Sean Barrett on the transport bill

I do not think privatizing public transport will have a beneficial impact. This is especially true in rural area’s.

Zhou – the West Midlands, UK. I regularly go from Birmingham Airport to the city, and then onto Villa Park (equivalent of going to Landsdowne Road in terms of distance) and back again. In total that costs £5.20, or about €6. Contrast to Dublin: Airlink return is €10; Connolly-Landsdown return: €2.80; total = €12.80, or more than twice the Birmingham price.

Still centrally regulated and subsidised, but with several competitors vying for those subsidies. Subsidies roughly on a par with Dublin, but the system is much more efficient. And they still manage to have an integrated ticketing system.

It’s the same in Edinburgh.

One of Sean Barret’s main examples of the benefits of competition in bus services was Dublin-Galway. This highlights a basic fact: that intercity bus services are a viable commercial proposition and in many if not most countries are a normal commercial activity, subject of course to necessary – principally safety – regulation.

Urban bus services are different, as are many local rural services, in that they are often not viable without subsidy and there are often significant externalities and/or social factors involved.

A useful and practical step would be the immediate de-regualtion and privatisation of all intercity bus services. I think that the McCarthy report recommended something along these lines.

Bus Eireann is involved in the intercity, local/rural and urban bus businesses. While the first should be privatised, ideally the latter two should be the responsibility of local rather than national government (much as I shudder at the thought of our local authorities being put in change of anything). Bus Eireann as at presently constituted is responsible for too great a range of activities, a sort of HSE on wheels.

@Richard, Colm

I concentrated on intercity because I think that’s where there are some straightforward things which can be done. I didn’t intend to duck the issue of Dublin Bus, although I suppose I should have included it in my remarks about urban services in general. But at leas Dublin Bus is a focussed on one reasonably similar set of activities, unlike Bus Eireann.

There were proposals from the late Seamus Brennan to put some services in Dublin out to tender somewhat along the lines mentioned by Richard, but the Unions and their Drumcondra friend quickly stymied that.

@Christy
I’m lost. Are you saying that a public provider like Dublin Bus would never use buses that are old and crap?

@Mark
Many mistakes were indeed made in the wave of privatisations in the UK, and many lessons were learned from that.

Would you mind clarifying the analogy “like a skilled worker selling her tools”?

Particularly, why is public transport a core “tool” of government, and what “skill” has the government shown in applying this tool?

In general, the government should regulate, the private sector operate. The problems with deregulation, where they occur, tend to be that the regulators have rings run round them by the operators who have sharper legal talent.

CIE should be split into network and operations forthwith. Network should remain in public ownership as an operator neutral owner of facilities (stations, yards, tracks) to be leased or licenced to one or more operators. This is the lesson learned from Railtrack. Operations could be privatised, or not, but some breakup would have to be contemplated – that is the lesson learned from VHI.

Irish Rail should then be permitted to run buses while at the same time Dublin Bus could be permitted to run commuter trains and new entrants either or both. Given the impending introduction of smartcards, transferring from service to service and operator to operator should be much easier than heretofore.

At the same time, the Government should request NI Rail to move the shared assets of the Enterprise service into a separate operating company. At present, the service is hobbled not merely by falling down bridges but by an inability to expand if one or other partner does not front up 50%, while sets of “Mark 3” carriages are laid up in North Wall with their Class 201 engines in storage for want of work.

@ Richard Tol

The privatisation of the bus service entails a long-term flow of capital from the public or the public sector (or some combination of the two) in the form of revnues, and crucially, profits. These would be in excess of any gain from a one-off asset disposal, else no private sector operator would entertain the idea.

The efficient management of the service in public hands is a different matter and improved efficiency would require increased investment.

@ Colm Mccarthy

Tendering for London bus routes began in the mid-1980s and full privatisation occurred in the mid-1990s. There were about 60 companies, some went bust and other routes taken over. There was massive duplication of services, different liveries, unconnected and variable timetables, and high and variable fares. Chaos, and plummetting usage.

The improvement in the bus service since 2000 was a result of a campaign to significantly increase bus regulation, as well as a massive subsidy via Transport for London, paid for by the congestion charge, which reversed what had been a rapid decline in bus usage in London.

This latter was such a success that the LibDems, no friend of London’s Mayor Livingstone, argued that his model should be adopted nationwide, see below.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/sep/20/localgovernment.uk

There are a number of misconstruals in this thread.

Consumer bus transport in London was never a free market, or even a regulated market. It has always been tendered, route by route by TfL (and its subsidiaries and antecedents). The tendering process is competitive, but the services do not compete with one another. The congestion charge has nothing to do with the competitive structure of London Transport.

Buses were always subsidised in London. This will nearly always happen when you have a transport system based around a railway system.

In many ways, London is an exceptional city, certainly compared to other cities in Ireland and the UK.

The EC directive and the new legislation provides for an arrangement like London. All subsidised and monopoly bus services will have to be tendered in Ireland, eventually. This means that DB/BE won’t automatically get to run them.

It is up to to the NTA how much they use this arrangement. It seems to be at their discretion whether to operate in this way or to license routes.

Edinburgh and Glasgow usually cited as an example of a city that functions well with privatised transport through a combination of unsubsidised and subsidised routes.

@ Richard Tol

There’s an enormous assumption in that “If…”

The additional factor necessary to attract private capital is profit. Publicly-owned entities are not obliged to generate profits, but can instead focus on the production or delivery of a public good.

Now, you could argue that the private sector is so obviously more efficient at managing capital that it can BOTH generate this additional flow of profit as well as providing a better and/or cheaper service. But I would have thought that the notion of the innate superiority of the private sector would have taken something of a knock in the last couple of years.

@ Richard

Sorry, but I didn’t forget it. The private sector also has a cost of capital, usually at higher rates than the public sector, an increased cost which also has to be met out of post-privatisation revenues.

Contrary to the dogmatic assertions of those at both ends of the spectrum, isn’t it simply the case that, whether or not allowing the private sector to operate in the transport field brings benefits and cheaper prices, depends entirely on whether or not it breaks down monopolies? A private monopoly is no better than a public one.

In relation to bus services, it is clear that allowing the private sector to operate does indeed break the Bus Eireann monopoly and is entirely welcome. It should be actively encouraged. In addition, by the end of 2010, Ireland will have a superb national motorway network (which, let’s be honest, if Irisheconomy.ie had been around in 2000, most posters here would have opposed). By the end of 2010, it should be possible to have non-stop bus services from Dublin to Galway, Limerick, Tralee, Cork and Waterford, all taking little more than a couple of hours. Absolutely ideal situation for having lots of companies competing.

In relation to rail services, it is by no means clear that allowing the private sector in will improve matters. It is very difficult to have different rail companies competing on the same routes. In the UK, the railways are now run privately. But, they don’t compete. Each private sector company has a monopoly on its own territory. Last week I got a return train journey from Holyhead to Cardiff, a not much longer distance than Dublin to Cork. It cost £88 return (100 euros), took 5 hours each way, the train was ancient (I think it was Stevenson’s original), totally lacked any modern facilities and there were virtually no refreshments available beyond crisps and coca cola.

Although having privately-run bus services in the UK has been a success, the same is not true for having privately-run train services there. What we need is pragmatism, not ideology, whicever side of the spectrum it comes from.

As there are so many John’s here, I should say the previous post was from JohnTheOptimist. I forgot to type my full name today.

@ Richard

Im not saying that a public provider would never use old and crap buses but i dont think they have the same incentive to do so.

In general, if the gov/state cant organise a bus system in the capital we need to rethink how the gov/state provides services.

Moreover, if you cant trust the gov/state to run the sytem what makes you think they will be any good at regulating the system – id be sceptical that is easier to regulate than run it, just cheaper

I run a bus company in Dublin. I can tell you that the public sector transport system is immensely inefficient. I could operate the same number of buses And hours as Dublin bus for 25 percent cheaper. I am in no doubt about this. I would still make a big profit. By making the route network more efficient I could improve service and cut costs further.

@ Antoin o lachtnain

Sorry, should have read;

“Such patronage does NOT value efficiency it values unquestioning loyalty.”

I disagree fundamentally with Sean’s analysis of the Public Transport Regulation Bill 2009.

Far from excluding independent operators, it will gradually open up access to State subsidies for them. In this way, private operators will be able to compete equally with CIE for subsidies for unprofitable routes. They will also be able to compete equally for licences to serve any bus route which CIE currently operate.

On the seperate matter of privatisation of Bus Eireann/Dublin Bus. I would agree with downsizing them considerably, but I would not like to see the State completely uninvolved in public transport. The very high standards of service from private operators in ireland is (IMO) directly linked with the need to compete with the high standards of CIE.

In fact, far from the tired notion of Public v. Private ownership, I think we often miss the benefits of having a public and a private system operating in competition with each other. Private operators are compelled to provide a higher level of service and public operators are compelled to make efficiency gains and manage themselves effectively. Keeping a public and a private system operating in parallel can create a healthy competitive tension which will benefit consumers. Perhaps someone would like to develop that further?

@Mark
Sorry. I though we agreed. We do not. You write anonymously and hide your identity also to the administrators of this blog. At the risk of causing offense, I nonetheless recommend that you reread your textbooks on finance and public policy. Your claim that “profits” add “costs” is simply wrong.

The debate on the causes for the current financial crisis is entirely irrelevant for the debate on public transport. You may be reassured by the fact that I would favour nationalisation of the Irish banks at this point in time. I see no contradiction between that position and my position on privatisation of public transport.

@Mark
Here’s my reply: Your points are based on false accounting.

@Mark
Sovereign borrowing is cheaper because sovereigns are guaranteed by taxpayers. Private borrowers have no such guarantee. You confuse actual and apparent costs of capital.

@ Colm

the other issue is that the States ability to borrow money is limited, it can’t borrow to infinity without consequences, as we have seen recently. As such, its ability to borrow is a limited and important resource. The question is, should be be borrowing to invest in an area where private competition would love to get involved, and in an area where the public need is not necessarily always required (ie we don’t need state involvement everywhere in public transport, or we don’t need subsidisation everywhere), when finances are precarious at best?

I meant to say that the rules for licensed routes are much tighter than for public service contracts, rather than the opposite. Apologies.

Eoin Bond: The clearest element of bus operation in Ireland where the state does not need to be involved is the long-distance market. Expressway should be privatised and the market over say 60 kilometres liberalised. There would be plenty of services on offer without subsidy. City services are more complex, but there are succesful models that involve competition in, or for, the market, with some routes subsidised.

This has been an excellent debate – even if, on occasion, it has been a tad fraught. Unfortunately, it appears that some fundamental points have been obscured by specific features of bus and rail transport in the Irish context. These include the limits on state resources, given the multitude and scale of other calls, to invest in sectors where, with effective incentives and regulation, the private sector is perfectly willing and able to participate and invest. They also include the key point that the search to find an effective combination of competition and regulation should be motivated by the objective to achieve efficiency in service delivery and to generate benefits, ultimately, for users.

It would be good if one of the principal contributors to this site were to see the benefit of kicking off some discussion of these issues across a number of sectors including transport but extending to energy, water and waste water and telecomms. In most cases the state has not being investing directly in these sectors and relies on high point-of-use tariffs to extract investment finance up-front from users.

Private sector investment in these areas would reduce costs and prices and would be the best form of counter-cyclical stimulus as it would enhance the productive base of the economy.

Any takers?

@ Anton
I also meant to respond to your comment that private operators might never be able to compete for PSO routes. I don’t know where the paragraph you cite is, but Section 20 clearly states that all uncontracted bus routes must be terminated within 2 years of the Minister commencing the Bill. So that seems pretty clear to me.

@Paul Hunt
Is this the kind of thing you have in mind – from my personal submission Colm McCarthy’s Special Review Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes?

“3.1 I propose that the most of the existing regulatory bodies be combined into one Public Utilities Commission.
3.2 Bodies of this type exist in many states of the United States and even at some subsidiary levels. These work alongside the more specialised bodies that operate at federal level eg. The Federal Electricity Regulatory Council. I do not see that a PUC need differ in any significant or material way from the way in which the existing regulatory bodies work with EU legislation or other international bodies which set standards and enable cooperation eg. Eurocontrol, IATA
3.3 I propose that the following activities come under the aegis of the Public Utilities Commission
• Electricity generation, transmission, distribution and sale
• Gas transmission, distribution and sale
• Telecommunications
• Broadcasting
• Water supply
• Public Transport – regardless of who owns and operates it
• Taxis
• Airports
• Waste Management
3.4 The Competition Authority should continue to have full, and enhanced, powers as needed to investigate activities, bodies and persons coming under the aegis of the PUC, in addition to its work covering the provision of other goods and services. This is necessary as part of the checks and balances needed to limit the scope for excess in a democratic state with a market economy.
3.5 One advantage of the PUC would be to minimise
• the risk of the regulatory bodies becoming captured by those they are to regulate
• the duplication of some routine organisational structures in each of the existing bodies.
• arbitrary interference by Government in the operation of regulatory bodies which come under their aegis
3.6 Neither the recent OECD report on Public Sector Reform nor the Government appointed implementation body suggested setting up a Public Utilities Commission.
3.7 PUC should report directly to the Dáil, in much the same way as the Comptroller and Auditor General does. This should limit the scope for day-to-interference by Government. Any changes in the operation of the PUC would have to be made through legislation.
3.8 Setting up the Public Utilities Commission should be used to broaden the experience of not just those making up the Commission (which should not have more than 5 members), but also the staffing. This should enable learning from different ways of doing things.
In short, there should be a deliberate, carefully implemented policy of employing people with experience and expertise from outside Ireland. This is no different from public policies and practice for changing economic and public sector performance by bringing in people from abroad eg.
• Foreign Direct Investment in manufacturing and services
• Scientific and technical skills eg. as part of Science Foundation Ireland programmes
• Contractors for the National Roads Authority’s Programme
• Appointing a non-national as the Inspector of the Garda Síochána
• The appointment of a person with considerable outside experience to lead the cancer management strategy within the HSE. ”

@Antoin
Please let me have chapter and verse on the experience from abroad on the benefits of a real-time information system.
Based on my regular experience (FYI by preference, I use public transport to go from the North side to Sandyford to work – yes, it does mean using three modes ie, bus/walking/LUAS. Yes, I do own a car too!), I get fed up waiting at bus stops, not knowing how long I am going to have to wait. I firmly believe that a real-time information system is a benefit to users/customers of public transport services.
We, public transport users, need it precisely because of the uncertainties (eg. delays arising from traffic).
To put it another way, when things get complex, there are at least two responses 1). to sub-divide ie. give the work out to smaller units 2) improve information processing. In practice, managing complexity successfully does both.
Those responsible for the provision of Irish public transport (whether through publicly owned monopolies or regulated private services or some mixture of the two) have not shown that they have the know-how and capacity to manage the complexities of public transport in a urban area.
In the mid 1990s, a senior Bus Atha Cliath manager told me that they were testing a real-time information system and expected to have it running within 5 years.
IMO, 15 years in long enough to manage the complexities involved.

@tommy tighe
IMO, the public authorities have had more than enough lead time to provide us with reliable user oriented public transport services.

“it can take over an hour to drive up O’Connell Street at rush hour, while the Bus Driver issues tickets to everyone”
On this, CIE/Bus Atha Cliath refused to answer questions I put to them (last July) on precisely this issue. As these state bodies are not subject Freedom of Information, I used the EU-mandated Freedom of Access to Information on the Environment Regulations to try to understand the extent, if any, to which Bus Atha Cliath looks seriously at optimising the running time of their buses.
What do you think this refusal means?

@Antoin
“It really depends on the skill and determination of NTA management2

Yes. Indeed!
Where do think that is likely to be drawn from?

Re RTPI – there is a lot of research, and it is moved on a bit from when I did my last big review of it. However, you will still see the ambiguity in the findings. See http://www.dft.gov.uk/adobepdf/245385/249577/prog-rti.pdf . Habe a look at points A65 and points in the same part of the literature review.

For your case with the bus, figuring out when the next bus will depart from the city centre to your home in the evening – whether the system will work for you will depend on how well it integrated the RTPI is with the rostering and the control room, because you are depending on the arrival of a bus on the inward run to turn around and start the outward run (because you will be connecting from Luas, and travelling after the peak, the bus will very likely be on its second run of the evening rush hour from the city). It requires a good bit of engineering to sort this out. Unless it works fairly precisely, you will get incorrect or incomplete information. The real issue is getting a good, workable schedule, and having appropriate bus priority in place.

This is why the key is route improvement. As it happens, one of the most successful route improvement programs ever, anywhere, happened in Dublin, on the Stillorgan Dual Carriageway when the bus priority went in. There was phenomenal modal shif to bus on this corridor – 240 percent over 6 years between 1997 and 2003. This is phenomenal growth, far more than the 2 or 3 percent growth you would expect to see from an RTPI scheme. See http://www.nctr.usf.edu/jpt/pdf/JPT%209-3S%20Mcdonnell.pdf for more information on this.

In the case of your morning journey from your home, the usefulness of RTPI signage really depends on the density of the area. Unless you live in a very densely populated area, it is very unlikely there will be an RTPI sign at your bus stop, for the simple reason that only around one-fifth of bus stops overall will have a sign. It costs 5k-10k euros to put in a sign. (That said, you could access the information by mobile phone and this might make more sense.)

Remember as well that RTPI does not actually help you all that much in your transport choices, and does not reduce your travel time. All it really does is give you a perception of control. I did a lot of research on this about 5 years ago, and found that although information is important in public transport, that what is really needed to make it work (indeed to make any enterprise work) is belief. I mean belief in the sense of religious faith, acting on the assumption that something will happen, even though you have no direct evidence that it actually will happen. Inspiring belief in public transport is really what you have to do to get modal shift to happen. Information is one part of inspiring belief, but there are many other aspects to it. (This is a very potted version of what I found.)

@Antoin
“….. the management appointees are players who are used to dealing with complex political and economic situations. This will be a big benefit to them.”
How will such experience be of benefit to those who either must use or want to use public transport, in addition to those who wish to provide such services?
Despite the intelligence and integrity of the pair you refer to, they have no experience in designing markets for the provision of services to the general public. The cult of the appointing insiders/generalists (amateurs in the area they are to manage) continues.
It was this kind of thing that led me to propose to An Bord Snip that we need a new institution to “regulate” for many utility-type services. I hope that the kind of debate that Paul Hunt calls for would inform this new institution. Let me say that I regard an institution as arising from the combination of a shared set of values together with an organisation to serve that set of values.
The major political complexity is CIE – an organisation that is completely part of the state class and which has shown no capacity to do anything other than preserve it monopolistic tendencies. The economic complexity lies in untangling the present set of subsidies without which CIE would not exist.
I still maintain that the NTA is a distraction from coming to grips with making it easy for people to more around the Greater Dublin Area.
Think back over the last 20 years during which we have many report all of which became government policy
1) The Dublin Transport Initiative
2) DTO’s Platform for Change
3) Transport 21
I remain to be convinced that such messing will not continue. Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

PS. Can you offer me anything in response to my query re. chapter and verse on the experience from abroad on the benefits (or otherwise) of a real-time stop-based information system for all public transport users?

@ Richard Tol

On project finance theory (although I think privatisation is only comparable, not being actual PF):

In a no recourse or limited recourse project financing, the risks for a financier are great. Since the loan can only be repaid when the project is operational, if a major part of the project fails, the financiers are likely to lose a substantial amount of money. The assets that remain are usually highly specialised and possibly in a remote location. If saleable, they may have little value outside the project. Therefore, it is not surprising that financiers, and their advisers, go to substantial efforts to ensure that the risks associated with the project are reduced or eliminated as far as possible. It is also not surprising that because of the risks involved, the cost of such finance is generally higher and it is more time consuming for such finance to be provided.

By contrast, where there is full recourse, ie where the project is backed by a public guarantee, the costs are lower.

My point is: But in that case, all that has happened is that the public body has extended its own credit-worthiness to the private sector, at additional cost, and risk to the public body.

@ Colm Mccarthy

Since all political parties receive votes partly on the basis of their explicit and implicit spending programmes, the pledge received from the taxpayer is not wholly involuntary.

But I agree with your main point. Very large or unexpected expenditures which have received no voluntary pledge from the taxpayer could be required to seek one before go-ahead. I have a suggestion in this regard.

How about a referendum on NAMA?

perhaps let the people at CIE buy all the buses, give them a chance to pay for them over a few years and have service level agreements for certain areas that must still be taken care of, I figure the people doing the job might come up with some interesting solutions if they had to create profit.

@Anton,
my understanding is that the whole point of this Bill is to do away with unlicenced bus routes and allow competition from private operators on all routes -subsidised or not.

@Paul
“I don’t think it would do much for public confidence in the process if regulatory determinations were being seen to be made by “foreigners”…..”

On the contrary, I think that Irish people have very little difficulty with foreigners. How Irish a name is de Valera or Lemass? Why the constant promotion of inward FDI – in all kinds of ways? What about the raising of all kinds of standards which arise from EU membership – where many things are determined by foreigners?

The point I make is that we aspire to standards of living and public services that we see elsewhere – either when we have lived abroad or travelled for pleasure/business or have friends/relatives visit us or watch the media.

All I ask is that we recognise our need to bring in the expertise and experience that we do not have in order to enhance our living standards. At a time like the present, where our existing ways of doing things have proved so inadequate, we need the insight and know-how that people gain elsewhere. One could say that the Government recognised this by breaking with “tradition” in appointing Patrick Honohan as Governor of the Central Bank.

Looking further back, this was how the ESB was founded in the 1920s. An Irishman who gained experience with Siemens in Germany was the prime mover. During the late 1970s, the Government decided to modernise the telecom service by splitting it from the Dept of P&T. The first chief executive (of the interim board) was somebody with a strong American experience. You may have heard the story about the time he refused to meet a crowd of TDs who went to see him, without appointment. Unimaginable for anyone whose only experience of how to do things has been gained in Ireland.

This site owes its existence to people who have considerable experience working and living outside Ireland – some Irish, some not.

@Antoin
Thanks for the reference – which I will follow up in due course.

However, I must comment – at length and negatively – on your statement “one of the most successful route improvement programs ever, anywhere, happened in Dublin, on the Stillorgan Dual Carriageway when the bus priority went in. There was phenomenal modal shif to bus on this corridor – 240 percent over 6 years between 1997 and 2003.”

This so-called improvement represents the way Bus Atha Cliath/CIE want to do things – saturate any and every route with as many vehicles as possible, preferably on road where it has a complete monopoly. The latest manifestation of this railroad way of doing things in the College Green busgate!. They and the public authorities had to be seen getting the Stillorgan Corridor to work – given that many influential car-driving people live use that dual carriageway. There was anecdotal evidence that buses and bus drivers were reallocated from other routes to the Stillorgan Bus Corridor. I have an internal CIE document (which I cannot put my hand on) showing that this is precisely what Bus Atha Cliath/CIE did when one of the first bus corridors was introduced along Fairview, years ago.

The so-called “success” of the Stillorgan route does not show any effort on the part of the public authorities to use optimisation techniques for providing reliable and timely services. CIE/Bus Atha Cliath just want as many buses as they feel are needed to cope with peak demand. As others have pointed out, they regard the resources tied up in such over-capacity as free.

However, I am still struck by the volumes of single occupancy vehicles on the Stillorgan Dual Carriageway at peak times – on the few times that I drive that route on my way to/from work. So I wonder about the extent of modal shift on that route. If the public authorities could not get a modal shift on a route, with an over-supply of buses on a dual-carriageway, the whole concept of modal shift would be damaged. Has the modal shift been independently checked?

So I still maintain, that from a bus users’ point of view, a RTI system will help modal shift. Why have that facility on services where there is greater predictability eg. DART, LUAS and air travel? These are public transport services, run on what are very heavily controlled spaces.
It is precisely the unpredictability of buses travelling in congested streets that makes RTIS necessary from a users’ perspective.

I do not expect a sense of control from a RTIS – just a sense of how much time I have to wait for the next bus on my route. If I know that, I have options eg. continue to wait, ake an alternative but is one if available or take a taxi

“someone will be in charge of public transport and have some sort of control over it.”
Perhaps I am naive, but how much more control can anyone have on an organisation that relies on subsidies – which is what CIE/Bus Atha Cliath is now?

In what ways will the new powers-that-be be exempt from the kind of arbitrary interference and whimsical intervention that our governing classes regard as “good government”?

Time and time again we have seen this myth perpetuated ie. that a new state-sponsored body will deliver the goods, to a high standard and in a consistent manner. It starts like that, but it does not take long for standards to slip.

Let me give you a lengthy example based on the Dublin Port Tunnel(DPT). The two people who you say will now take run the NTA were very heavily involved in this project, particularly before construction, but also during construction.

After two environmental impact statements and a sworn public hearing, the then Minister for the Environment (Noel Dempsey) made an order to go ahead with the DPT. As specified, the operating height was set at 4.65m – the same height as most public roads throughout the EU, with exceptions in the UK.

After the contract to build was awarded and the DPT was in construction, another Minister (the late Seamus Brennan) re-opened the question of the DPT operating height. This was in response to a very small number of truck owners, with very strong support from a PD Senator and the Irish Road Haulage Association. Note that these same people did not raise the operating height as an issue when the specifications for the tunnel were open for public discussion during the EIA and public hearings. Quite the opposite – they called for the DPT to be built without delay.

As importantly, the two people about to be directly involved in the NTA said nothing in public. Being public servants, they probably felt they could not. If they had, it is extremely unlikely that they would have been appointed to the positions they have held since or are now about to hold!

When I sought, under FoI, a statement from the then Minister on what powers he was using to raise this whole question again and spend more public money on a matter which had been decided (by a Minister in a government of which he was a member!), you can imagine that I got a very bland and evasive response. Yet another Minister (Martin Cullen) then started yet another public consultation on the issue to which I responded.

The point of this long story is that we cannot trust our Government not to interfere in arbitrary and whimsical ways in anything – no matter how decided it is by legislation, Ministerial order or contracts. Nor can we rely on the public servants to stop such waste of time, brains and money – precisely because of the way the public service in Ireland operates.

In short, what is to stop similar abuses in power with the NTA?

You ask for faith in a certain way of runnning bus services which seems to be based on not doing the hard work needed to get an RTIS to work.

My experience (set out about) that there is wisdom in the Arab proverb which says “Trust in God, but tie your camel”