Dublin Fucking Bus! (1 Viewer)

[spiritualtramp]

Originally posted by herv
actually on most buses there was one of the creation people giving directions... was there not on yours? one of the main reasons i reckon the guy got lost was because they were trying to dodge the police and all went different routes and doubled back on themselves. a bus journey which should have origionally taken 30 mins took over an hour.

no , there was nobody from creation on the bus I was on - but the driver did have the directions!

as much as I would love to be saying in me dublin accent "yeah man we were driving around for hours trying to lose the fuzz , it was a mad buzz" , as far as I know they were not trying to dodge the police.
it was just a case of being in the middle of nowhere in the dark and the driver not having a fucking clue.

 

[Theseus Mock]

Originally posted by silo
"can everyone please get off this bus and onto the one infront

love that one. i have fond memories of living in Phibsboro, getting the 19(or 19a is it?) into town only to find that you have to change buses around parnell square or else find that the bus is terminating at O'Connell fucking Street.

 

[herv]

Originally posted by spiritualtramp
no , there was nobody from creation on the bus I was on - but the driver did have the directions!

as much as I would love to be saying in me dublin accent "yeah man we were driving around for hours trying to lose the fuzz , it was a mad buzz" , as far as I know they were not trying to dodge the police.
it was just a case of being in the middle of nowhere in the dark and the driver not having a fucking clue.

heh.

well thats what they did with us. it was the most convoluted bus route i've ever come across. i used to live on the south side and i never ever saw any of those places before.

i suppose when you're stuck in the wilds of wickerlow though, "fleeing the bizzies" as a cover story begins to wear a little thin.

 

[nine]

privitisation is probably the worst thing that could happen to the bus service in Ireland now.
If you privatise a state body you change the bodies priority goal of public service to one of profit or stock price maximization.
I realise that the bus service isn't what it should be at the moment,but i firmly believe that that is down to bad management.
If the now private firm wants to cut some route because it's not profitable it will,and it won't be obliged to offer an alternative.They also can ignore safety issues if they feel addressing them would cost too much.
Prices would also rise.
Look what happened to the train service in England,it's a fuckin mess now.




politics board??

 

[nlgbbbblth]

One wet morning I was on the 18 coming down Waterloo road and someone rang the bell for the second stop on the road [halfway down]. The bus stops and the driver shouts

"Anyone getting off"

No response.
Nobody gets off

He drives on and about a dozen people stand up and walk towards the front of the bus, some ring the bell. They all want to get off at the bottom of the road, by the Xtravision and the turn-off to upper Baggot st.

The traffic lights are green.

The bus fails to stop, drives through the lights and turns right up Pembroke road. Some people say

"You missed the stop. We all wanted to get off back there"

Driver shouts

"Fuck yis! Now you know what it feels like!"

and pulls up at the next stop which is quite a reasonable distance from the previous one.

 

[Richie]

Oh god I've been waiting to vent my anger on Dublin Fucking Bus for ages.... today was a pretty good example. I missed a funeral service in Glasnevin thanks to some kind of immense fuck-up on the number 13 bus. After leaving O'Connell St we got as far as the Rotunda and then it all went horribly, mysteriously wrong. Bus stops... driver talks on 2-way radio for about 5 minutes... conductor-type gets on and talks with driver for another few minutes... then both of them get out and vanish, leaving a bus full of people just sitting there for about 20 minutes. Eventually people start getting very pissed off and somebody rings Dublin Bus. A message is passed on that we should get out and transfer to the bus behind us. Everyone starts doing this, then word comes back from the driver behind that we're to *stay* back on the old bus, beyond that he doesn't know what's going on. Finally all of half an hour later another driver gets on, takes ages to get his shit together, and off we go. Nothing so much as an apology. I reached the cemetery just after the end of the (short) service, and so pissed off that I walked back into the city later instead of bothering with the fuckers a second time. Okay anger gone now.

 

[IrishUnsigned]

Originally posted by silo
'fraid i have to disagree with you about the privatisation stuff, ron... but you're in a talkin' mood, and i've got work...

maybe tomorrow...

When am I not in a talking mood?

By the way, it's not illegal or immoral to disagree with me, so that's alright

 

[IrishUnsigned]

Originally posted by spiritualtramp
the people that organised the trip gave them the directions. it was the driver that got lost.

do you work for amc or something?

Nope, just a coach driver that got stitched up, many times, by 'directions' given by people

Once I got stuck in a by-road in North Mayo that took a 3.5 mile reversing manouevre to get out of

 

[IrishUnsigned]

Originally posted by nine
privitisation is probably the worst thing that could happen to the bus service in Ireland now.
If you privatise a state body you change the bodies priority goal of public service to one of profit or stock price maximization.
I realise that the bus service isn't what it should be at the moment,but i firmly believe that that is down to bad management.
If the now private firm wants to cut some route because it's not profitable it will,and it won't be obliged to offer an alternative.They also can ignore safety issues if they feel addressing them would cost too much.
Prices would also rise.

Privatisation and deregulation are not quite the same thing. Dereg. usually requires that the license buyer must provide a certian level of service and a certain level of 'individually unsubstainable' services (ie money-losing routes in this case). naturally it would be down to the Govt to enforce it, but companies would get fined for any bus that ran early, or didn't run (late running is excusable due to traffic/weather etc).

By the way, the prices are already continuously rising. If Mortons (just as it's the major example I know of) can run a return service from Cellbridge at a profit, then so can Dublin bus. Effectively, the punter is losing out because of *not* deregulating since then Mortons (or others) would be forced to do a not-so-profitable route as well.

As for safety issues, seriously? The percentage of vehicles in a London Transport in one single examination that were found to be 'technically unsafe' by my team was 68%. Dublin Bus is *not* running a safe fleet of buses by any stretch of the imagination. If they had to remove every bus that was 'technically unsafe' then I reckon you'd lose a third of them regularly. Think about it next time you hear or feel a bus skid, slide or jump when starting/stopping!

 

[IrishUnsigned]

Originally posted by nlgbbbblth
The bus fails to stop, drives through the lights and turns right up Pembroke road. Some people say

"You missed the stop. We all wanted to get off back there"

Driver shouts

"Fuck yis! Now you know what it feels like!"

and pulls up at the next stop which is quite a reasonable distance from the previous one.

And how many do you reckon made a written complaint? Not many, I bet. Another (unwritten) rule is that writtn complaints are given five times the credibility of oral ones as it is reckoned that people have to be five times as annoyed. On top of that, a written commendation by a member of the public is usually given five times the credence of a complaint in writing as it is guessed that people are five times more likely to complain than to compliment

Remember that when some bus sriver *does* go out of their way to be nice, polite or helpful!

 

[pete]

aaaargh

So anyways, I leave work at 5 o'clock today,because i have to go buy some blank video tapes in golden discs before i meet the wife on the 70x at stephens green.

So i gets me tapes, and decide to stay in the shelter of the Stephens Green entrance, where i can see the "bus stop" (there is no bus stop for the "express" buses that go through the green while the Luas works are on, so they all pull up at the end of grafton street).

So at 5.20 i ring the wife, who is standing at the bus stop in Leeson Street waiting on the bus.. "Any sign of the bus yet?", says I. "No", says she, "but there's 37x's and 39x's going by". "Should be along any minute now", says I.

So i ring again at 5.30, but still no sign of the bus that left Belfield at 5.15.

"Probably the weather", we agree.

5.45 comes and goes, and i start worrying. Still no sign of the bus in Leeson Street, so at 5.55 I head over to where the inspectors are shepherding the buses in and out.

"What bus are you looking for?", one of them shouts from a bus.

"70x"

"No."

I pause for thought for about 2 seconds.


"WHAT DO YOU MEAN - "NO."???!??

"It's cancelled. Nothing can get to Dunboyne, the buses are breaking down."

"What about the people waiting on the 70x in Leeson Street? What the hell are they going to do?"

"Sure we have to look after the people waiting here!"

"..."

"Where are you going anway?"

"I'm not even going as far as Clonee!"

"Get this bus so - it's a 37x"

(The 37x being absolutely fucking useless to me, so i'm not about to get it, even when my missus isn't stranded in leeson street.)

So i ring the wife to tell her to get on the first bus she sees going into town. During this time, inspector guy #1 vanishes in his 37x.

I wanted to ask him if the drivers of the 37x's and 39x's had been instructed to, I dunno, maybe tell the people at the bus stop that there would be no 70x coming, and if so why they hadn't done so, and if the hadn't been instructed to, why not, and even so, why, when operating from the same garage and listening to the same radio's, none of them had the simple fucking decency to tell the people at the bus stops about the bus being cancelled.

I turn to inspector guy #2 and say: "Roll on privatisation" and walk off in a huff.

So anyways.

Wife gets the first bus with room, but has to get off it again shortly afterwards as it's not moving.

She walks to stephens green, and we decide to try to get a 39 to clonsilla and walk, so we head up to Dame street.

Traffic = not moving.

Buses = packed.

Bus stops = full of people.

After a while of this, we decide to go to the cinema, but see what appears to be a number 70 bus (the ordinary type, not the express), but says "School Bus" on the front, and is a single decker (unheard of on the 70 route). We run across college green and he lets us on.

Nice driver man explains that he's not going to Dunboyne, only Littlepace (excellent!) and that he won't be going into the Blanchardstown Centre (even better!), so we get on and relax in semi-comfortable seats. I ponder why it's ok for this bus to only go as far as Clonee, but the "express" gets cancelled outright.

It is now sometime after 7pm, 2 hours after i left work, and we are now effectively only starting our journey home.

Oh... did I mention the leaky roof, and that water poured in on top of people every time the bus stopped? Or that his windscreen wipers weren't working and he had to get out of the bus every 10 minutes to manually push them backwards and forwards so he could see where he was going?

But we weren't complaining.

Approximately 2.5 hours later, the bus makes it to the Navan Road. It is crawling. Absolutely crawling. I have never seen traffic so bad.

We wait, happy in the fact that we're not in the rain. Apart from what's falling in through the roof. But we can handle that.

At approximately 8.45pm, our plucky little soldier of a bus catches up with the 70x. Our driver informs us that he shouldn't really have a bus with broken windscreen wipers out on the road, and requests that we transfer to the 70x.

No problem! A bus is a bus, after all.

Now, those of you paying attention will be thinking "Aha! But wasn't that the 70x that they said was cancelled?".

Well, no.

This is the one that left Belfield at 4.55pm, 20 minutes before the one we were supposed to get.

There are people on this bus since then - four hours ago. They look remarkably unimpressed by this fact.

An hour later, we're still on the Navan Road, crawling. Crawling. Fucking CRAWLING.

People start to bail out and walk up the dual carriageway. Lots of them.

We wait.

at 10.15 or so, we cave.

We get off the bus and start walking. It's still raining.

This is where things start looking like a scene from some apocalyptic end of the world type movie, as people flee the crumbling city. Nothing but abandoned cars and vans along the side of the road. People walking down between the two lanes of "traffic" to avoid the floods at the side of the roads.

Eventually, we make it to the slip road off the dual carriageway, the final stretch in sight. Police are turning traffic away from Clonee village, as apparently it is completely impassable, and, curiously, there is a tailback from the roundabout into our estate.

We get to the roundabout and see why...

It's underwater.

We wade through a foot of water to get past it, eventually arriving home at 10.30pm

5.5 hours after I left work.


I'm not going in tomorrow.

 

[Dan]

Originally posted by nine
privitisation is probably the worst thing that could happen to the bus service in Ireland now.
If you privatise a state body you change the bodies priority goal of public service to one of profit or stock price maximization.
I realise that the bus service isn't what it should be at the moment,but i firmly believe that that is down to bad management.
If the now private firm wants to cut some route because it's not profitable it will,and it won't be obliged to offer an alternative.They also can ignore safety issues if they feel addressing them would cost too much.
Prices would also rise.
Look what happened to the train service in England,it's a fuckin mess now.




politics board??

Ok, for one thing, if you say profit will become the main issue aftert privatisation, then bad management won't be tolerated.

Secondly, after privatisation, if there is competition, prices will go down. And also, if there is bad management in the company as you say, this will have pushed prices up since the company is run inefficiently, meaning they should come down with more efficient management.

As for safety, I'm sorry, but thats rubbish. Every company is regularly audited and has to adhere to quality and safety guidelines. Its not a matter of choice, its something thats enforced.

And all this talk that dublin bus is not a profit oriented company. Are they doing it out of the good of their hearts? The fares on buses are about to increase. Surely this is to do with maintining profit???

Now, I'm not all for privatisation, theres many things should never be privatised, but in the case of dublin bus, its never going to improve in its current condition.

 

[silo]

Re: aaaargh

you're ancient.

Originally posted by pete
meet the wife

 

[pete]

Update!


Just took a walk down to the roundabout and it's now under 5 feet of water. You can see the top of a taliban-style 4x4 stuck in the middle of it all.

Oh and i forgot to mention that there were people out laughing at us wading through the 1 foot of water last night.

Their houses are now flooded.

 

[Burgerbarbaby]

Seriously. THAT is one of the most gut-wrenching stories I have ever heard. My 40 minutes last night waiting in drizzle for an hour long journey pales into insignificance.
WOW. Beckett, Kafka rolled into one horrible evening, lightened up with some frustration humour.
WOW. I laughed, but I know it's not funny.

 

[dudley]

i reckon this thread should be posted to dublin bus, me

 

[pete]

there's people panic buying in spar

it's insane

 

[Dan]

Jesus Christ, this happens every year out in the wesht. A little bit of rain on Dublin and people think armegeddons upon us....

 

[pete]

well if "a little bit of rain" = "submerged under five feet of water" then i'm glad i don't live in the west.

i mean there's other reasons i'm glad i don't live in the west - this would just be one more.

 

[Dan]

Originally posted by pete
well if "a little bit of rain" = "submerged under five feet of water" then i'm glad i don't live in the west.

i mean there's other reasons i'm glad i don't live in the west - this would just be one more.

Outside now !baggyyyy !baggyyyy