How close is your home to a high frequency bus service?

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That's fieldmaps.ie The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman. On Newstalk, with Kiya.

Ciara Kelly (0:39)

Now, new figures from the Central Statistics Office reveal that 8 in 10 households are located within 2 kilometres of a bus stop, while almost 7 in 10 are near a high-frequency bus service. And joining us now to discuss this is Adrian Kavanagh, Geography Lecturer at Maynooth University and Brian Caulfield, Professor in the School of Engineering at Trinity College in Dublin. Adrian, we will come to you first of all.

Tell us, I suppose, the headlines from this. What is it saying about the worst and I suppose the best areas geographically that are supplied by public transport?

Adrian Kavanagh (1:12)

I think the best areas, not surprisingly, you're talking about the Greater Dublin area. There's a few pockets where outside of the Greater Dublin area, East Ligo and parts of Limerick aren't badly served. But ultimately, it's very interesting west-east divide here in terms of the regional imbalance.

Counties like Donegal, Leitrim, Roscommon, Galway coming out as the parts of the country that are the furthest away from what they call a high-frequency public transport hub. What's really interesting is, if you drill down further past the county-level data, there's actually more interesting figures to be seen when you look at, say, smaller areas. Once you look at smaller areas, you'll see within each county, there's pockets in those counties that are very badly served. There's parts of West Waterford that are very badly served, parts of the Kilmourkridge local electoral area.

We can talk about a national trend, but within each county, there are pockets that are pretty far away from a high-frequency public transport hub. The problem as well is a lot of these areas can be areas which really don't have a lot of car drivers. If you're an old person who can't drive a car in these areas, you're really depending on neighbors to help you to get to town because a lot of these bus stops are actually in the local town. I remember when as a child, you might have buses would stop along the road to pick people up.

Ciara Kelly (2:48)

Sure.

Adrian Kavanagh (2:49)

Even though bus, in fairness, public transport links, I've seen them myself in the last few years, they have improved a lot, especially within bigger towns, between towns. Over the last few years, one of the main achievements of Raymond Ryan's term as Minister for Transport. But a lot of these, if you don't live in a town or close to a town, you really are depending on people to help you to get to these bus stops. Otherwise, there's no way of getting there.

Ciara Kelly (3:19)

Adrian, is it the wrong way to look at it in terms of looking at it within, sort of, I suppose, county boundaries? Is a better way of looking at this in terms of population, where population is, I suppose, biggest, which would be the East Coast and the Greater Dublin area, there's more services there.

And yes, that follows through, through that Dunigal and Roscommon, etc. have less. But they also have far fewer people there, so far fewer people affected by this.

Adrian Kavanagh (3:49)

There are, but it's fine, I think. If you look at the overall national figures, they look quite good. I think it says almost half the people in the country are within half a kilometre of a bus stop or that. The problem is, what about the other 50 percent, or if you're looking at people who are far away, they're talking about that 10 to 20 percent of people who really aren't being served by the present public transport infrastructure.

In a lot of ways, these groups, they're generally older people in remote rural areas. These are probably the people who are most dependent on it. I think, by and large, you tend to find that the groups that are closest to public transport link tend to be younger people in the cities. At a lot of times, maybe they've got more options in terms of transport, including public transport, but maybe other options than these older rural groups.

Ciara Kelly (4:49)

Adrian Kavanagh, Geography Lecturer at Maynooth University. Thank you for joining us on this. Let's bring in Professor Brian Caulfield, Professor in the School of Engineering in Trinity. Brian, two things kind of jump out at me from this study. Firstly, if you live in Dublin, yes, you're more likely to have good access to public transport, but it also appears to be, if it is to be read in a certain way, easier to deliver good quality transport infrastructure in densely populated areas.