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Izzie is spending her year abroad in Dublin. In this blog she discusses all the oddities of the public transport system in Ireland.
My friends all know me as a massive public transport nerd, in fact I even had friends on a trip to Paris send me photos of the trams they saw. In light of my “obsession” I feels right that my first blog about studying in Ireland should be about public transport.
I think the thing that startled me the most when I first came here was how much travel is coach/bus based. At home if I wanted to visit a town or city my first thought would be to get the train. It's fast (relatively), generally connects more places than coaches, and can get out of London in under an hour. Here in Ireland however the norm for travel and trips is bus and coach and it's safer to assume you can do it by bus than by train. Arriving at the airport, instead of a train station, you are bombarded with choices of coach service, Wexford Bus, Bus Eireann, Dublin Express the list goes on.
What is nice about all these services is that the method of payment is all the same: Leap Card. It might be seen as outdated as when you get on the bus you can pay with either cash (the drivers often have no idea of the fare so you both just guess) or Leap Card. The readers aren’t like the Oyster readers in London where they also accept contactless, they only take Leap. However, these Leap Cards work on every single public transport system across Ireland. The Dart takes Leap, Bus Eireann, Aircoach, Dublin Bus etc. You can go from Waterford to Donegal using the Leap system. It's a beautiful thing knowing you don't have to worry about having a ticket, you can just hold the piece of green plastic on the reader and get charged a mystery amount. I am convinced that the charges are random though. I took the bus from Dublin to Wicklow town a few weeks ago and it cost €7 to get there but €12 to return. The same when I went to Trim with a friend, €12 there, €9 back.
My big mistake with the Leap Cards though has been getting a student one (50% off!) and then immediately losing it. It's not the end of the world, I can reorder it, and I definitely need to. It’s starting to resemble last year where I lost my Oyster with my bus pass on it and didn't sort it out for 3 months and would have left it longer had someone not handed it in to lost and found.
The other highlight of Dublin life is the LUAS. This grey and yellow tram brings me so much joy, it's hard to explain why but they just look so sweet. I like to think they have ears, maybe that's why I’ve started thinking of them like Dublin's pets. Luas itself is Irish for speed, which some say is ironic. On tram only sections I’ve seen it reach a dizzying 60 kmph however on the city streets there’s no tram priority so it frequently gets held in traffic jams. It also only has 2 lines, and to change from one to the other you need to walk for 5 minutes between stops on O’Connell Street.
Overall, I am really enjoying Ireland's system. It's quirky and has a lot of character, especially the Leap Cards (Frogs!) and trams. Did I mention I like trams?