Translink has been urged to take action to make public transport in Belfast more reliable.
The call comes as it emerged that nearly 80,000 of the city's Metro services didn’t run as planned over the past year.
A Freedom of Information request submitted by SDLP Botanic councillor Gary McKeown revealed that 7.6% of Metro journeys over the past year were cancelled, late or terminated before reaching their destination.
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That equates to 78,695 journeys, according to the figures from Translink.
Councillor McKeown said: “Thousands of people across Belfast rely on Metro buses to get around the city every day. We need this service to be punctual and dependable, but unfortunately the figures show massive gaps in reliability.
“Not only does this cause inconvenience, but there are also safety issues with people being left to sit at bus stops in the cold or alone with no idea if another bus will come along. I’ve had older people get in contact with me who have been stranded when their timetabled bus didn’t show up.
“What we also don’t know is what times of day the problems are worst – if the services are running fine during quieter times, it would suggest significant issues in the morning and afternoon when people are trying to get to and from work or school.
“In real terms these figures show that nearly 80,000 services were disrupted, meaning thousands of passengers will have been inconvenienced, leaving many people at risk of being late for work, missing important appointments or having to make alternative travel arrangements at the last minute, with the potential for additional costs.”
Cllr McKeown added: “While I would stress that Translink staff do a tremendous job keeping services running in all conditions and acknowledge that the vast majority of services run on time, I am still concerned that so many Metro services failed to run as planned last year.
“As part of our attempts to help combat the climate crisis by lowering emissions and removing cars from our roads, we want people to use more sustainable forms of transport. However, for this to happen we need to ensure that we do everything possible to provide a reliable service that gets people where they need to go without delay.
“In some respects, a more reliable service would mean more people leaving the car at home, which would actually reduce the congestion which probably accounts for a lot of the delay issues, creating a vicious cycle. I believe that these statistics show that there is room for improvement when it comes to reliability, particularly in light of the recent increase in fares being introduced.”
A Translink spokesperson said: “Translink operates around 6K Metro services every day to a high standard of punctuality and reliability, and we continually monitor and adjust services where we can to maintain a high-quality service for our customers.
“Coming out of the pandemic during 2022, we’ve experienced many challenges in relation to driver availability and other factors including traffic congestion, road traffic accidents, road works/road closures and other reasons outside of our control.
“A robust and sustained action plan is having a very positive impact on our service performance in 2023 with reliability across Metro trending above 98% from the start of this year as we continue to see passenger numbers grow back to pre-Covid levels.
“We remain committed to keeping people connected and helping Northern Ireland build back greener.”
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