Dublin Bus is offering €15,000 for ideas from members of the public on how to improve the bus system. So here’s mine, free of charge: stop pretending this is an ideas problem.
Dublin’s public transport dysfunction has been diagnosed exhaustively for years. We do not lack proposals, pilots, white papers or international case studies. What we lack instead is sequencing. And, of course, the institutional authority to enforce it.
I am a strong believer in participative governance. I love opportunities for members of the public, like myself, to have a genuine say in how Dublin’s transport system is run. But why does this feel like someone throwing their hands up instead of asking for input?
The concept of prize money for ideas suggests a lack of clarity about responsibility. Dublin’s buses are not slow because we lack ideas or imagination. They’re slow because every day they have to fight for space with private cars in a city that has never quite decided which kind of transport should come first.
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This is why the congestion-pricing debate matters, but also why it is so often mishandled. Advocates of congestion charges argue that taking cars off the road must come first. Traffic volumes, they say, make buses slow and unreliable; price the cars out and public transport will work. It certainly sounds intuitive, but it is also hopelessly backwards.
You see, pricing only changes behaviour when people have a viable alternative. In Dublin today, for many commuters, driving is not a preference but a hard constraint. So charging them before a reliable alternative exists will lead to two things: driver behaviour barely changing, and people getting poorer. Well done. In this situation, you may not have solved congestion, but you have certainly imposed a tax on immobility.
The evidence from cities that actually fixed this problem is remarkably consistent. In London in the mid-2000s, and Stockholm a few years earlier, congestion pricing was introduced at a later stage in the reform process.
First came aggressive bus prioritisation through dedicated lanes, physical separation, and visible enforcement. Buses could therefore travel faster than cars on key corridors, meaning that reliability improved. Only then, once the alternative was clearly superior to travelling by cars, did congestion pricing arrive. And only then did it actually work.
[ Dublin’s traffic nightmare: Why are we ignoring a few quick fixes?Opens in new window ]
In the cities where this has worked, the sequence mattered enormously. Get it wrong, and congestion charging becomes a political lightning rod rather than a transport tool, as seen in Edinburgh, where pricing was rejected before public transport had earned public confidence.
The learning, it seems, is that you cannot price people into a behaviour they are structurally unable to adopt.
Dublin, by contrast, has spent years attempting to do this backwards by accomplishing the hardest part first, asking people to give up cars without first guaranteeing that buses will get them where they need to go, on time, every day. The result is predictable resistance to such chaos, followed by policy paralysis, followed by another round of consultation, white papers and reports.
This is where the €15,000 prize becomes dispiriting. If €15,000 worth of ideas could fix Dublin’s buses, they would already be fixed. Bus networks are among the most studied systems in urban planning, globally. We know what works, globally. The conclusion may be boring, but thankfully it leaves no ambiguity: when buses are reliable, people use them.
What is harder to explain is why a country that prides itself on being open, international and outward-looking seems unable to apply lessons that are already implemented and studied elsewhere. More simply, why can’t we enforce the priorities we already know work?
Bus lanes exist across Dublin, but they are routinely violated. This is not helped by the fact that traffic enforcement is sporadic; a hardly surprising result given that obstruction carries no consequences. As a result, delays are managed administratively through excuses of traffic, weather, incidents.
I have written before about how fragmented authority undermines accountability in Irish transport policy. The same dynamic, unfortunately, is at work here. For when responsibility is unclear, Ireland’s default response is yet more public consultation, the go-to safe option when no person, politician or department is willing to own the solution.
The €15,000 prize fits this pattern perfectly, now further dissolving accountability into the well-intentioned public. By multiplying the number of voices involved, none of whom has the power to implement what they suggest, transport responsibility is spread so thin that it effectively disappears entirely. What starts as local participation is, in practice, a way of ensuring the costs of inaction are borne by everyone except those with the power to act.
The irony, of course, is that congestion pricing would be far easier to introduce once buses are visibly better. People will tolerate being priced out of a worse option if a better one exists. They won’t tolerate being charged for a failure they did not choose.
This is not an argument against congestion pricing in principle. It is an argument against treating it as a substitute for competent public services delivery. While pricing is a powerful tool, it cannot carry an entire transportation system on its own.
So if Dublin Bus really wants an idea worth €15,000, here it is in operational terms: pick the dozen corridors that carry the bulk of bus passengers and enforce bus priority ruthlessly on them. Make buses faster than cars, consistently, visibly and at any cost. Channel the inner Michael O’Leary and just accept the political noise that inevitably follows. Then, once reliability is somewhat achieved, introduce congestion pricing as a reinforcement rather than a punishment.
[ How different it would be if politicians had to use public transportOpens in new window ]
Dublin does not need another whiteboard session, even if €15,000 is cheaper than a McKinsey consulting contract. It needs a city willing to decide, in practice rather than through competitions, to give public transport the right of way.
Sinéad O’Sullivan is a business economist, formerly at Harvard Business School where she served as head of strategy of the HBS Institute for Strategy
