irish commuting: not quite getting the concept of "integrated"
Since I will need to figure out a regular means of getting from Chez Waider to (approximately) the Guinness Brewery, and more immediately from Chez Waider to the Life Bar, I've been poking at the various websites of Dublin Bus and the DART to see what my options are. For the latter trip, the DART is closed this weekend due to the ongoing upgrade scheme, and is being replaced with a bus service. In my case, a special bus service as opposed to a beefed-up version of the regular service. The DART site helpfully fails to provide any information about this service; the Dublin Bus site doesn't immediately appear to do so, either, but after digging around a bit I found the press release for the service in their news archive which tells me I can catch said bus from outside the Post Office in Dalkey "every hour, on the hour between 7am and 9pm". First problem solved, at least, although it'd be nice to know if I could catch the bus any closer to home. The work commute led me to look at what passes for multi-mode transport tickets, as there's not a single bus or rail route that will get me to the office. The DART site appears to have the better version of the shared ticket information; apparently you can get an unlimited Rail ticket, an unlimited Rail/Bus ticket, or an unlimited Rail/Luas (tram) ticket, but you can't get an unlimited City transport (i.e. Rail, Luas and Bus) ticket. I'm no stranger to the skull-bursting idiocy of the commuter services here, but it still astounds me how close they can get to The Right Thing without actually getting there - or even being aware that there's anything wrong.