Galway city's bus services are not "operating at optimal level", with a number of heavily populated areas having no bus service, while other routes have "insufficient capacity at peak times".
This is the view of Fianna Fáil Galway City West councillor John Connolly. At Monday's council meeting he proposed that representatives of Bus Éireann be invited to the council to review these issues.
Cllr Connolly raised the issue of 405 route in particular. "Some routes are operating above capacity at peak times," he said. “I’ve been at stops at Francis Street and University Road waiting for a 405 only to see the bus drive past with no room for further passengers."
He said the route should be "consistently serviced by double-deckers or increased frequency". While he noted that 13 new double-deckers had been allocated to the Galway network during 2018, more were still needed. "There are similar problems with other routes and despite the 10-minute frequency on the 409," he said. "There is still insufficient capacity on that route at peak times.”
Cllr Connolly said that as a commercial semi-state body, Bus Éireann has a duty to respond to councillors' concerns. However he said there was "no standard forum for such discourse to occur". As a result he proposed a meeting with the city council.
“The public are entitled to know how bus operators foresee the implementation of the Galway Bus Connects project," he said. "The project envisages five cross-city routes. The project could be successful if the five routes enjoy significant bus priority, matched by a high-frequency high-capacity service. The public deserve to know the detail of this.”
