Swords Express

In response to extra demand, we are adding extra capacity (an extra bus) on the 8.10 morning service and the 17.30 evening service. This will make the service more timely and make sure people are not left behind. Thank you for your loyalty and patience.

Swords Express has been working with the authorities to support provision of a bus lane along North Wall Quay. This should shave five minutes or longer off the morning trip into the city and it should allow evening services to run closer to schedule on days with heavy traffic, as they will be able to make the return trip from Swords much more quickly.  Bus shelters along the Quays will also make the wait much more comfortable.

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Our plan is to extend our all-day, two-way, express service to these areas, by a route beginning at Swords Manor, passing Applewood, turning into the village at the Pavilions and travelling along Forest Road to Airside and past Holywell to the motorway. This service would be a tremendous boon to the area, not only because it would provide a fast, regular link to the city, but because it would link all these areas of Swords together as well.

Swords Express has had this new route with the Department of Transport since the beginning of this year awaiting approval.

The route is designed so that it avoids all the bottlenecks in Swords. Even people at the beginning of the route will get a fast, reliable service.

It is also designed to minimise walking distance to the route. The vast majority of the people of Swords will be within 800 yards of the route, and almost all of them will be within 1000 yards.

The fare on our weekend (and bank holiday) services is now 2 euros. There is an advertisement in this week’s Swords Gazette. We want to attract more weekend custom for our service. Offer runs until 22 July, but we would love to extend this offer if it is attractive.

Even though the weather is good, and you would expect traffic volumes to be getting lighter, there are still major problems with traffic in Dublin City Centre. This has knock-on effects for the Swords Express.

It’s impossible for us to predict. Some days it happens, most days it doesn’t. The DCC control room says the problem is simply traffic volume. On a fine day like today, just after a bank holiday, you would expect traffic volumes to be lower than usual and for traffic to be steady. But it didn’t work out that way. Everything is chockablock. As a result, buses take much longer to arrive, and it’s a major headache for our passengers and for us. It’s impossible to provide good service in this situation.

So what to do?

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Most commuters will be able to travel on the Swords Express for €3.50 with a ten-journey ticket. Other users travelling off peak will still only pay €3 euros. If you get a monthly or yearly ticket, you can get a lower price - 960 euros a year, which works out at €2.40 a trip if you travel twice a day, 40 weeks of the year. With the tax credit for commuter tickers, it’s even less.

I wanted to point this out because a group of customers rang me today about the price increase. I accepted their point that passengers might not have been sufficiently aware of the alternatives to paying the full fare. We’re now working to fix that.

There have been some problems with ticket machines and printing 10-journey tickets this morning, which we are working to sort out for this evening.

We’re making an adjustment to our fare increase - the fare increase will only apply at peak times. At other times, the fare will stay as before.

Off-peak is from 8.45 until 15.59 and after 7pm in the evening, as well as all day on Saturday and Sunday. We may even reduce the fare further at peak times, to increase off-peak ridership.

We are making some changes on our fares. The reason for the change is simple - we are not currently covering our costs on our operations. We cannot sustain the quality of the service at the price we are currently charging. We also need to speed up our boarding and that’s the reason for encouraging a move to using the 10-journey ticket and season tickets.

The new fares, for reference, from the 16th of April will be:

35 euros for a ten journey ticket (3.50 per trip). You can buy these tickets on the bus.

4 euros for a single ticket.

There are also various options for saving more money.

The yearly ticket will continue to be available for EUR 960 for the next two months. This ticket will go up in price, however.

The monthly ticket will continue to be available for EUR 96 per month for the next two months, and then will go up in price.

We have not decided what the increase will be as yet. We recommend you take advantage of the opportunity to buy a monthly ticket.

We do not take increasing the price lightly. We have taken a long time to make a decision on the increase, but it has become inevitable as peak time traffic continued to grow, while off-peak remained low. For a service like ours, it is the peak time service that drives all our costs - we need a large number of vehicles and drivers to provide a full service at peak times. Cutting back peak services would not really improve our figures. Because we are an express service, we can only fill each space once, because all the passengers are effectively on board for the full journey. We also want to continue to provide as high a level of comfort as possible on our services.

Non-express services, including express services that drop off mid-way, can often fill some seats twice during the peak times. Dublin Bus express services have increased their prices by 15 percent over the last four months, apparently because of similar issues.

At the same time, we are dealing with increases in costs. Diesel has gone up in price, and the cost will certainly hit us in the coming months. At the same time, the Department of Transport is planning to increase the net price we pay for fuel because of a direction from the EU, and this change could come into effect at any time.

One thing we are considering is a less expensive off-peak and weekend ticket. We’d be interested in getting your feedback on whether that would bring an increase in patronage (say from 9.30 until 3.30, and from 7pm onwards).

Our new bus stops are being installed this week (poles today, flags tomorrow we expect). I hope you agree that they look really great. We’ll have timetables up on them by the weekend.

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We’re leaving people behind in the morning, and so we are adding an extra service. It will be at 7.55 am. The 8am service will be moved to 8.05am.

UPDATE: In the meantime, here’s some suggestions about the busiest services.

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