Sir, - Mr Conor McCarthy of the Dublin Transportation Office (August 18th) complains about the criticisms and the lack of constructive solutions from some of your correspondents in their letters about Quality Bus Corridors. However, he failed to address many of the very excellent and specific points raised in previous correspondence, for example allowing parking on some QBC routes.
He also went on to make some extraordinary assertions. It does not make "irrefutable sense" to encourage a change from car to bus just because a bus carries as many passengers as 60 cars. What about the frequency and availability of buses? What about those people who have no bus route between home and work, and for whom the bus is not a viable alternative? In any event the equation "60 cars equals one bus" means nothing unless the numbers of buses and of cars per hour is specified. The scarce resource is road space and what needs to be maximised is the total number of commuters carried per hour on a given route.
Mr McCarthy's letter confirms all that I ever suspected about the incompetence and arrogance of the DTO, which seems to be accountable to nobody. I am quite confident that in September traffic jams will be worse than ever before: the only real hope for Dubliners is that they are so spectacularly worse that there will be irresistible demands for heads to roll.
With no apologies whatever for the critical, negative and destructive tone of this letter. - Yours, etc.,
John Sheehan, Pinewood Park, Dublin 14.