Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine your job is to sell rubber bands. You are already the leading rubber band supplier in the country – chiefly because there is no other supplier. Your competition, in fact, is people opting to do without rubber bands. Nonetheless, you have set yourself a bold target of increasing rubber band sales by 130 per cent by 2030, and you want to reduce the number of people using rubber band alternatives by 20 per cent in the same period.
The main problem you face is that many of the regular users of your rubber bands don’t seem to like them very much. Your bands, they say, are too unreliable. They are often nowhere to be found when you need them. They don’t appreciate the Ryanair-style reservation charges you levy on prepaid band users, particularly when your rubber band booking system is so often malfunctioning.
Still, they persevere with your rubber bands because many have no choice. The number of customers is increasing with little-to-no effort from you – mainly because, so far, they have been relatively cheap, the overall population is growing, and with it the potential customer base is expanding.
So what do you do to try to achieve that bold 130 per cent target? You whack on a huge price increase.
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This analogy is obviously silly. Comparing rubber bands to public transport is plainly ridiculous, but then so too is Ireland’s approach to public transport.
In its Sustainable Mobility Policy Action Plan, published last March, the Government set itself a target of a 20 per cent reduction in total vehicle kilometres travelled by 2030 and a 130 per cent increase in daily public-transport journeys. Earlier this month, the National Transport Authority said it would hike fares on public transport by an average of 15 per cent, and up to 30 per cent on some routes.
I’m no expert analyst of consumer behaviour, but charging more for a service you want more people to avail of doesn’t strike me as a winning strategy, especially when so many parts of the service are creaking.
Take the bus (presuming it turns up, so you can actually take it). Up to May 2025, the National Transport Authority logged 5,984 complaints about bus services, the majority involving delays, cancellations and ghost buses – this was up from 1,565 in 2024. To be fair, this isn’t a straight like-for-like comparison, because the total for 2025 included complaints made directly to operators and routed through the Transport for Ireland (TFI) complaints centre. But it is not a great endorsement of our bus network. The rural bus network my children use in the summer very often simply doesn’t turn up – and judging by the experiences recounted recently in The Irish Times, that’s not unusual.
Then there’s the Luas, which received 5,780 customer complaints last year, of which 40 per cent related to antisocial behaviour. Of the 1,750 customer complaints in the last quarter of 2025, nearly 700 were about antisocial behaviour. This is not a surprise.
On the Red Line Luas, which I use six times a week, I have seen open drug dealing, verbal spats and threats of violence, passengers bellowing racial slurs and older people and pregnant women left standing on horribly overcrowded trams. I have rarely seen security personnel on board and in over three years of commuting, have never once had my ticket checked on the line. To Luas’s credit, complaints in the first quarter of this year were down by one third on the previous year, so perhaps things are improving – though try telling that to commuters jammed into the circle of hell that is the stretch between Smithfield and Middle Abbey Street.
Then there’s Irish Rail.
I commute by rail from Waterford to Dublin three times a week and currently pay €4,040 before tax saver relief for my annual commuter ticket. The service is so busy that it has become virtually impossible to access the 20 per cent of seats that are rumoured to be kept free of charge for prepaid ticket holders, which means another €2.50 to prebook a seat on each leg, adding up to as much as an extra €780 a year. But the seat reservation system very often doesn’t work anyway, leaving users locked in a sweaty Hunger Games-type scramble to eject one another from their seats. The wifi often disappears completely between stops, the tea trolley service never resumed after Covid and the timetable is seen in the realm of a loose aspiration, more like a new year’s resolution than a firm target.
The one positive is the friendly staff. But even they won’t compensate for the planned fare increases. A 15 per cent increase, if that’s what it turns out to be, would add another €606 to my commuting costs, meaning a total charge of €5,426, or €3,005 after the tax relief.
By comparison, ditching the train and driving my electric car instead would cost roughly €65 a week (€9.70 to fully charge it at home overnight, and then a top-up at a public charger to get me back home, which costs about €12), adding up to €3,385. The case in favour of public transport is starting to look marginal.
The National Transport Authority says the €70 million collected through the fare increases is needed to close the gap between what it costs to offer the service and revenues generated through fares, and will be pumped back into rail projects like the MetroLink.
But a metro that might or might not transform public transport in parts of Dublin, possibly some time in the 2030s, is not going to encourage someone in Portlaoise to leave their car at home tomorrow and take a crowded, expensive, uncomfortable train to work.
