I’ve again raised the 114 bus issues with the National Transport Authority. Here’s the letter I wrote to them and you can see it below too:
Dear NTA team,
Further to my emails of 14th November 2022, 14th January 2024 and 2nd October 2024, I am still continuing to receive many complaints about the reliability of the 114 bus. People in Sandyford who rely on it, particularly between Rockview and Blackthorn Drive, have no other reasonable public transport choice available to them, as this bus every 35 minutes is currently the only east-west bus in the area.
The latest report I have is that the 7.40am 114 bus from Rockview failed to turn up yesterday 21st January 2025 and today 22nd January 2025. I understand that the bus operators are fined based on running less than a certain % of overall passenger kilometres. But in cases like this, when the bus doesn’t show up during the weekday morning peak, it has a much more serious impact than if the bus doesn’t show up at 1 o clock on a Saturday afternoon.
Could this please be raised again with Go Ahead, the operators of this route and are there any plans to address this serious issues with the 114 bus service? I note from the 2024 Punctuality report that the 114 did not reach the 80% punctuality standard in any of the recorded periods in either 2024 or 2023. There are no performance reports on your website that show the reliability performance route by route. Could you please share the reliability performance reports for the 114 for the last few years? I would like to see whether it’s been improving or not.
Regards,
Oisín O’Connor
I’ve written previously to the NTA to complain about the 114. You can read about that here.
The NTA publishes Performance Reports for each bus operator here on their website. The two main performance criteria the bus companies like Go Ahead, Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann have are: Punctuality (did the bus show up on time) and Reliability (did the bus show up at all).
In the reports, you can see Punctuality by route, but for some reason, the NTA don’t publish Reliability per route. The bus providers are supposed to keep Punctuality above 80% but as you can see, below, the 114 is falling short of this every month.
The NTA also record complaints made for each route. The 114 is the most complained about route. It’s very important to send all your complaints directly to the NTA: [email protected]. It’s ok to report them to me or post them to Facebook or whichever. But if you want the NTA to take notice, you need to send the complaint directly to them.
Reliability (% of a route’s KMs that a bus covered) is meant to stay above 98%. Overall, Go Ahead Ireland have improved their Reliability over the past couple of years as you can see below. I have requested a breakdown of the Reliability for the 114 bus itself, because the overall figures could hide the issues that one bus is having.
The NTA are also looking into my request to have a bus shelter at the 114 terminus at Rockview. More details on that and the other bus shelters I’ve requested here.
I’ll keep the pressure on for our public transport services to improve. As always, if you have any public transport issues you’d like to raise with me, please feel free to drop me an email [email protected]
