There must have been around 100 people around the bus stop on Belfast’s Dublin Road last Thursday evening, when the rain was torrential and traffic was once again at a standstill.
Translink’s cunning solution to the current city centre gridlock, apparently caused by the road closures due to Grand Central Station, is to have buses do a loop round Bruce Street, avoiding the usual Howard St/Great Victoria St chaos.
Only in Northern Ireland could a new transport hub make transport much worse.
There were buses for Ballynahinch, Saintfield, Lisburn Road all stopping there. Some of the younger passengers were in their festive finery, dripping wet, but still avoiding the necessary addition of an overcoat.
There was no semblance of a queue, just people surging forward when they saw a bus for their destination emerge from the rain.
I’d been out for the Christmas lunch for our College of Business Studies journalists’ class – 50 years and still standing.
A few of us headed for a last drink to the Crown, which had been our local as it was the nearest bar to the college on Brunswick Street.
Paul and I were heading in the same direction and the bus stop on Great Victoria Street was handy.
Or it would have been, until a Translink inspector stopped by to tell all of us, cowering from the elements in the bus shelter, that we’d have to go to the stop outside the Tesco on Dublin Road. In the rain, with the wind blowing so hard it was turning umbrellas inside out.
En route we passed a bus sitting at the stop on nearby Bruce Street. “Why can’t you pick up passengers here?” I asked.
The driver pointed to the sign. “Alighting only,” it said.
Well, it said “bus stop” where we were originally waiting, but that sign was meaningless.
But the Translink man shook his head. “We don’t pick up passengers here,” he snapped, as if I was asking for a rewrite of the 10 Commandments from Moses himself.
So why not, Translink? Why make people walk from Great Victoria Street past a bus stop where people get off? Why not allow passengers to get on, instead of having to cross a busy road and walk another distance?
What if we were elderly and infirm? Why can’t you make sensible decisions?
It’s not surprising local businesses fear their Christmas trade is being damaged by this near-constant travel chaos. It would deter the hardiest from making a pilgrimage to town, either by bus or car.
The constant refrain is that we need to lessen our dependence on cars.
That’s true, but what is there to encourage people? We have no tube system, no Luas-style trams, instead we got a few new bendy buses.
We’ve got little infrastructure to make bikes an attractive option, with cycle lanes that are non-existent or just stop dead, not to mention some psycho motorists who don’t think cyclists should exist.
And yes, there are irresponsible cyclists too – especially the death-wish brigade who ride in dark clothes with no lights.
Let’s have a look at how our transport system operates.
Unlike in other big cities, you can’t hail taxis on the street.
We have two airports, neither of which has a proper train link to them.
The train stop to the City Airport is no longer outside it. The airport entrance moved, the train stop didn’t, so passengers have to walk alongside a busy dual carriageway.
The International has a disused railway line nearby but it was never linked to the airport and there’s little prospect of that changing any time soon.
Our journo class lived through the worst of the Troubles when buses were regularly hijacked, bomb scares often made travel difficult, and the last bus was at 11pm.
But there were reasons for disrupted service then. Why is public transport still so bad?
Ah well, at least we have a nice, shiny new station.
If you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article and would like to submit a Letter to the Editor to be considered for publication, please click here
Letters to the Editor are invited on any subject. They should be authenticated with a full name, address and a daytime telephone number. Pen names are not allowed.