Swords Express

There is a great walking tour of Dublin this Sunday and every Sunday in June at 11am, starting from Clery’s on O’Connell St. It starts at 11, so you’ll need to talk the 9.30 Swords Express service. The tour is free (normally a tour like this would cost you 6 euros per person). It’s led by the historian and campaigner Pat Liddy. The tour is organized and sponsored by DCBA.

See full details

Swords Express has been working to get a deal for Swords commuters and workers to allow the use of Dublin Bus prepaid tickets on Swords Express. This would have been a big first step towards an integrated transport system in Swords. Dublin Bus gave ‘consideration’ to the proposal, but then decided not to go ahead.

The reason for not going ahead was bureaucracy and inflexibility - it had nothing to do with cash or funding -. What we proposed would have actually saved money for Dublin Bus.

We feed that Dublin Bus is putting its desire to dominate all aspects of bus transport in Dublin ahead of the need to work with others to provide the best possible public transport.

There’s also no news yet on our licence application to extend our service, despite the fact that our application has been with the Department of Transport for over 16 months. Please ask your local election candidates to support the Swords Express plan to extend services to Applewood, Swords Manor, Forrest Road and Holywell.

The Tall Ships in the docklands are a good reason to visit the city during next week.

Advertising blurb from the website:

Some of the most beautiful ships will be taking up residency on the River Liffey alongside our own Jeanie Johnston. Climb on board the Atlantis, Lord Nelson, Le Aoife , Kathleen & May, The Loth Lorien and The Eendracht, for a chance to see what life of the high seas is like.

You can go on board the ships, and admission to the ships is free for accompanied children, so it’ll be a good day out with the family.

Swords Express operates its usual services on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and a Sunday service on Monday.

We are moving our 08.10 service to 08.15. This is due to over-filling of our 08.25 service. This is happening because our busiest period is moving later as the summer comes in. If you are having problems getting on the 08.25, the 08.15 may be a good alternative for you. If the 08.15 service is too late for you, there is plenty of space available on the 08.05 service. The change should also help the 08.40 service. Details are posted on a notice on the bus.

There have been some problems with our 07.55 service to the city and our service has been below the level we aim to provide. We apologise for this. We are addressing these problems to make sure they do not recur.

In response to requests and obvious customer demand, we’re making the following changes to our evening timetable to Swords.

16.20 will move to 16.25

16.55 will move to 16.45

17.30 will move to 17.35

We will implement this change from Monday 11 May 2009.

The effect of this will be to spread demand across services (so there will be fewer or no full buses), and reduce the gap between services to a maximum of 20 minutes between 16.05 and 19.15.

Update: we’ve had more difficulties with this. Now, the 16.45 is under-filled, and the 17.05 is over-full, and this is cascading into later buses, causing serious problems for people who want to catch a bus at around half-five. We are going to move the 16.45 to 16.50 today to see if that deals with the issues. If you have a chance to leave work early, this is the bus to get, and there will be space on it.

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Beginning Monday 20 April. We are removing the 07.50 service and the 08.50 service towards the city in the morning. We are removing the16.35 and 17.40 services in the evening.

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We will have our usual service this Saturday. It looks likely that Dublin Bus will not be operating, so we are expecting to be busy.

If you wouldn’t normally be travelling on our service and plan to travel on Saturday, please leave a comment, so we have some idea about the amount of demand.

 UPDATE: 4:20pm: Everything looks pretty clear now and should run close to schedule

UPDATE: Tuesday afternoon services are still running but expect delays on evening services. Please get a bus before 5pm if you can. Later buses are more likely to be delayed. (This probably goes for all buses, not just Swords Express.)

We can’t get buses on the road this morning because of the ice and snow. We expect to have the first services leaving Swords at 8am. There is a message on our telephone service about this too.

Swords Express (like all other scheduled public transport operators) used to benefit from a rebate on fuel duty, which amounted to 34 cents per litre of fuel - a pretty big discount -. This rebate was removed in the budget. The result is that our operating costs have gone up by six percent as a result of this change since the beginning of November.

We are trying to avoid passing on the costs to our customers, by increasing our volumes. But some increases, especially on our best value products, the monthly and yearly tickets, are very likely in the New Year.

We’ve adjusted our timetable and added more capacity to provide a better service at the busiest times. This will also help the service cope with heavy traffic.