The Irish Times have picked up on something we’ve been banging on about for a while, namely the obsession in this country with continually reviewing and reviewing infrastructure plans, without actually doing any of it.
Repeated reviews and constant consultations have halted progress and stifled innovation in our transport network, writes Tim O’Brien
ON MONDAY [...]

But would there be enough drivers to run a full service even without a strike?
In addition to the ongoing problems due to Iarnród Éireann rolling out a timetable with not enough drivers to drive the trains, and then blaming the drivers for not driving the additional trains on their time off, there are now problems [...]

It looks like the Dublin traffic ban kite flying exercise is going to be even more short lived than we first thought, with it now being delayed till 2011. And that is assuming that the projects scheduled to begin that year even happen at all.
There is further talk of a congestion charge, but of course [...]

Maybe all the money squirreled away from unclaimed change receipts on the buses could be used by Dublin Bus to pay out all these compensation claims. It’s not clear what route this happened on, maybe the 70N?
The Irish Times [subs required] reports:
A man has secured €143,000 damages from the High Court after he had to [...]

Consultants continue to swallow up our transport budget
The RPA have published a report explaining why a line it is proposing would cost lots of money, require the purchase of 10 buildings and 150 gardens and wouldn’t make enough money to justify itself (their criteria, not mine). To make matter worse, it would mean the removal [...]

Noel Dempsey says he’s not sure, doesn’t know and remains to be convinced.
While appearing to make all the right noises to the media, there is something of the same old story when you actually take a look at the kind of things Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey, is saying in relation to bus provision in [...]

Some more detail on what we reported last week follows below. The nonsense of the Irish Government’s ill-conceived and over complicated integrated ticketing fiasco continues, with the solution to the delays now being to hire more consultants. Of course, why didn’t we think if it before!
Ian Kehoe of the Sunday Business Post writes:

The [...]

A report in today’s Sunday Business Post (below) gives some more information on the proposal that has been floating about recently on reducing private motor vehicles from the centre of Dublin. While this is obviously an attempt at kite flying, any plan to reduce cars from the city centre, increase space on the roads for [...]

Even though an integrated system could be introduced tomorrow with the minimum of fuss and using current technologies, the powers that be are continuing to drag their heels. Even worse, it looks like we’ll be wasting money on more consultants.

The News Letter reports:
TRANSLINK has defended its decision to refuse a woman who applied to be a bus driver on the grounds that she is deemed too fat.
The woman, who weighs around 12 stone, has the PSV licence required to drive a large vehicle and has spent 20 years driving buses in England.
When she [...]