Earth Day and Irish Rail
Today is Earth Day.
I’d like to take note of it in relation to Irish leadership by calling into question the continued calls from government to use public transport in Ireland.
Fiona and I normally drive up to Dublin from Waterford in her 1.6l petrol Ford Focus but decided to take the train this past Sunday. The pros were it was safer and easier as neither of us would have to sit for 3 hours concentrating on the road. I got to read most of the way and have a refreshing kip. It wasn’t all easy though as the cons were it was expensive, the times weren’t quite to our liking and once we got to Dublin we had to use taxi services to get around.
The expense really shocked me. It cost €63 return for the two tickets. On a Sunday. With a half-full train. Even halved that is more than would have been spent on petrol if we had taken the car and accounted for parking. Once we got to Dublin we then had to fork out another €8, then €24 and a further €20 to get around by taxi. Had the train times been more flexible we could have used the bus service but as it was there was no way we could have used the bus to get around Dublin and been back to the station to catch our train back to Waterford.
€115 for a trip up and back to Dublin via train. It would have cost us roughly €50 by car, less than half. In this day of rising fuel costs why is a car so much cheaper than a train?
Another aspect is that Fiona is 27 weeks pregnant and had we been using the car we would have been able to stop off half-way in Carlow where her parents lived. The train timetable made no allowance for a stop-off in Carlow and 3 hours on a train for a pregnant woman is not what she would call heaven.
Public transport needs to get its act together here otherwise we will continue to clog up the roads and cities with our personal cars. It needs to be cheap, frequent and flexible.
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Public transport in Ireland is one big joke.
It costs 62 (or maybe 65 now) euro for a return 5 day ticket from Dublin to Cork. If you want to get a monthly ticket it costs approx 70 euro!
In the past year I have travelled on the Dublin to Waterford, Dublin to Galway and Dublin to Castlebar train. None of them had a 5 day return price. They each had a fixed cost in which the return journey could be made within 30 days of purchase.
So why are Irish Rail riding everyone on the Cork to Dublin train? More people travel that train than any other service in the county. It serves Kildare, Tipperary, Limerick, Cork and sometimes Kerry. Surely the more popular journeys should be more affordable?