Sir, - While Dublin Bus may explain the wider implementation of an "exact-fare" regime as a means of protecting drivers from crime, it is bus users who are left feeling the victims of a mugging when they use the service.
The fares would seem designed to secure overpayment (55p, 80p, 110p). Surely, rounding all fares up or down to 50p or (pound)1 - depending on journey length - would be more customer-focused?
The current system ensures that passengers are often left clutching raggedy refund tickets that begin to disintegrate even as the machine spits them out.
Of course, these tickets are not re-usable against another bus-fare. Instead, passengers are supposed to take an hour off work, and bus it into the city centre to redeem their 20p or 45p overpayments. Hardly an economic prospect, one would have thought.
May I suggest that Dublin Bus eliminate the pretence that most passengers will ever see their money again, and instead install some kind of charity collection box for refund tickets on buses? Passengers might then feel at least that they were helping, rather than joining, the disadvantaged. - Yours, etc., Niamh Foley,
Blackrock, Co Dublin.