Comment by JansjoFromIkea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JansjoFromIkea | Hacker News Reader

The reason I didn't even consider Dublin over London or another major European had little to do with the rent prices as it had to do public transportation.

Being dependent on mainly in Dublin means you'll likely want to restrict yourself to areas which can get you to your workplace with zero connections (and everyone else who works in your general area will probably feel the same). Being an especially wet country (nowhere near as bad as the west of Ireland, mind), means even this is gonna be an utter misery many mornings and evenings. As far as nightlife is concerned, with a better public transportation system you can get away for ages by just continuing to push stuff further out.

In London I've the option if I want to live pretty far out (but still on a line that stops near my office) and live alone for not a whole lot more (if anything) than I'd pay to live within walking distance and share. Hardly anyone I know on my pay level in Dublin could even consider living alone, which puts even further pressure on living as near to work as possible.

I've lived in Dublin for two and a half years years. I like to tell about its public transport to people who complain they have it bad in their city (not that it's an excuse, it's just extremely entertaining to see their reaction):

- There's one suburban train service (DART) that kinda goes through the centre and then just takes you to suburbs. It's like an S-Bahn except it doesn't stop anywhere useful in the city itself. Unless you live in one of the expensive suburbs it takes you to, you can basically forget about it. I've only used it to get out of the city for hikes.

- There's two tram lines, that until a year ago didn't even cross. Oh, and the trams are _extremely_ slow because they have barely any dedicated lanes in the centre, instead sharing the street with the rest of the road traffic. Even when they are on dedicated tracks, they're still absurdly slow for some reason (in comparison to all other tram systems I've used elsewhere).

- There's buses. They're ugly, loud and extremely uncomfortable. They have no timetable, instead they leave their terminus at some fixed time and then go as fast or as slow as they can, sometimes skipping stops if the traffic is bad. [1] Since this means you basically cannot make distributed, reliable connections between buses, they maximize their usefulness by running most of them through a single choke point in the city centre, where it can take up to 30 minutes to go through. Each line has a ton of stops, and every time passengers get on the bus, they go single-file through the driver that asks for the target stop and charges their pre-paid card accordingly (or you can go through a separate card reader that just charges you a daily flat rate, but that doesn't make sense if you're not commuting a long distance that day).

And that's it. Nothing else. Unless you're lucky enough to be on the _two_ tram lines or _one_ commuter train, you're stuck with shitty, expensive buses. Don't move to Dublin.

[1] - There is real-time bus tracking, but this doesn't help you to make a connection, just to leave home/work and not have to stand in the rain for too long. Just hope you bus doesn't get stuck in traffic along the way.

You left out the atrocious(in the few places it exists) cycling infrastructure.

> There's buses. They're ugly, loud and extremely uncomfortable

Ireland didn't invent these buses just to annoy you, the Volvo buses used in Dublin are used worldwide, including London and Berlin. They're as modern as you can get.

They look good from the outside. It's when you actually want to use one that things go downhill:

- Extremely rattly and loud. No idea why, but I assume it's because of the extra resonance created by the double-decker design. Any time the engine is idling, you're shaking with it, and you're likely to get a headache in the long term. Don't even get me started about how it leans and kips hitting tree branches on tight corners in Sandymount. I don't generally get nauseous in public transport, but Dublin buses would without fail get me extremely dizzy.

- Terrible seat design and spacing. I'm not a tall person, but there's some rows where I can barely fit my legs. Not to mention the seats tend to bend back with use, giving the person behind you even less space.

- Dirty. I haven't ever seen a single bus without an empty can, bottle, or other packaging. Spilled liquids are common, too. But that's a general Dublin problem - for some reason it's one of the nastiest cities I've seen, people just don't seem to care for it at all.

Just to be clear - I'm not comparing this against an imaginary Perfect Bus. I'm comparing this against existing bus systems I've used and loved (Warsaw, Munich, Berlin, ...).

This must be a route-dependent thing (e.g. Sandymount routes would have lots of students on them). My routes rarely/ever have trash or liquids on them, hit branches etc.

Again re: seats and engine....these are the same seats and engines used in Germany and England also.

Still, I prefer the trains to buses in Dublin.

I would think Sandymount routes would have few students on them, considering the price of living in that part of the city. What's more, blaming the problem on students/young people (ie. me and my peers) seems short sighted.

I have lived near Ballymun/Glasnevin for years (where there are indeed students), and would consider the problem similarly widespread everywhere I've seen in the city.

I think the mentioned problem of the choke point in the city centre was the important one for me; it's impossible to get from where I live to more or less anywhere else on the Northside without a half hour's bus to O'Connell, a change, and then a 30 minute bus again in the other direction, even if where I am trying to go is just a 10-15 minute direct drive from where I started. Walking to my destination, no matter where it is, has almost always taken a similar amount of time as getting a bus, since I moved to Dublin.

All this said, there's new bus routes coming in, so we'll see if it changes. I'm leaving the city ASAP though.

Everything you wrote is correct. And yet it's vastly superior to what I had living in LA.

BTW, if you want to help improve bike infra please consider asking your employer to support https://dublin.cyclingworks.org/ - we're trying to pressure Shane Ross to take cycling seriously.

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