Driver shortages and IT problems have been blamed for “phantom” or “disappearing” buses in Dublin.
On Tuesday morning, the two largest bus companies in the city will address lawmakers to discuss recent service problems.
Real-time passenger information issues and phantom buses that leave passengers stranded at stops have been a growing complaint among Dublin commuters.
Dublin Bus will inform the Oireachtas Transport Committee that it has been putting a lot of effort into resolving software issues that have occurred at the same time as a critical driver shortage.
It has said there have been software problems which it has “been working hard to fix”. It said those technical issues “unfortunately coincided” with the current driver recruitment shortages.
“This has resulted in the company having to cancel some trips due to [driver shortages]. The cancelled trips should be removed from the real-time system in a timely manner. But in some cases, this was not happening.”
It said a new process was being put in place to address this issue.
According to the company’s statement, it was able to operate 97% of all services during the first six months of 2022 within three minutes of the scheduled time, falling just 1% short of the goal. This has decreased to 95%, which is 3% off target, since the summer.
The main cause of the decline in operational efficiency, according to Dublin Bus, is the difficulty in hiring new employees, particularly drivers.
“The pace of expansion of the network is outstripping the pace of recruitment of new staff, particularly in the driver grade,” it says in a statement to the committee.
The company has recruited an additional 290 drivers in 2022 and has conducted a big recruitment drive. “However, even with this number of new drivers, we are not keeping pace with the rate of network expansion,” according to the statement.
Dublin Bus reports that customer demand had returned to pre-Covid levels and it is carrying 400,000 customers a day, over 7,000 trips.
Go-Ahead, which operates 30 routes in total, also acknowledged there have been “issues related to our services”.
It also said it had been impacted by staff shortages. “While we have consistently run a proactive recruitment campaign since the beginning of the year, our efforts to get drivers on the road over the past several months were hampered by an unavoidable external backlog in acquiring essential paperwork for commercial drivers,” it said.