Bus Eireann annual fares
 

Been looking at maybe giving up my rail pass with the move to bus eireann instead.

I was amazed that the price of bus eireann to irish rail is not much cheaper if not more expensive

example is Wicklow

BS €2,100 pa
IR €1,770 pa

BS this
http://www.buseireann.ie/pdf/1260266...ares-Dub09.pdf

For IR i used this
http://www.taxsaver.ie/en/Ticket-Cal...r/Calculators/


I currently drive to Maynooth 10 ish miles and pay €1,030 for my Irish Rail pass while my BS pass would be €1,776.

That is crazy. Bus is no more than 25 miles into Busáras.

I would have thought the bus would be cheaper than the train

There is a big jump in fares from the Dublin suburban area (Balbriggan, Maynooth, Hazelhatch, Kilcoole - the area served by Dublin Bus) to those areas just outside.

By driving to Maynooth, you are crossing the boundary.

Right. From Maynooth, the best comparator is really an annual Dublin Bus ticket at €980.

The rail fares start to step up after Maynooth as Colm pointed out - Kilcock is €1230 and Enfield is €1770, reaching the maximum (€3400) at Longford.

One thing you can't complain about with Irish Rail. A UK equivalent commute to Longford - Dublin is Peterborough - London which costs nearly 6 grand sterling before you add tube costs. And they don't have taxsaver in the UK.

If you look at it another way, a 3.4k ticket form Longford ends up costing about 1.7k after tax. If you take the approx 2 million cost of a railcar and divide that by 60 (for a 22k), you get about 33 grand for the price of a seat. So just to pay the capital cost of the seat excluding interest, labour, maintenance, and fuel, it would take about 20 years to pay it off.

I love a good moan about Irish Rail when it comes to punctuality or level of passenger information, but you can't really complain about the prices for commuters.

Comparisons with the UK aren't terribly helpful, Peterborough has a train every 10-20 minutes and takes an hour.

Irish Rail's fare system is broken and needs urgent repair.

Whatever about the government paying all the capital costs, the seat gets used more than once per day, which will contribute to operating costs.

Whether or not the government pays the capital cost is purely an accounting issue given that CIE and IE's defecits and captial investments eventually end up on the national balance sheet in any case.

I wouldn't think that a seat on the Sligo line gets used much more that for two one way journeys per day given the loadings on the trains I use. And a significant proportion of that will be freebies on various social service obligations. The only full train I use is the 1805 to Longford and it is at least half full of Maynooth traffic anyway.

The train is fundamentally an expensive way to travel. Luckily, as commuters we don't have to contribute the full cost - otherwise we'd be paying close to 10 grand a year for a Longford - Dublin commute.