RTÉ reports that congestion is costing Dublin Bus €60m a year out of a total subvention of €80m, according to a submission to the Joint Committee on Transport.
Bill McCamley, SIPTU worker director, said Dublin Bus also paid VAT on its subvention and these factors had to be considered when looking at the subvention.
He told the committee that in relation to private operators SIPTU had a pragmatic attitude but claimed that up to 50% of licences issued to private operators to provide a service on some bus routes in Dublin were not being used.
He claimed the private operators were sitting on their licences and in the meantime Dublin Bus could not develop a service on that route.
The Joint Committe on Transport looks predominantly a conservative lot, so I don’t hold out much hope, but if congestion costs Dublin Bus €60 million a year, and Dublin Chamber Commerce estimated in 2003 that congestion cost its members €3 billion, isn’t it time to think out of the box and create a free-at-access public transport system - if necessary incorporating private companies like Luas and other bus lines? If the figure was so high in 2003, it must be closer to €4 billion now. Anyone got up to date figures?
At least then the subvention would be supporting public transport, and not congestion.
If you’d like to read some of the arguments I’ve made so far, click here. Click on the headings to get the full article. And please do add your own ideas in the comments. Criticism welcome but refinement of my idea even more so.
Please note that Irish Culture Guide (see Sister Sites in side panel) has been moved to www.irishculture.ie
Thank you.
Irish Culture Guide
But what about Europe? You may be surprised to learn how our estranged transatlantic partner has been faring during these roller-coaster times — and how successfully it has been knocking down the Europessimist myths about it.
5 Myths About the Sick Old Man of Europe:The Washington Post
Eight years after its controversial flotation, Eircom is poised to offer the Government a stake in its telecoms network in return for control over public broadband systems owned by the State, writes Arthur Beesley , Senior Business Correspondent (The Irish Times)
For barefaced cheek, this is hard to beat. The landline business is dying, and eircom wants to fob it off to the government, in return for an another real public asset. The government should smack eircom’s gob and teach it the manners it obviously lacks.
The government has botched the Metropolitan Area Networks, but that’s no reason to give it to eircom.
In my humble opinion.
New Scientist provides comprehensive explanations for the 26 most common climate myths and misconceptions.
During the election, I joined other bloggers in making a wish list to offer the incoming government. This was number one on my list:
The Modest Proposals
1. Transport: (a) Forget about extending the Luas. Bring the bus network up to Luas standard, ie electronic timetables, shelters, and high frequency. Thereby: saving millions, bypassing massive disruption - benefiting passengers on the entire network, not just a few routes. Almost immediate beneficial effect – no waiting for years on end. See my Mark of the BX
(b) Free public transport. Yes I know it has to be paid for, but no one says that when Minister Cullen opens yet another motorway. See my detailed proposal here.
Like the politicians, who unlike me are going on a 12 week break, I’ve been pretty tired
since the elections (if you’re not reading this in Ireland, several weeks of rain and storms are partly to
blame), so it’s only in the last few days my thoughts have returned to it. Actually, it was when Labour counsellor and ex-Deputy Lord Mayor of Dublin Aodhán Ó RÃordáin turned up on my doorstep that I thought of it. He wanted to know if there was anything he could help me with and I gave the poor man an earful about how the RPA want to rip up the newly renovated O’Connell St to extend the Luas from Stephen’s Green to O’Connell St. What’s wrong with a bus/tram hybrid, I fumed? No disruption, a tenth of the cost, meaning ten bus/hybrid routes for the price of one Luas route, with all the admitted benefits of a tram, namely real time passenger information, high frequency, accessibility, speed etc.
Well, imagine my surprise when I did a google for bus/tram hybrid and the first link to come up was Bus Éireann! (see link below).
It seems when ex-Transport Minister Martin Cullen (now Minister for Social and Family Affairs) was touring the country, announcing new routes and buses in Galway and Waterford,
An 18 metre streetcar, manufactured by Wrights of Ballymena, Co Antrim, was unveiled at the event.
Ballymena is in First Minister Ian Paisley’s constituency, and sure enough, his photo is on their website (PDF), pictured at the ceremony where the Wright Group honoured for engineering innovation.
Their website is pretty poor, but their engineering appears to be fast and first class. At least I hope so.
Bus and Coach Professional, however, has a very interesting piece on the Streetcar, plus photos.
Am I the last one to hear about this?? The Sunday Business Post reported on the prototype two years ago, and added
Both Bus Eireann and Dublin Bus have already invested in low-floor buses designed and manufactured by Wrightbus buses which ease access for passengers with disabilities, elderly people and customers with buggies. According to Nodder, both companies have “expressed interest’‘ in StreetCar.
Let’s hope that interest hardens into Streetcars of Desire on Irish streets. A start could be made by substituting a Streetcar for Luas between Stephen’s Green and O’Connell St.
Ten upgraded routes to Luas’ one would take a lot of cars off the street. It would be nice to see Irish cities join the 21st century public transport club - at a tenth of the cost.
Of course coupled with my argument for free transport - well, maybe that’s 22nd century.
Bus Rapid Transit - Could ‘Bus Trams’ be the Future for Public Transport in Irish Cities?
(it’s half way down the page)
Bus and Coach Professional on the Streetcar
A Wright Street Car in operation in York (see bottom of page)
We all know the one about how, if every bulb in the country was changed to economic cfls (or leds, when the time comes), we could close down a power station or two.
But this is something that has only recently been discovered.
It turns out, that if all United States power companies were to upgrade to new electricity meters today, America would save roughly $35 billion in energy costs over twenty years and it would eliminate the need for around 625 power plants.
625 power plants. Everything is on an enormous scale in the US, but it must make one pause, even in a small country like Ireland, where the gurus keep telling us we need nuclear power. I hear people who were dead against it agreeing with it now, so the propaganda is working.
I think we must have more sophisticated meters in Ireland than in the US, as storage heaters are based on cheap night time electricity, are they not?
There is change afoot with regard to energy meters, oddly enough. As far as I can make out it’s to do with SEM, or the Single Energy Market, between the Republic and Northern Ireland. I haven’t the technical head to work it all out, or whether the proposed new meters are more sophisticated, and energy-saving, than the ones we have, but the Commission for Energy Regulation posted pdfs of a Metering Code in June, and also has a link to the All Ireland Project, with more pdfs.
So all you meter geeks, get stuck in.
With strong signs of a depression in China akin to what happened in Japan in the nineties, and for the same reason - but which could have far greater consequences for the world; and with peak oil just a few years away we have to keep on the ball with regards to energy and much else.
EcoGeek: Why your electricity meter sucks
Bank for International Settlements warns of Great Depression dangers from credit spree
The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has named Brian Lenihan, John Gormley and Eamon Ryan among his new Cabinet.
The full list is:
Brian Cowen - Tánaiste, Minister for Finance
Mary Harney - Minister for Health and Children
Mary Coughlan- Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food
Seamus Brennan - Minister for Arts, Sport & Tourism
Noel Dempsey - Minister for Transport and the Marine
Éamon Ó CuÃv - Minister for Community Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs
Willie O’Dea - Minister for Defence
Mary Hanafin - Minister for Education and Science
Micheál Martin - Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment
John Gormley - Minister for the Environment, Heritage and local Government
Dermot Ahern - Minister for Foreign Affairs
Brian Lenihan - Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform
Martin Cullen - Minister for Social and Family Affairs
Eamon Ryan - Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources
Attorney General - Paul Gallagher SC
[Courtesy RTÉ]
The Irish Times has been running a Negotiations for Government section in their letters page, so I thought I’d send a brief note: Peak Oil 2010. End of Story. . Just that. I don’t think it made it from the huge pile the editor undoubted receives.
Or maybe the editorial staff, in common with most people, thought, so what? Most people, and that seems to include all our politicians and political parties, think that there will be a long decline in peak oil. We have loads of time to keep going on the way we do, wasting practically all our resources.
But that just ain’t so. When oil - and gas - peak, the decline is thought to be about 3% a year. That doesn’t seem like much, at first glance. But consider this, from the Life After the Oil Crash website
The issue is not one of “running out” so much as it is not having enough to keep our economy running. In this regard, the ramifications of Peak Oil for our civilization are similar to the ramifications of dehydration for the human body. The human body is 70 percent water. The body of a 200 pound man thus holds 140 pounds of water. Because water is so crucial to everything the human body does, the man doesn’t need to lose all 140 pounds of water weight before collapsing due to dehydration. A loss of as little as 10-15 pounds of water may be enough to kill him.
In a similar sense, an oil-based economy such as ours doesn’t need to deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10-15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.
Are you scared yet?
It’s even worse.
The effects of even a small drop in production can be devastating. For instance, during the 1970s oil shocks, shortfalls in production as small as 5% caused the price of oil to nearly quadruple. The same thing happened in California a few years ago with natural gas: a production drop of less than 5% caused prices to skyrocket by 400%.
To be really scared, all you have to do is read through this website. The nub is this: if a five percent drop in oil production causes a 400% increase in the cost of oil, what do you think a 9% drop in as little as three years, and a 18% drop in 6 years, and a 32% drop in 12 years, would do? This is not a blip in production as in the 1970s. This is a permanent, inevitiable reduction. And once an oil well reaches a certain level of depletion, the cost of extracting from it makes the oil recovered uneconomical - to put it in a nutshell.
We rely on oil for everything, from toothbrushes to the production of solar panels and windmills.
This website is utterly bleak, offering not a glimmer of hope, and it’s well backed-up by facts and research. It’s not run by an eco-freak in sandals (Personally I’ve nothing against eco-freaks. Some of my best friends, etc, but I point this out to caution cynics to read on). He’s a lawyer, and he has marshalled his facts well.
There are tiny glimmers of hope - but only if the world wakes up fast.
I’ve mentioned Ted Talks before, I think. It’s a great video (requires Flash) resource for anyone thinking about the world we live in.
John Doerr is a venture capitalist who was woken up to reality by his 15 year old daughter, and he and his firm, KPCB, spent a year trying to find a solution to global warming. Their hardnosed research made him very scared indeed.
One fact he mentioned that I hadn’t heard before is that the US has enough geothermal energy to power the country for a thousand years. He also points out that while Exxon earns $1billion a day, the total US research budget into geothermal energy, a resource used by American Indians for thousands of years, is $20million.
Of course Ireland has the Atlantic Ocean, and this is being ignored in pretty much the same way, with just token amounts put into researching its potential.
Doerr quotes Kleiner:
There is a time when panic is the appropriate response
-Eugene Kleiner
So please, negotiators for the next Irish Government, wake up, and panic.
Life After the Oil Crash
John Doerr’s TED Talk
