COMMENT
We publish two letters this month from readers responding to last month’s Comment that argued for a new long-term planning vision to lessen the need for some of today’s dependence on cars and light delivery vans.
The gist of those letter writers’ message is that public transport — the bus especially — does not provide the convenient connections they can make by other means. We would not argue with that, but how can that be addressed? How can more services be created that provide the quick links not offered today?
Our news pages offer two hugely contrasting examples of public transport providers trying to do that. One we could class as the old way, the other a very new way.
The old way is in Dublin, where Ireland’s National Transport Authority has commissioned what promises to be one of the biggest overhauls of a bus network in any major European city, installing miles of continuous bus lanes on the main radial routes and upgrading three of these to bus rapid transit standard with multi-door tramlike bendybuses.
The aim is to overcome fast rising traffic volumes by greatly speeding up bus journey times, but it also wants to make the bus network more relevant to the needs of 21st century Dubliners…
