Just when the Government is at last investing in public transport, the response of the managers and employees of Dublin Bus has been to re-enact the industrial relations conflicts of the 1970s. Not surprisingly, calls for the privatisation of Dublin Bus are increasingly popular. But there is a real risk that trying to solve industrial relations issues in this way will only make Dublin's transport problems worse.
Even without strikes, Dublin's public transport is a notorious mess. A European Union-funded research project (Project SceneSusTech), which I co-ordinated, analysed transport in four European cities: Dublin, Athens, Bologna and Helsinki. In Bologna and especially Helsinki, people have a high opinion of their city's public transport; in Athens and Dublin they do not.
Things that citizens of other cities can take for granted do not happen in Dublin. There are no route maps, the bus and the rail systems barely connect to each other and there is certainly no integrated ticketing (so that you can easily change from bus to rail and vice versa). And for all the notices about "Quality Customer Care" that plaster Dublin buses, whether staff are helpful (usually) or rude (sometimes) depends on their personal whim and certainly not on any training or company policy.
These are failings of management and governance. They cannot be explained just by the low level of subsidy. In Dublin public transport is State-owned, but this produces none of the obvious advantages it should.
Given this lack of a public transport system, it is not surprising that Dubliners use their cars for most journeys. People in Dublin, like people in Athens, are far more likely to travel to work by car than people in Helsinki or Bologna. And while Dublin's quality bus corridors are a successful and cheap innovation, in many ways they distract from the growing problem. The corridors are like spokes of a wheel, linking the suburbs to the city centre and, furthermore, used at rush hours. Yet jobs (and shopping centres) are increasingly in the suburbs and work is less likely to begin at nine and end at five. For such journeys, rush-hour radial routes are irrelevant.
Helsinki provides a very different model. Public transport comprises buses, metro, overground rail and trams; it is easy to change from one to another. The tram network traverses the city centre, so that people can easily move around a relatively large area by public transport. In Dublin, people only get on a bus in the city centre in order to leave it.
Outside the centre of Helsinki, most development is concentrated at transport nodes, so that it is easy to reach most parts of the city. Helsinki is a "city on rails" - the transport network is the backbone of the city. Dublin, like Athens, is a car-dependent city. In Dublin, and in fact even more so in Athens, not only do people use cars a lot, but there are many activities which are impossible unless you have a car.
Car dependency occurs when poor public transport is combined with low density housing and a land-use pattern in which workplaces, shopping and public facilities are all dispersed across a wide area.
Such a city is built for the car, but the trouble is not everyone has a car. In the Dublin middle-class suburbs, the family car belongs in the past. Cars now spew out of the garage and down the driveway. Yet in the working-class estates, there are many households without a car. In a car-dependent city people without cars are often socially excluded. They have to spend vast amounts of time and ingenuity simply to make the journeys that others regard as normal. Our study included a Dublin housing estate with a high level of unemployment. In such an area, part of the explanation for unemployment is that people without a car cannot reach the jobs they could otherwise take.
In the poorer areas of Bologna and Helsinki, poverty does not create physical isolation. You may be poor, you may not have a job, but you can move around the city - it is your city. In Dublin, many people can only do so if they have a car. For those without a car, it is not their city.
Privatising Dublin Bus or deregulating public transport will hardly create the sort of transport network Dublin needs. European cities with good public transport are distinguished, not by the fact that the public transport is privately run, but by the fact that the cities are run by people with power and responsibility. When we interviewed city officials in Bologna and Helsinki, they could not understand why a minister in the national government should decide whether there should be a tram or a metro in Dublin.
Like other researchers, our study shows that an effective public transport system requires a city government with some financial autonomy, some decision-making power and some responsiveness to its local electorate. Furthermore, successful cities are part of regional governments which also have real powers of co-ordination. This does not guarantee success, but it is a precondition for it.
Effective city government can ensure that a city has a public transport system or network. Within that context, and only in that context, it may well make sense to put individual routes out to tender, seek private financing for new routes or whatever. In Dublin, by contrast, deregulation would simply mean further fragmentation and the further deterioration of public transport.
The Dublin Transport Office (DTO) has made great strides in getting the different parties concerned with transport to work together. But at the end of the day the DTO is not directly responsible to the people of Dublin and lacks political clout and legitimacy. There has been much discussion of whether the Minister should or should not intervene in the current bus dispute. Nobody has even thought of asking the Lord Mayor of Dublin for her views because at the moment they are irrelevant. When the city government is held responsible for the public transport in the city, then Dublin might get moving again.
Dr James Wickham is Jean Monnet Professor of European Labour Market Studies at the Employment Research Centre of the Department of Sociology in Trinity College Dublin. Further details of Project SceneSusTech are available at http:/ /tcd.ie/erc/cars/
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