Thomil's Random Ramblings

For a keen supporter of public transport like me, the last month or two haven’t been the easiest, with a coalition of fossils and egomaniacs here in Cork bringing down the partial closure of Patrick Street and its use as a public transit corridor. At the same time, BusConnects Cork, 200 million € worth of new vehicles, lines, ticketing principles and other much needed improvements promised in the governments Ireland 2040 plan seem to have taken an express bus to nowhere as they’ve completely disappeared from view. Anyway, I had a day off from work on Thursday, due to it being a bank holiday in the main market that I cover, Germany, and as luck would have it, I’ve been dealing with a bloody migraine all day.  As I’m sitting here on the couch, nursing my head and cursing everyone and no one indiscriminately (Hey, I’m an equal opportunity hater when I’m in a bad mood ;) ), a video on the Facebook Page of RTÉ News catches my eye. Apparently, the city of Zhuzhou in China has be...

Public transport in Cork – a never-ending story. No matter how you twist it, the current situation is completely untenable, and not worthy of a city of coming up to 200.000 people. At the same time, the city is choking in exhaust fumes, the roads are clogged worse than the arteries of a chronic smoker, and more and more new companies are opening up, further inflating the traffic volume. I don’t want to repeat myself here about the current state, I wrote an article about that little more than a year ago, but for the sake of consistency, let’s just highlight the main issues. First of all, public transport is effectively invisible in the cityscape, unless you know what to look for. Most bus stops do not have a passenger shelter, and many lack even the basics like the name of the stop, or a schedule. What’s more, even those stops that do have shelters and haven’t been vandalised don’t really catch anyone’s eye. On Patrick Street especially, you can never be sure whether you have a bu...