing, until they go wrong. We all have the experience of our home computer system going on the blink and tech support is non existent.
Between bugs, systems out of date (which seems to happen every few months), viruses, crashes, etc the IT sector has a lot to answer for.
I have seen it in my own company, they sell a system and run.
As far as I’m concerned the IT sector is the most inefficient sector around, but unfortunately we all depend on it now to carry out our business.
@Fr. Fintan Stack: I don’t disagree at all – but as I’ve alluded to further up and as youve pointed out as well – companies are not leveraging their internal IT teams in the process. They leave all of the decision making to middle and upper management business people and/or consultancies, who generally have very limited technical expertise, and almost never do they have any hands on operational experience. Internal IT teams tend to be treated as a cost center and a necessary evil, rather than as a knowledge centre. I’ve spent pretty much a lifetime watching the same mistakes being made over and over again by various organisations and they don’t learn – they just continue with the same practices over and over.
@Terri MacDonald: 100% this!
Middle and Upper Management insist on being the ones having the discussions when they have the LEAST exposure to the systems.
Developers can have tunnel vision and never think of Users.
Too many industries don’t want to pay to update their systems (or even maintain them!) right up until the point something goes wrong.
Remember that joke of a salary the HSE were offering for their IT head?
@Terri MacDonald: As you say internal IT not involved enough in the decision making process. And these managers/buyers absolutely should be taken to task. But that is no excuse for the IT industry taking advantage. They talk up these systems to senior management, make a sale, usually worth millions, to these large companies. Then they run. The IT industry is the main culprit here as in most cases it doesn’t do what it says on the tin.
In the almost 12 years the system has been in place, I don’t think it’s ever worked correctly. Timetabled buses not showing up, and buses not timetabled showing up have always been an issue.
For a start, the system, from what I understand, isn’t truly real time, in that buses are automatically added to the timetable an hour before they’re due to arrive, regardless of whether there’s a bus/driver available. The DB control centre or whatever it’s called has to be manually notified so the bus can be removed from the timetable, which as we all know rarely happens, so it’s left to the passengers to realise that the timetable is often complete fiction. If the bus does show up, then the GPS tracking takes over and becomes more accurate, although it’s still not great. The arrival time doesn’t seem to take traffic into consideration whatsoever, so if a bus is stuck in a jam for 20 minutes, it’ll say “due in x minutes” for those 20 minutes, whereas ideally it will say “due in 20+x” minutes. Google and other mapping providers at this stage have enough historical traffic data to allow transport providers to make at least an educated guess of what the impact of traffic will be.
The staffing exuse is a non-starter. If you don’t have the staff to provide a timetabled service, change the timetable! Don’t leave it up to the passengers standing in the freezing cold, wind and rain to deduce when a bus will ACTUALLY arrive.
To make matters even more complicated, the geniuses who designed the system split the responsibilities for providing the bus service, apps and timetables to different organisations so when things go wrong, the opportunity for failure is tripled because it’s three systems that have to be kept in sync, not one. It also means that if you’re at a bus stop which is used by both Dublin Bus and GoAhead, depending on which bus you need, you’ll need a different app.
It’s the classic Irish lack of joined-up thinking and long-term planning. You’d swear we were the first country in the world who attempted to build a system like this, given how brittle it all seems to be. Other countries had real-time timetables long before us, that work a lot better, so obviously corners were cut somewhere.
@Eric: Thank you for that breakdown.
That explains a LOT!
Just not good enough!
Ghost buses are the bane of my life.
It’s not just Dublin Bus though. The Bus Eireann 101 service from Dublin to Drogheda is appallingly bad.
The service never comes. Finish work at 4:00 and the bus home is 4:15, it has often never come until 5:00.
Not too sure how the government’s ambition to get more people using public transport will work though, when you’d actually be quicker driving home. Public transport in general in this country is held together with sellotape it seems. The buses are mank too, always breaking down.
It’s a load of nonsense to blame the absence of drivers on a failed IT system (x3). It’s like saying my computer won’t work properly because I’m not using it. The problem has been going on for years and I don’t believe a word from Dubln Bus or NTA.
This had been happening a lot longer than since September, so cyber attack is a bollocks excuse. I was coming back from Bray and the 155 driver was only going to UCD, I had a group with me so we said we would wait. The next bus pulled in (not due to leave for 20 mins) I tried to engage with the driver who ignored me. When he opened the doors he stated he was only going to UCD, I asked why and was told if I had a problem, phone that number. When I did I was informed it was there was no extra driver on, have a nice day!!!!
Maybe some public outage akin to the water charges is required. Such as not paying for late buses or requesting refunds for pre-paid buses that don’t come.
Money talks here and when that’s threatened maybe they might pull their finger out.
So basically we’ve finally established that the displays at the bus stop are not real-time information displays and not connected to the bus’s GPS and only the Transport for Ireland app may be accurate but not Google Maps.
These are new excuses but the so called “ghost” buses, have been an issue since I was taking the bus way back 40yrs ago. Bad mgmt hiding behind pathetic excuses.
I recently went for route 76 due at 1640 bus was a large crowd at bustop when enquired was told the 1600 never came and neither the 1620 so next bus due at 1640 bus came at 1651 was a single decker had a row with driver who was only stopping to let passengers off he said to contact headoffice but a double decker 2 minutes behind…. never came till 1801.
Headoffice told me T.F.I. said a single decker would do for time at 1640 when I pointed out “yes if all services ran ontime”
Phone was hung up!!!
Scary
It can be daunting for newly recruited bus drivers to drive around our city and it’s outskirts. Just a simple request like somewhere to use a loo for a driver male/female at some termini can be a problem. Whilst this may sound trivial to some, it’s being an ongoing problem for years. New drivers have felt if the companies could not solve a relatively simple problem like that, what else would they be up against?
That’s just one example of a behind the scenes problem.
Yes RTPI is a problem. Too many cooks spoil the broth!!!
We still have huge difficulties with buses having their bus lanes clogged at times of the day and of course any schedule is then thrown into disarray.
I could go on because I can speak from experience but I do also have to say that money is good and work is steady
have your say