Madam, - I accept Liam Reid's statement that "almost everybody agrees the Irish bus sector is badly in need of reform" (The Irish Times, August 2nd). However, I do not accept partial or total privatisation is the answer.
How exactly would privatisation lead to buses running on time, or at all? In my home city of Melbourne, the state-run light rail services were privatised with the promise of more, cleaner, newer, and punctual trains. These turned out to be empty words as many people (myself included) were left fuming on the platforms as the trains were at least as unreliable as before.
In fact, by turning over the rail services to private interests, the government lost a great deal of legislative power over the sector, and was almost powerless to sanction the companies involved for failing to adhere to timetables.
Passengers are not asking for much. All we want is for the buses to run on time, according to their timetables, and for some more bus routes to be allocated where needed. This could be achieved by tightening the legislation in the 1932 Road Transport Act so that bus operators were more heavily fined for failure to adhere to timetables, and by releasing the withheld funds for 150 buses to operate on new routes. - Yours, etc,
LUCIA FERNANDEZ, Bolton Street, Dublin 1.
