Colm O'Regan: 'Are we there yet?' Irish public transport for dummies
Irish Rail also does its bit to keep costs and plastic packaging low by not selling so much as a jelly tot on board the train
Warning: the following article contains references to decent public transport. If your network is ‘pre-Bianconi’, you may wish to look away.
This summer, for some journeys that had always been by car, we said what if we give public transport more of a go?
My three criteria were money, time and comfort. Money used to be simple. The bus and train cost more. But then gap narrowed. Diesel went up. Train and bus fares came down. People started thinking: “You know what? It’s a crazy idea but ..” Yes, a car has insurance and tax and wear and tear, I just haven’t done the sums per trip. Another bit of my brain deals with that. Maybe when this current car conks, I’ll cop onto it.
But for pure diesel, when I added it up, this summer for about 2100km on bus and train, with and without children, cost a little less than the car. And that’s not including parking and tolls and high prices for shite sandwiches in a motorway shopping cathedral.
Irish Rail also does its bit to keep costs and plastic packaging low by NOT SELLING SO MUCH AS A JELLY TOT ON BOARD THE TRAIN. But that’s a different story. Which I will never stop telling.
Time? There’s no point in pretending. Driving takes less time. Although we definitely got out the door faster. It was unprecedented. Sometimes we left the house only once. (Packing was also more severe. “Do we really need all that?” I’d say waving my four underpants and toothbrush in a Ziploc bag.)
But the extra hours were mainly nice hours. Not driving. When I was on my own, I got a bit of work done. (I have one of those not-real jobs where you can do that. Not everyone can. You can’t do your plastering on the train.)
We read. The children coloured, listened to podcasts (about fairytales, they weren’t neck deep in Joe Rogan’s theories. And on headphones, we’re not gobshites.)
Was it comfortable? Swings and roundabouts. A car means autonomy, privacy. Long train journeys inevitable have other people on them.
In a car, you can do all your bad parenting away from the public gaze. And unlike Irish Rail, your car doesn’t tell you you’ve pre-booked a seat and then pretend it knows nothing when you get to it.
But I still wasn’t holding a steering wheel for 25 hours. I could get up for a bit of a walk. Not swearing at knobs. All responsibility devolved to someone else.
The children were not belted in. Not asking “are we there yet?” Okay, they were, but to my face instead of in the mirror.
There was plenty to distract them out the window. One trip was the picturesque Dublin Wexford route. Like a montage in Every Irish Film where someone comes out of a dingy flat and three minutes later, they’re running across beaches, coastal tunnels, cliffs, wooded Pride and Prejudice-looking valleys.
Even the bus trips were an adventure. There will come a time when the top of a double-decker bus will stop being an attraction to a child until they get nosy again in their middle age trying to see whether a site is still derelict. But for now, a stairs on wheels is a big deal.
So less money, more time, more comfort. Am I sold? Enough to keep going in winter? There is the final factor.
I like not setting fire to a new pile of diesel if there’s a fire burning already.
I liked the feeling I hadn’t made any new smoke, no nitrogen dioxide for the neighbours no new CO2 for the planet.
I got this weird feeling, I can’t describe it. I felt ‘good’ about it. I know, it scares me too.
- Colm brings his show to the Skibbereen Arts Festival on Saturday September 3rd, Details at SkibbereenArtsFestival.com
