Adults only at the Dart ticket machineA reader from Marino had a bizarre and frustrating experience while trying to bring his young children home from Dublin city centre last weekend.
He went into Pearse Dart station on a Saturday afternoon and noticed that the ticket desk was unmanned. This is not an uncommon occurrence at quiet times, so he thought nothing of it and made his way, with children in tow, to a ticket-vending machine. He bought himself an adult single and paid the full fare. So far, so good. Then he tried to buy his children their tickets, but was unable to find an option to pay a child’s fare.
He went in search of an Irish Rail employee. Eventually he tracked one down and explained his ticket problem. “He told me they had changed the software and were no longer selling children’s fares through the vending machines. I asked why, and was told that, as too many adults had been buying children’s tickets and using them to get through the barriers, the company had decided to scrap them entirely.
Our reader went on to say that there were no notices to this effect anywhere in the station. The Irish Rail employee told him that, on this occasion, his children could go free. He wrote a note, which our reader was told to present to staff if challenged at the end of his journey. Our reader duly did this and confirmed with the inspector at Clontarf Road station that the explanation about the child tickets was true.
This story sounded outlandish to Pricewatch. How could Irish Rail simply discontinue offering child fares from its ticket machines and not tell anyone about it? Surely there had been some mistake. So we called company spokesman Barry Kenny and asked him about it.
Kenny said that Irish Rail added child tickets to its ticket-vending machines in October 2009. “However, in the Dart/commuter area, there was a notable level of misuse of child tickets by adults, resulting in loss of revenue,” he said. “Despite our revenue protection officers focusing on penalising such fare evasion, the problem continued, and we decided, in the Dart/commuter area only, to withdraw child tickets for sale from vending machines, in September 2011.”
He said that, in the coming weeks, Irish Rail would be adding a facility to its machines to allow child tickets to be purchased with adult tickets. A child Leap Card is also about to be introduced in Dublin, covering all modes of transport. “While the situation is not ideal, we must – particularly at a time when funding is being cut significantly – take steps to protect revenue, to cover our costs and maintain services to the public,” Kenny said.
Getting it right on RTÉ’s app-earance
In our feature on the future of television last week we referred to RTÉ and said that while its content is available on demand through its website, there is no smartphone or iPad app. Well, it turns out we were wrong. Just before Christmas the broadcaster launched apps for smartphones and the iPad, a fact which went unnoticed by Pricewatch. A number of people alerted us to the mistake via Twitter last Monday. We then got in touch with RTÉ, which told us the app has been doing very well.
A freshly baked take on gluten-free
Our Value for Money review of gluten-free bread got a big response. Some readers were pleased; others, such as Maura O’Grady, were not. “I know for a fact that the BFree bread – which, granted, is very good – is in fact delivered to the stores frozen,” she wrote. “It is then thawed before being placed on the shelves for us consumers to purchase. What part of this can be considered ‘freshly baked’?”
It is true that the bread is delivered to Dunnes Stores frozen, but it is available freshly baked in the Duke Street pop-up shop mentioned in Value for Money. Meanwhile, our review of Lynch’s gluten-free bread from Aldi also annoyed her. She wrote that it was “an insult to us coeliacs because it’s awful stuff”, adding that she couldn’t “understand how you rated it four stars . . . were you paid for that review?”. Eh, no.
She wrote that we would think differently if this was the only bread we could eat. “After doing some research myself in my quest to get my hands on a ‘freshly baked’ loaf between five different Aldis, I discovered that while the factory down in Bandon may in fact bake bread freshly every day, it is not delivered fresh daily to Aldi stores. With a nine-day best-before, the five stores I have canvassed only receive delivery once a week. So their ‘freshly baked and delivered to stores daily’ mantra is not what it seems . . . It is indeed delivered every day to stores nationwide, but each individual store only receives delivery once a week.”
O’Grady added that there were other gluten-free breads on the market that were “without doubt better than those you reviewed. My bread of choice is a brown soda loaf by the Gluten-Free Foodie (below), which I pick up from Nourish on Wicklow Street, Dublin . . . or Londis KCR in Terenure. It is by far the best I have found to date.”
