Frozen Dublin: Pratfalls and Snowballs

The city of Dublin is frozen tonight, like one great block of ice. An Spailpín had to walk home through it, the buds in Dublin Bus having taken one look out the canteen window, shivered, and returned to their cards. Allegedly.

There’s no way between Hell and Bethlehem they’re gritting that in time for the commute to work tomorrow. The RTÉ news site is reporting that the Corpo owes five gritting trucks. The greater Dublin area covers an area of three hundred and fifty square miles. How fast can a gritting truck go? Do the math and draw your own conclusions.

The best thing the citizens can do tonight is to visit their whiskey shelves and make a few hot ones, congratulating themselves on being at home in the first place. When An Spailpín heard a bud from Dublin Bus or the Corpo or some other class of stonecutter telling Matt Cooper on Today FM that Dublin Bus were going to “make a call” on whether they’d take gritters out tonight and get the public transport system back up, or snuggle up in bed and take a jolly good go at it first thing in the morning, your faithful quillsman realised that his boots were made for walkin’, and set off into the night.

And considered himself lucky to do so. The traffic was making no progress whatsoever. Crossing the streets it was clear that the roads were sheer ice, and haste would be made slowly. Very, very slowly.

But I made it home safely, with only one incident of note. As An Spailpín trudged up Poplar Road towards the crossroads at glamorous Summerhill Parade, I espied some youths of the locality preparing snowballs.

One of them, a rangy welterweight, stepped forward and let fly for a bus (an out of service bus, of course, but recognisably a bus nonetheless). An Spailpín noted that he aimed for the cabin, where the driver sits, and realised aha! These are the disaffected urban poor of whom Joe Higgins, Fintan O’Toole, Vincent Browne and others speak so eloquently.

As Fintan himself might say, the projecting of the snowball was in fact the projection of a greater truth; from this simple action we can draw a metric, if you will, that expresses this young man’s inarticulate yet wonderfully expressive rage at the bus, which he sees, not as nineteen tonnes of Volvo B9TL with Alexander Dennis Enviro500 bodywork, but an expression of the cruel and faceless power structures that imprison him in Summerhill, born to bloom unseen, forgotten about by the heartless metropolis. Take that, says the snowball thrower, as the missile smashes home against driver's window! I’m a man! I rage, I rage, against the driving in the night!

And then the second snowball hit your correspondent on the right cheek, just above the line of An Spailpín's current unusually elaborate whiskers. As I walked on, cheek stinging from the snow, ice and grit, it became clear that the bombardiers were perhaps not disenfranchised urban youth striking with poetic and symbolic beauty against the insignia of the cruel capitalist oppressor, but rather democrats like myself, who view all targets as equal sources of feckless amusement. Sigh.






Technorati Tags: Dublin, Dublin Bus, weather, snow, snowball, traffic

Dublin Bikes

Like Miss Kelly Brook here on our left, An Spailpín Fánach dreams of the wind in his hair. Or at least, what’s left of his hair.

The Dublin Bikes initiative has your diarist’s imagination in thrall. Just as John Keats was taken to new and unexplored worlds when he first looked into George Chapman’s translation of Homer, so An Spailpín Fánach dreams of travelling in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seeing.

Freed from shackled traffic, I dream of whizzing around the city on that most noble, that most Irish of forms of transport, the bicycle. I would take a spin along the south side, perhaps, through the great Georgian facades of Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square. I could roll across the canal at Mount Street Bridge, salute the bould Paddy Kavanagh, immortalised in bronze forever, and then carry out his own instructions and look out for his ghost on the Pembroke Road, dishevelled with shoes untied.

Or I could criss-cross the Liffey in the manner of that other great song, and follow the pursuit of the man who was so badly smitten with the Spanish Lady, up and around by the Gloucester Diamond and ‘round by Napper Tandy’s house.

I’d be out of the saddle pumping the pedals like a man who feared hellhounds on his trail at the Gloucester Diamond, of course, but still. Dublin has been lacking short hop city centre transport since Ryan Tubridy’s grandfather put an end to the trams and the Dublin Bikes scheme is as close the municipality has come to fixing that ancient error.

So I made my way as far as the bike depot beside Pearse Street last week, and went for it. The annual sub is cheaper, of course, but the website says you must wait fourteen days for your card, and An Spailpín is not as young as he was. I shoved in my flexible friend, and waited for something to happen.

Nothing happened. The whole thing froze. I didn’t know if my details had been read, if my card had been scanned, or what happened.

I turned around. There was a citizen behind me, with his mobile phone in his hand.

“Same thing happened me,” he said. “I had to ring them back. I’ve been here for ten minutes.”

I looked at my credit card. I looked at the machine. I looked at the bikes, all lined up at a rakish angle, gleaming and new, with solid frames, handy front baskets and snazzy blue mudguards on the back wheel. I bid my dreams of freedom adieu, turned up my collar and walked on, hoping to catch a bus on the quays.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bikes, Dublin Bus

Mean Streets

I live on a side street that joins a main road. When I was on my way home from work this evening, I saw a little old lady crossing the side street. She had one of those wheeled walkers that are getting more common now, and she was pegging it – going as fast as she could.

I thought it was too bad that an old woman was so worried about the traffic that she was hurrying like that at a green light, at a rate beyond her capabilities. But what confused me was that after she had crossed the road, the old lady continued hurrying – nearly skipping along after the walker, struggling to keep up, like a child with a scooter that’s too big for her. And I couldn’t figure out what was making her hurry. So I stopped to look.

There was a bus coming up the side street. The bus route goes up the side street and then turns left into town. There’s a bus stop about fifty or sixty yards from the traffic lights, and this is where the old lady was headed. And she was pegging it because she wanted the catch the bus.

Now. I am aware that the bylaws and regulations and the book says that drivers are only allowed stop at the authorised bus stops, but this was an old woman. She was clearly not in the prime of health, having the walker in the first place, and I thought she might even take a tumble trying to work the thing. Did the bus stop?

The bus stopped alright. But he didn’t stop to pick her up. The driver drove on to his authorised stop, and then sat there waiting at his convenience like My Lord’s Bastard while the little old lady scuttered along on her walker, like a hen trying to fly.

It's been a sour evening. I'll be glad of the rain.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bus

Reading the Runes of the Dublin Bus Routes

An Spailpín Fánach is mystified why Dublin Bus isn’t a more popular topic of conversation in the city. Dublin Bus, as the majority public transport system in the city, has a huge impact on the lives of the populace. But there never seems to be any discussion of how the buses operate; why they do what they do, and why they don’t do something else. Perhaps the fact that one so seldom sees the likes of Ryan Tubridy or Gee Ryan squeezed in the standing room part of the bus between the chemically dependent and the hygienically disinclined has something to do with it.

The news reports of the job losses in Dublin Bus have been cursory at best, and overtaken by the hideous scenes at the Anglo-Irish Bank EGM. Is this an instance of news management on Dublin Bus’s part? How interesting to note, for instance, that the latest news section of the News Centre link on the Dublin Bus website does not have any news of the layoffs at all, or their consequent effect on the overall service in the city?

Curiouser and curiouser. How interesting also to note the repeated commitments that, in spite of the great breach in the hull of the company’s finances, no routes will be lost. To which An Spailpín asks: why not?

Who decides what makes a bus route? How do you get that job? Who comes first? The company, the drivers’ union, or the commuter? Perhaps a look at some of those routes – that are immaculate, inviolate, safe from the sickle – will be instructive.

Let’s start at the start. Route 1. Route 1 of Dublin runs twice daily. At half past seven in the morning and eight minutes past five in the evening, a bus leaves Parnell Square East and travels to Poolbeg Extension (whatever that is). A bus makes the return journey, twice daily, at five to eight and twenty to six. There is one bus at the weekend, early in the morning on Saturday, and that’s it. And what An Spailpín wants to know is: why?

Route 5, from O’Connell Street to Sandyford Industrial Estate. Five times daily, there and back. Buses at eight, eleven, twelve, one and three. Why? Who needs to go from O’Connell Street to the Sandyford Industrial Estate at those hours?

Route 58c is a bit of a legend. It’s one for the connoisseur, the same way that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the biggest flop of all the Bond movies, but always gets high marks among aficionados. Route 58c runs from Parnell Square West to Dún Laoghaire, and goes via Foxrock Church on the way. It’s a bus for people that enjoy a spin, clearly – how much better it would have suited Liam Reilly than the 46A during that famous summer in Dublin. But the Bagatelle balladeer mightn’t have been able to catch it of course. Because the 58c runs but once a day – in the morning, it leaves Dún Laoghaire at 7:35, and then returns, from Parnell Square West, at 5:17 in the evening. There is no service on Saturday or Sunday. Why is that?

Route 51 is remarkable for not having a return route. Five times between half-six and nine-thirty in the morning the 51 brings commuters in from Neilstown to Aston Quay. And then just leaves them there, apparently. Why isn’t there a return route? What’s the grand plan behind all this?

Route 86 is one of those buses that is rarely seen. It runs in the deep south, from Shankill to the Sandyford Industrial Estate at twenty-five past seven every Monday to Friday. One of very few similarities between the denizens of Shankill and Neilstown is that, like Neilstown’s 51, the 86 doesn’t seem to have a return route either. Why?

These are just some of the highlights of course – true busmen simply need to say “78” or “142” or even, God help us, “70x” to each other during the Friday night post work pints to reduce the company to tears of laughter. What is sweeter than the in-joke?

Someone once said that, to truly understand James Joyce’s Ulysses, you needed a working knowledge of the Dublin tram system of June 16th, 1904. Reader, imagine the modernist masterpiece that could be written by someone who can figure out the bus routes?





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bus, Bus Routes, Commuting

What Dublin Bus Really Thinks of the Commuter

An Spailpín Fánach is seldom a man to attack reading, that most wonderful and endlessly rewarding of hobbies. This evening, I am making a very special exception.

I took the above picture a little after six o’clock tonight. Sleet and snow arrived in the city this evening – great flakes of snow that melt immediately on impact and that leave you drenched and freezing in seconds. In the ten minutes it took me to walk from the office to the bus stop I was soaked, perished and eager to get somewhere warm.

Dublin Bus, however, had other ideas for me.

There was a queue of maybe ten people waiting for the bus. There were two buses at the stop. You’ll notice that the lights are on in the bus in the picture, the engine is running and the radiators are on. Did the driver open the doors to let the people on? No. He did not.

As far as he was concerned, the people waiting IN THE SNOW could damn well stay there. Eventually, once his thirst for literature was sated, this constant reader switched off the out of service sign, put up the correct number and opened the door.

You see, even though the “Out of Service” sign was lit, the bus was not “out of service” at all. It was the driver that was out of service. He was going to read his buke and anyone out in the cold could damn well stay there and catch ever damn type of pneumonia going. He didn’t care.

And do you know what puts the tin hat on it for me? He’s only starting the damn book. It’s not like Rudolf Rassendyll is facing a final, deadly showdown with the inexpressibly evil Rupert of Hentzau in the dark dungeons of the Castle of Zenda and this bus driver can’t wait, just can’t wait, to find out what happens next. He’s just acting out of principle, and that principle is that any Dublin bus driver can do what he damn well pleases and nuts to commuters freezing in the snow. Isn’t that why Joe Hill was shot, so Dublin Bus drivers wouldn’t have to suffer torment and slavery by opening the doors on a bus before they're good and damn well ready?

An Spailpín Fánach has edited the pic as I don’t want to personalise this about the driver concerned. He might have only just learned how to read for all I know, and can’t get enough of it. But everyone involved in fostering this culture in Dublin Bus, the culture that says the drivers do what they damn well like when they damn well like and only if they damn well like ought to be deeply ashamed of themselves.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bus, commuting, books

Operation Freeflow - The Teeny-Weeny Detail They Overlooked

Few things capture the experience of living in Dublin in the early years of the 21st Century as much as the remarkable paradox of Operation Freeflow, the traffic management system that the city uses to deal with Christmas shoppers. (The only real way of dealing with Christmas shoppers, of course, is to machine gun the wretches, but then you’d have Amnesty International annoying you and it wouldn’t be worth it. Pity). It’s not so much the system itself as the relentless self-congratulation that goes along with it that gets An Spailpín’s gabhar, as it were. I mean, dear Jesus, it even has its own website.


Look at the thing. Look at that little picture there of Dublin in the snow. Does that look much like Dublin to you? Doesn't look much like it to me. Who do they think they're kidding? It’s more like a scene from one of those Budweiser ads – those Budweiser dray horses wouldn’t look half as pretty if they’d been kept in some twelfth floor flat in Ballier all year, I’m thinking.

Look at all this bumph from the Irish Times’ breaking news section:

"Hundreds of gardaí have been drafted into Dublin for the force's annual drive to keep the capital's traffic moving over Christmas. Some 160 officers have been transferred to Dublin Garda stations for Operation Freeflow, which began yesterday and will finish on January 4th. In addition, 48 motorcycle patrols will be put on key routes at peak times, supported by other mobile patrols, mountain bike patrols, the Garda Mounted Unit and the Garda Air Support Unit, according to the Garda Press Office. The operation will be managed from the Garda Traffic Control Centre on Harcourt Square, which will be in contact with Dublin City Council's Traffic Centre."

It sounds like a feature length episode of CSI, with Grissom working out a heuristic on the back of an envelope to see how many 1982 Ford Cortinas can be jammed into the Liffey Valley Centre. And, to be honest, it’s hard to argue with a lot of it; it’s a good thing that there are mobile patrols with mounted and air support to make sure the city can keep the traffic moving.

But here’s what gets me: What about the rest of the bloody year?

Reading from left to right across the foot of that ridiculous Freeflow website, which I'm clearly having a lot of trouble getting over, the Dublin Transport Office, Dublin City Council, the Gardaí, the Department of Transport, the Dublin City Business Association, Bus Éireann, Dublin Bus, Iarnród Éireann and the LUAS are all swelled up like harvest frogs, bursting with pride because they can get the traffic moving in December. Well, what about the other eleven months of the year? You can live and die in the car then, stuck in the timeless parking lot that is the M50, the junction of Berkeley Road and the North Circular Road, the entire village of Dundrum, and a thousand and one other traffic black holes. Where are these jokers then? They’re no-where to be seen, that’s where they are.

It’s like hiring a carpenter to put up shelves and when he only hammers one nail into the damned wall, not only does he think he’s done a great job, he expects to the congratulated on it. He thinks he’s just built Noah’s bloody Ark. Incredible.

An Spailpín Fánach advises all readers who have the ill-luck to have no choice but to shop in Dublin to rise at the crack of dawn to do so, if you can at all. And for God’s sake don’t be fooled by some load of soft chat about taking “public transport.” Public transport is miserable enough when there’s just you and your buke to bring onto the bus, with the driver scowling at you for wrecking his buzz and that whiskery buck on O’Connell Street getting in your way and doing nothing, I mean NOTHING, else, without having to face all that while being loaded down with cashmere ganseys from Arnott’s, scented candles, box set DVDs of TV shows that were very middling when actually broadcast, signed copies of Maeve Binchy’s books and three bottles of whiskey, while also being in charge of the safety and well-being of Adam, 8, Maedhb, 5, and Benjamin, 2. Take the car, for God’s sake. Life’s too short.






Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bus, Operation Freeflow, traffic, Christmas

Dublin Bus Strike

Dublin Bus drivers are on strike this morning. Twenty-five routes have no service, and eleven more have “limited” service – whatever that’s meant to mean. The situation will almost certainly escalate, unless Dublin Bus management back down on the point at hand – which is do with where drivers will have their lunch break. It’s remarkable to think of an entire city grinding to a halt over where some buds will consume their ham sandwiches.

If An Spailpín Fánach is to retain any memory, any lasting sensation of his eight year sentence in this ugly city of Dublin, it is this: the unmistakable and unforgettable sensation of standing in the cold and rain at a bus stop on winter evenings, looking at several buses parked in a line at the bus stop, each with its doors closed; each and every bus containing a driver, snug and warm in the cab, hunched over the steering wheel, carefully studying the Evening Herald and not giving a fiddle-dee-dee for me or the rest of commuters getting colder and wetter.

So, readers, don’t pass a picket today – stop, and throw stones.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bus, strike

Everybody Must Get Stoned - More Fun on the Buses

At half-past seven tonight, a 123 double decker bus was following its usual route - having crossed Gardiner Street from Parnell Street, it was travelling east along Summerhill, moving into Summerhill Parade and on towards Ballybough and Fairview. Contemporaneous with the moving bus, three static children - ten year olds, according to an eye-witness - were arming themselves with missiles in the flats along Summerhill, waiting for a sufficiently rewarding target.

As the bus drove by, the children let fly with their fusillade. The two youths on the ground floor did no damage, but their Hannibal, who had the wit to station himself on the high ground of the first floor balcony, scored a bull's eye. He struck one of the windows of the upper deck of the bus, shattering it.

As the bus crossed the North Circular Road into Summerhill Parade, the remaining glass began to fall out of the window and render the bus unsafe. Another was called from the depot; as the passengers waited for the lifting of the siege, they compared notes about other horrors. One girl had suffered double jeopardy - her father had the back window of his car broken in the same area, while her dog had been blinded after being struck by the glass. Eventually, the second bus arrived and we continued on our way.

There are one million stories in the naked city, and this hasn't been a terribly interesting one. If anyone wishes to kick up the dust about it, and perhaps remark that when one is travelling home from a day's work one does not expect a re-enactment of the Alamo, that plaintiff will be met with a shrug of bureaucratic shoulders and be reminded that Dublin is a big city now bud, these things happen. Friend bureaucrat will remark in confidence that, were it up to him, "scumbags" such as these would have their coughs softened but, in his official capacity, the bureau's shoulders remain shrugged.

Unfortunately, if there is one stubborn, spiteful, selfish son of a bitch on this Earth it is your faithful narrator. An Spailpín Fánach is not willing to accept that being fired upon on the way home from work is beyond our control, or a small price to pay for living in "this vibrant city [that] hums with a palpable sense that it is creating a new cultural heritage", or any of the rest of that buncombe to which we're so often treated. As such, though he only be a voice, crying in the wilderness, An Spailpín will continue to record these incidents so that, when the Chinese or the Muslims or six-foot mutant ants or extra-terrestrial invaders like the Martians or the Jovians, whoever it is takes over from our now clearly past its sell-by date Western Society, will know what it was like in the final years. Stubborn, as I say.


Technorati Tags: Dublin, Dublin Bus, Anti-Social Behaviour, Hooliganism

Only Losers Take the Bus

An Spailpín is still trying to come to terms with a clip from Liveline he heard this morning, just before the eight o’clock news on Radio 1. It seems that a 19 year old man was thrown off the upper deck of the 77 bus in Tallaght at the weekend, and is currently pretty badly shook up in hospital.

Thrown off the upper deck of a bus. Isn’t that astonishing? And if it is, why hasn’t it been front page news? In his efforts to faithfully chronicle contemporary Irish life, An Spailpín likes to keep an eye on these things, and this story is definitely well under the news radar.

What about the comments of John McGrane of the National Bus and Rail Union, reported in this morning’s Independent, that they will have no option other than not to go to Tallaght anymore if the gardaí aren’t going to protect their drivers? An Spailpín isn’t the greatest Irish public service union man in the world, but it’s very hard not to see Mr McGrane’s point.

Not least when we discover that a man being thrown off the upper deck of the 77 bus is only one of twenty-five reported incidents on buses serving west Tallaght in the past month alone. These include:

• A passenger’s coat being set on fire
  
• A bus driver being spat at in the face
  
• A child being assaulted
  
• A bus being set on fire
  
• Fighting in the upper deck
  
• Drug-taking in the upper deck
  

On reading that list of depravity, we quickly realise that it’s not just the bus drivers that need protection here. All his life, An Spailpín has heard about how Tallaght is one of the fastest growing and biggest towns in Ireland, and how its needs need to be looked after. So what An Spailpín now wants to know is: what is the government doing to protect the ordinary, decent people of Tallaght, who are in the overwhelming majority, as we are always reminded whenever these reports of so-called “anti-social behaviour” occur? What steps are being taken to stop Joe or Jane Citizen from having their clothing set on fire, their bus set on fire, their means of getting to and from work being set on fire, their children being spat at or assaulted?

The gougers rule the city of Dublin. We saw it during the riots, we see it every day in the city, and we sit back and accept it. There is zero political will to deal with the issue and in the meantime ordinary decent people have to get up and go to work without knowing what sort of foul horror will confront them once they get on their bus. And what do they get in return? Lectures about inequality in society on the op-ed pages of the Irish Times.

What they don’t get are results. What they have to suffer every day doesn’t even make the news. An Spailpín has searched today’s Irish Times in vain for the story about the potential disruption in bus services to Tallaght, and he can’t find it. Here’s the link to the Article Index in today's Irish Times – happy hunting.

The Irish Times isn’t slow to laud itself as the paper of record, but on an issue that affects a huge tranche of the population it has nothing to report. Zero. Zip. The null set. Madam ought to be ashamed of herself. As for any poor dumb bastard that’s trying to commute to and from Tallaght, may God help you, because nobody else gives a fiddler’s. Only losers take the bus.

Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bus, Anti-Social Behaviour