No New Bus Shelters Installed In Clare Last Year

0:00It's interesting that all of those 31 that have been are erected in a care, it coincides with the four years that the Green Party was in government. It's not a strange coincidence. So you'd say that perhaps the current government isn't taking this as seriously? No, no, they're not. It just seems to be a complete reversal putting more investment into roads than they are in public transport. And public transport benefits, everybody. The road users, the car drivers as well as the people who are using public transport. Is there a possibility, Bridget, with that significant amount of activity seen in 2024? And especially in 2023, when we saw, I believe, 15 bus shelters put into the county that certain deficits were addressed and, therefore, there hasn't been as much of a need for a direction of bus shelter since then. Well, I think anybody who wants to get a bolster around MSR around the county, will first of all have the difficulty where is the bus stop? Not only do we not have bus shelters,

1:01we don't even have bus stops. I've been around in other counties and seeing that they've taken the simple action of taking a telegraph pole and sticking a bus stop sign on it. And that is a wonderful first step, really. In some ways, I'd love to see us take other measures as well or even crawl before we get on the bus. You know, the people need to know where the bus stop is. They need to know when the times are. It's, you know, the time tables are not made easy to read. I mean, I have to collate the endless bus time tables in endless to try and encourage local link to promote endless bus being the bus being used until we're waiting for endless bus. You know, and then there's different things as well. How frequent a bus is makes a big difference. Obviously, there's no shelter you get wet. But if you're waiting for 15 minutes, you get wet as well. So we can shorten that time simply by having it that in the endless town with it, when the endless town bus comes in,

2:02we look to an hour, but we also have lots of local link buses going out the main roads. And if we got a collated combined bus time table so that people could get any bus, it doesn't matter what they bus they get, once it's one going near their door. And so that's one way that we can have more frequent buses. And another is having live information. You know, that's, it's not rocket science. It's not, you know, really expensive technology to know where the bus is when it's going to come. So it makes a huge difference. If you know if I leave the house now, there'll be a bus in five minutes. And these steps would make it easier for regular people to avail of public transport and maybe see it as something that they can do where currently they might not see it as all that easy. Absolutely, absolutely. And the real saving is that it, households can manage most households. This families have two cars, but if some could say maybe we can move from two car to one car, we're saving thousands of rural as well as making savings in terms of traffic and gesture

3:03and emissions. You know, so it's really, you know, and it's, it's a real benefit in lots of ways. Just finally, Bridges, we received an update on the NS Town bus service just before the new year, the new expected delivery date of the Longowated Services summer of this year. We don't know if it's currently on track and we have seen significant delays, several of them in the last couple of years since this was first floated. How soon would you like to see the town bus and is this urgently required? Obviously, the sooner the better. I mean, we've all seen how they are. The traffic is increasing also a lot. You know, the number of school children that have to be brought to school by car would be just wonderful to give them the independence of going by bus to save all those cars for every, you know, 10 pupils getting on the bus with 10 fewer cars going there and going back. So it's really such, I think it would be a game changer

4:04if we really got a good NS bus town center and make it more effectively more frequent by really tying together the local link as well and using those buses coming in as well to make it frequent. It's easy and we know it's very low cost. So I'd pursue the better, hopefully in the summer. Be great to see.