Unfortunately there appears to be precious little information out there on the web. I spent some moments trying to find descriptions of problems similar to ours, or find a support forum for users of equipment such as ours where we could perhaps get some feedback, without success. That could of course come more as a result of my Googling skills than anything else. Do you know of any sites, forums or otherwise which deals with pellet boilers and their ilk? If not, is there enough call for one to be set up?

Before I start my rant, let me plainly state that I am great supporter of the principles of public transport. That is not to say that I don’t see the use or take advantage of private transport, merely that I feel the balance in society is generally wrong, particularly in the first world, or whatever the preferred term is these days. These societies should be perfectly capable of providing for the vast majority of man’s annual miles, with our regular combinations of buses, trams, trains etc. and private transport being available to fill in the gaps where required. Being able to pack your bags, grab the kids and hit the road for a weekend away seems like a reasonable thing to do, but where is the logic of moving a ton of metal to work and back five days a week?

For probably the majority of the world’s population, public transport is the only option, certainly the only affordable one. In more privileged societies it seems, that logic is largely turned on its head, with many simple journeys costing as much as would the equivalent travelling via private transport, and indeed being more expensive if the journey is shared. Car pooling saves more money than bus pooling.

Yet some of the key problems afflicting these public transport services, is that having lost even the semblance of being a service (and who can deny that they are nothing more than businesses operating within a service field?), the companies involved only through obfuscation manage to run within the guidelines no doubt prescribed by governments. Planning a trip across the country, one could easily spend hours trying to find the cheapest combination or the quickest route. The privatisation of the industry has not exactly resulted in the competition of service and price that the government suggested, but a proliferation of competing and confusing systems which has resulted in a drop in passenger numbers, as a committee found last year. And the confusion, of course, isn’t restricted to the paying customer. Pensioners in the UK can now enjoy the benefit of free bus fares, but at least according to one relative of mine, this is restricted to the local borough, outside of which a mere discount is available partially due to the competing companies – after all, why should you wish to travel away from the one shoddy town?

Paying customers, of course, have the hardest time of all. Unless you are a genius at figuring the ins and outs of the system, public transport never comes particularly cheap, what with all the advance, economy, super, mumbo, banana and toffee flavoured tickets, not to mention all of the student travel cards, young person cards, old person cards, gay person cards, regular user cards and drug abuser cards which can be used for discounts on most, but certainly not all services, particularly any of the ones you might be tempted to use in conjunction with the first. And of course, as there is rarely any integration in the transport system, you’ll probably need at least two varieties of discount card to cover your journey via bus and (shock horror) train, and these rarely come too cheaply. One begins to wonder who on earth was paid money to design the backend pricing systems to some of these services. I remember one particular journey using First North Western trains, where I was sold a Day Return ticket because it was actually cheaper than the single I required. Go fathom! Just how the train companies can manage to create something as complex as a train timetable, and yet can’t produce a viable pricing plan borders on the criminal.

In fact, it gets to the stage now where I’m becoming suspicious that the baffling arrangements aren’t actually designed to confuse customers and reap the benefits of their lack of patience or lack of knowledge to find the right deals. There is no sense of service here, only pandering to government requirements for companies to create offers for the underprivileged. Take the various varieties of student travel card, and Britain isn’t alone on this account. Or click on the image and take a look at how asking for an earlier train on thetrainline.co.uk can result in a previously unavailable ticket magically appearing. Indeed, the manner in which such offers seem to disappear and reappear lends one to conclude that such websites are designed to hide offers from those who might actually take advantage of them. This screenshot even begs another question, that being of how the Value Advance tickets are still available whilst the Advance Standard C¹ appears to have sold out – would some customers voluntarily pay almost thrice the price of the cheapest ticket for exactly the same service?

Of course, the European dream of integration can’t even get a toehold when national systems aren’t even adequately in place. Experiences like this might leave us feeling embarassed, but why should the consumer have to work so hard to pay the best price for a service that the economy cannot survive without? Public transport is not perceived to be the vital economic keystone it really is, the likes of which education and health care are often fully or partially covered through public funding. Competition in the marketplace is the basic principle behind the diversification of the public transport system, but it doesn’t really take a genius to work out that competition cannot thrive in such a market. Go onto the high street to buy a television, and not only is there a variety of worldwide manufacturers to choose from, but there may be half a dozen shops eager to offer more competitive prices and accompanied services. In theory, the consumer can make an informed choice, and vote with his wallet to get the best deal.

Now try to convert that situation into a public transport ‘market’. Queue for a bus on Manchester’s Oxford Road, pick a bus, and depending on your situation you might find yourself getting a 60p student ticket. Get on the wrong one, and he’ll tell you there’s no such thing as a student ticket, and the fare will be £1.20. So you either wait, and barge past the angry queue of people waiting to get on behind you, or more likely just throw the extra fare in the bin. And of course, just like when Dixons rip you off over that warranty on the television, you are just as able to boycott the train service which caused you to be 2 hours late for an interview, except that they’re the only train operator in the entire region.

I often try to make a distinction between individual and social rights. By this I mean to highlight the difference between what each individual by virtue of his very existence has the right to, and those rights which are bestowed upon him by the society in which he lives. One example of this is the individual and personal right of movement. By his very being, man can relocate himself, using his own body, harnessing the power of the animals around him, and since early periods used his knowledge to craft certain forms of transport from the world around him. This does not, however, stretch to man’s ability to travel by any means possible; no single man built the Volkswagen Touareg, no number of harnessed animals would equal an Airbus A380. My point in this instance is that man has the right to travel, and our rich, modern states and societies should be enabling factors to his movements, not restrictions. In return, man must relinquish his demands for the right to travel how he wishes, for these are privileges empowered by his society. Yet society must also acknowledge that a transport service should not be marketed off in chunks to the highest bidder, since which modern economy could survive without it?

Ideally, one should be able to get a route between two locations, across borders, boundaries or whatever divisions, using whatever forms of transport, for a single, logical price, without having to cross reference various travel cards and special routes. He might even be able to relax in the knowledge that his taxes or his annual, universal travel card has it all covered already. But such a dream is only possible with the enforced integration of the various transport systems, and some realistic and public oriented pricing models. Wouldn’t it be worth paying £500 a year to be able to travel anywhere in the country on any form of public transport at any time? And if that were the case, wouldn’t half of the other 60 million on the island find it equally useful? £15 milliard a year plus public subsidies says it’s not.

1. Slightly cheaper than the Banana and Toffee Mix I mentioned earlier.

Now I can of course only pretend that this is a real ‘pet hate’—for starters, it is a pretty universal sentiment—since it serves its purpose pretty well. That of protecting innocent people? Oh no, there is no security at the airport per se! If you want to set off a bomb or open a phial of some contagious disease, in an area as crowded as the city centre, feel free. There are even bins provided for your convenience. But to make everyone feel safer about boarding the big bricks with wings, and of course for the protection of those big bricks with wings, passengers must arrive early, hand up their luggage for inspection, and file through security like cattle. Oh, and these days, of course you should throw away anything over 100ml!

Well that’s all well and good, but does any of it actually work? Any small sharp objects taken through security will be quickly confiscated, just in case you are tempted to start trimming your nails in public (heaven forbid!), but they will happily provide with a can of beer or pop which any remotely enterprising villain could readily fashion into a very sharp implement to slash someone’s throat with.¹ Of course, no billiard cues would be allowed on the plane, since we all know what a great swing you could take in the cabin,² but an extension cord or power cable for wrapping around that little girl’s neck and threatening to asphyxiate her unless they let you into the cockpit, well that’s just using your initiative.

And what about that 100ml limit? It’s actually up to a total of litre in most places, which is probably, thank goodness, insufficient to blow a plane up in one go. Of course, those carefully prepared poxy explosives stored in a tube of mascara and a pot of lip gloss should be able to blow a nice hole in the fuselage. Who knows, maybe more if you sat in the right place!

Of course, not everyone would be daring enough to try something so reliant on chemistry, which is where that little arch that goes “bing” might just do you a favour. In Kraków-Balice airport, a woman wearing a tight denim jacket with buttons to the brim unsurprisingly set off the pulse induction metal detector. A quick frisk and she was on her way. But this was in the days after the British airport security scare, so there was a second, more ‘personal’ security checkpoint to go through. Her bag was searched, and her body checked over with a magic wand, which bleeped away merrily as if it had just discovered an android, and off she went on her merry way, with god knows what packed away in all those little buttons.

Let’s face it, a lot of us have probably smuggled things through airport security, knowingly or otherwise, so just imagine someone putting some effort into it! And if all else fails, you could do worse than try it at a regional airport. That hand luggage you pass through a machine is scanned with X-rays to display a multi-coloured picture of the various frequencies of absorption, highlighting metal, inorganic and most importantly organic substances.³ Last week I managed to smuggle a few pounds of Lancashire hot pot through one of the regional airports of the British Isles, without a qualm or a query. Fortunately for them, there was only a flavour explosion at the other end!

1. Albeit only something for the wealthy villain to contemplate.
2. And after all every Hollywood bar room brawl has shown us how much damage one of those can do.
3. Most common explosives are organic substances.

Example student card

How do you identify a student? Sounds like the opening to a joke, and in many ways this isn’t far from the truth. A great number of services and products come with discounts to students, and discerning who is eligible therefore requires a little more care and attention than simply looking out for tousled hair, hangovers, piercings and berets. Most higher education institutions produce student identification cards, which might double as library cards, security cards and/or university credit cards, amongst other things. However, the vast range of designs and stamps means that identifying a student card could prove as difficult as trying to identify a student by the first glance rule.

Or at least, that is essentially the only excuse applied by the transport authorities of the UK and Ireland in the use of discount travel cards to recoup some of the losses incurred by students availing of discounted services. In Ireland, despite the much reduced number of higher education establishments, the lack of any body similar to the UK’s NUS to provide an all-encompassing identification card allows CIE to demand that students buy a €12 student travel card¹ to avail of their discounted student tickets.

That should surely leave UK students in a much stronger position, since the availability of an NUS card and its associated entitlement to numerous other discounts should surely prove sufficient to identify students as being eligible for student prices for public transport services. Surely. But then it would be folly to forget the twisted logic of the islanders – particularly where red tape and money are concerned.

As a rule, there simply aren’t any student discounts available. Since there is already a suitable national student card available², which covers 98% of all UK students, and already includes a flurry of other discounts on goods and services, there would appear little reason to demand an entirely separate card which qualifies the holder for student travel fares. Hence the discounts offered are in the form of Young Persons’ Railcard, and in the case of London’s Student Oyster photocard are limited to certain establishments and cost £5. Whilst this approach to providing a catch-all discount using age as the discriminating factor is perhaps more logical, and can be found across the continent, the relation born to age actually becomes disconnected by the fact that proof of age is no longer proof of eligibility.

So how do you identify a student then? Does it have anything to do with them actually being a student, or being able to manifestly prove the fact? Where the discounts are available to young persons, does identification bear any relation to them being under the allotted age, or able to prove it? Not where the transport services are concerned.

1. Generally at a cost of €15 to the student, to avoid having to take passport photos and post the application form.
2. Already at such a cost to the beholder that any hike in price might cause some level of protest from the student bodies.

Yet what was only mentioned in passing was that government initiatives to improve the transport network in the country can only be spent once, and ultimately further improvements to the road network must necessarily mean public transport receives less funding. One of the interesting statistics cited was that in Dublin, the only large urban centre, around 70% of commuters travel to work by private transport. Although unduly unfair, for the sake of comparison just consider the figures for the centre of London, which show the figure to be as low as 10%. Is Ireland’s public transport system underperforming?

Public transport

Let us limit ourselves to a consideration of the public transport services in the Dublin area, and exclude those varieties either non-terrestrial or unshared (i.e. planes, ferries, taxis &c.). If we were being unduly critical, the very constitution of the services in this area could be called into question, but in truth the combined services provided by Dublin Bus, the DART and in recent years the LUAS offer in most cases a decent coverage, reasonably rapid transit and under normal circumstances a regular service. Just where then is there a problem in the government and CIE‘s attitude to public transport.

For this we need only look at the price. If we assume an average car achieves 35 miles per gallon, (it can be conceded here that this figure is not representative of general urban driving conditions) and using a price of 105 cents per litre we get an average price per mile of 13-14 cents. Now taking an average annual mileage of 12,000 miles, if we then add on to this price per mile figures for insurance, tax, NCT and servicing, some sundries and double this figure for vehicle depreciation, we come to a figure of approximately 40 cents per mile travelled. Think you could get that kind of value for money on Dublin Bus? An average 3 mile journey on the bus would cost €1.55 i.e. just over 50 cents per mile; a shorter journey would probably be even less value for money.

Of course comparing the value of public and private transport side-by-side is a difficult task, but as the above little calculation shows, public transport is certainly no cheaper than owning a car, and in fact might be a good deal more expensive. Consider the added convenience of owning a car, being able to nip in to the shops or take a detour, without needing to wait for another bus, and worse, buy another ticket to continue on the same journey. Perhaps most importantly of all, take a passenger on your journey and you virtually double the economy, something you can’t do on a bus. Certainly there are disadvantages as well, such as that the bus often avoids the rush hour traffic to some extent using their dedicated lanes, or that there is a matter of parking space in the city centre, but as soon as you take the car outside of these confines these disadvantages soon evaporate. For example, Dublin Bus has an extensive network, but as soon as you operate outside these limits, cars again show their advantages. Further if you want to travel out of peak hours or on the weekends, you may find the journey by car more direct, comfortable and just as fast, and all this with a saving to boot.

Whilst price might not necessarily be the main reason for the prevalence of private transport in the capital, it certainly illustrates a disregard for the ideal of public transport. The institution of bus lanes and the so-called “Quality Bus Corridors” (QBCs) are obvious physical manifestations of the government’s commitment to quality public transport services. Unlike for instance the London congestion charges, however, this does not necessarily imply a real commitment; in fact Dublin Bus’ own findings in 2004 showed that only in 75% of the QBCs was the average bus journey at rush hour quicker than the same journey untaken by car. At any other time this benefit is negated, and fully a quarter of the time this benefit does not even apply at the busiest time.

Government policy appears to be ignoring the Lewis-Mogridge Position, something like transport’s answer to Parkinson’s Law: that traffic expands to meet the available road space. Take for example the Dublin Port Tunnel, due to be opened in December this year; designed to free up HGV traffic from the city centre, and in particular from the narrow Quays, this long vehicle amnesty will only be replaced by private vehicles in the heart of the city. Whilst the benefits of the tunnel should not be understated, the full ramifications of the government’s policy do not seem to have been considered. The implementation of the LUAS might similarly be criticised, in the nature of its overlapping, not necessarily complementary services with Dublin Bus, and that under separate governing bodies. The results of the Dublin Metro are, of course, yet to be seen.

Student fares

Of course, in terms of offering value for money, the government and associated bodies must always be seen to make concessions to those fringe groups, such as students and the elderly, and public transport is no different. CIE produced an advert in recent years which went along the lines of “You asked for more – and we listened”. Which begs the question – what exactly were they listening to? The playful crash of the euros as they collect in the bottom of the piggy bank? Students represent a significant proportion of public transport users, a fact reflected by the building of the LUAS line in close proximity to Trinity College’s residence buildings at Dartry, the number of Dublin Bus services terminating or servicing UCD’s Belfield campus, and the future extension of the LUAS to Grangegorman, the site of the new DIT campus.

But let’s just consider the economy of a student ticket. For €64 students can enjoy 30 days’ travel on all Dublin Bus and LUAS services, for example. Essentially this benefits heavy users of the service, but given that an average student might make the back-and-forth journey to college during the week and wish to make use of the Nightbus service at the weekends, the fact that this isn’t included in the ticket only adds insult to the injury that paying the fare box rate of €1.35 each way would in fact be cheaper. And we must not forget that in the eyes of Ireland’s transport network, students are not students because they are students but because they hold a €12 card which indicates the holder is in fact a student. Such a system would appear abhorrent on the continent; only the balmy Brits would also consider implementing such an abomination.

Public transport for the public

What, then, does this critic propose? As one of those scary proponents of free public transport, that would be seen as the ultimate goal in an ‘ideal world’. Nevertheless, the more immediate aim should be seen by everyone to institute a fair system of tariffs for the public, and that to mean everyone. The systems in place offer a service which whilst purporting to be a real alternative to the world of private transport actually offer a convenience for those with money to spend. The figures can obviously be twisted to support any viewpoint, but when we consider that the government subsidises public transport by only 25%, one of the lowest rates in Europe, the facts illustrated here are no longer much of a surprise.

The Irish nation is in a strong position to deal with the issue of public transport, particularly in the Dublin area, given its geographical benefits and the lack of significant vested interests in the petroleum or car manufacturing industries. In terms of the Dublin area, the economies are greatest of all; consider that a car with one occupant can average 35 miles per passenger per gallon, whilst a bus carrying just 9 passengers can achieve the same efficiency.

If the government wishes to improve the public transport system therefore, it must penalise those using private transport and simultaneously offer incentives to use the systems in place. No matter how good the service is, if it simply does not offer value for money for the consumers, they will look elsewhere. This can happily be achieved in a number of ways, and the QBCs are at least on the right lines here. Better value tickets covering longer durations would prove an incentive for many more people, and offering greater incentives to younger people can only improve the public perception of the service in the next generation.

So until the Irish government and the CIE holding company can improve upon their act, bring that dusty bike out of the garage and do your health a favour at the same time, or put that loose change for the bus aside for petrol money and take the car to work. Hell, at least that way you can have a smoke on the way.