On not being a “burden for others”: Bringing your children to weekend activities using public transport…
Dublin Inquirer’s recent launch of their NoShowBus.ie website, which allows people to report cancelled or disappearing buses, is very dear to my heart. It also prompted me to reflect on a quasi-experiment I’ve been conducting the last year: using public transport to bring my son to his away GAA matches. Generally, it’s been great. I prefer travelling by public transport so I really don’t mind the additional time it takes (we left our house on Saturday at 7:40am!) and he gets to see more of Dublin than he would in the car. So far, we haven’t missed a bus.
I realise it’s a bit of a luxury for us whereas for lots of other parents, for lots of good reasons, it’s not always practical and sometimes not even possible to do the same. The single biggest take-away from the experience is how fragile many of the public transport links are from the city to its densely-populated suburbs, satellites and commuter towns. We’ve seen huge areas of north Dublin which are reliant on infrequent services, and walked on roads without footpaths to get from bus stops to pitches. Last weekend, we were standing at a bus stop in Rush wondering if the bus would turn up, how long we’d have to wait for another, and whether we would be quicker walking the two miles from Rush to the DART station if it didn’t show.
There’s a line in “Smarter Travel: A Sustainable Transport Future”, a 2009 policy setting out Ireland’s transport priorities for the period 2009 to 2020 which says: “Commuters will only begin to consider a shift from car to bus transport when the advantages of the bus are greater than those of the car”. I can’t say for certain but I’m fairly sure the (mostly young) people standing at the bus stop with us in Rush were there not because the bus was their best option but because it was their only option.
If you’ve experienced public transport in cities where no two locations are more than a seamless transfer away from each other, you will not enjoy the sense of precarity associated with travelling by public transport at the weekend to and from the suburbs of north Dublin. A bus to Howth on a Saturday morning is once every 30 or 40 minutes. To get to Lusk or Rush, depending on the time, you might have to get two buses from town. I haven’t figured out the DART enough to trust it yet.
Coming back into the city, the vulnerability of travelling by public transport is even more obvious. As the bus appeared into view on Saturday, you could feel the sense of relief amongst those waiting at the stop. If it hadn’t come, we would have had to wait 35 or 45 minutes for the next 33 / 33a. At midday on Saturday, this bus had just a few free seats on the upper deck as it headed towards town and, a few weeks prior, we had a similar experience getting two buses back from Lusk to the city centre. The 41 into town was full by the time it had left Swords main street.
Sometimes, I think people that I’ve told about our Saturday morning adventures consider it a bit extreme. Fine in principle, but just a bit much in practice. Maybe it is culturally a bit odd but I thought that if I wanted to argue for people to use more sustainable forms of transport for regular journeys, then it was probably important that I experienced what anyone would have to endure by doing so. I have also been more recently diagnosed by the Road Safety Authority as a “burden for others” (i.e. I don’t drive) but I wasn’t aware of that before I started all of this.
It is clear that, culturally at least, we still view driving as the standard from which all other modes of transport are deviations. And, mostly, because I live in a part of Dublin where everything, including the city centre, and almost every conceivable transport link is within walking distance, I am not often confronted by the impact of that perspective. But the “getting to children’s weekend activities by public transport” experiment is still a whole lot of fun. Even if the fear of being stranded on the side of a motorway when the only bus due for 60 minutes doesn’t turn up will probably never disappear, the journeys themselves are generally brilliant.
It’s also reminded me that you have to engage with your environment, physically and socially, much more when you’re walking or travelling by public transport. We often have to go via town and walking down O’Connell Street in the morning while the city is waking up is a great experience. It’s simply a more social way to travel (one tangential insight from the experiment is that strangers are much more likely to stop you for a chat when you’re walking somewhere with a child carrying a hurl than when they have a football!).
I’m not sure where I go next beyond continuing my own personal experiment. Ultimately, however, if we are serious about getting rid of unnecessary car journeys as a political priority, we need to continue to invest heavily in the controllable variables (public transport system, pedestrian provision, active travel infrastructure) that currently make many car journeys appear necessary and that currently make the advantages of the car greater than the advantages of the bus.
We need more options / more services and better frequency. We need to fix reliability. We also have to broaden out the lens through which we evaluate delivery or service quality. There is no point in x per cent of the population being within y metres of the bus network if the pedestrian environment you have to endure to get to the bus stop is prohibitively unpleasant or unsafe.
There’s no point in having a cost-efficient service if it means we don’t have enough capacity to keep running when a driver’s sick or a bus breaks down. Every missing bus is not just a quantitative data point, but involves real practical consequences for people wanting to use the services. It could mean a missed medical appointment, a missed job interview, a missed meeting with a friend and such “critical incidents” are likely to represent turning points in people’s commitment to using public transport. We need to understand experiences rather than simply measuring them. Ethnographic and qualitative insights are key to ensuring we do. Thinking like economists about sustainable transport will only get us so far.
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Emmet Ó Briain is a professional social researcher (www.quiddity.ie) specialising in discourse analysis and ethnography for policy, and also a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture, Building & the Environment in TU Dublin (https://www.tudublin.ie/explore/faculties-and-schools/engineering-built-environment/architecture-building-and-environment/) researching the accountability of active travel delivery.
As ever, if you enjoyed this article, I would be grateful if you could share it with anyone you think might be interested. You can find me sharing random thoughts online here: https://bsky.app/profile/emmet.quiddity.ie and https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmetobriain/
