Car-free in Cork: week four
Ellie rides off into the sunset by bike, bus and train...but is she going to stay car-free?
Sometimes, at Limerick Junction train station, it feels like you and the Iarnród Éireann employee in the hi-vis are the only two people left in the world.
Maybe I’ll come and live here, I think, halfway through the dreamlike state of a long Sunday wait for a train to Cork. Maybe I’ll start a YouTube Channel: Humans of Limerick Junction. Live out the rest of my days in this empty station, with its bird song and its piles of building supplies and its humming vending machines.
And then all of a sudden, a train from Limerick disgorges itself and I’m joined by a throng and we are all crossing the bridge together to Platform 4 to get the Cork train. Everyone is vaping, or on their phone, or vaping and on their phone. Three teen girls are uploading selfies to Instagram. The sun dips gloriously and we’re in that time before dusk where the street lights are lit and the sky is not quite dark, and out of the gathering gloom there comes a whistle.
“The train arriving at Platform 4 is the seventeen twenty nine hours train to Charleville, Mallow and Cork,” the tannoy announces reassuringly. Good, I should be home for about half seven or eight, then. I’ve only been on the road since 9.30am.
I had no idea I’d be getting a train today: I had an event to go to in Clonmel and I had naively assumed that there would be buses between Clonmel and Cork.
My partner was on his way somewhere and gave me a spin to Clonmel from Waterford but to my horror, when I went to book myself a bus back to Cork, I discovered that the Clonmel to Cork bus takes well over four hours and goes via Kilkenny. Yes, that’s right: via Kilkenny.
But all roads lead to Limerick Junction: there's a bus from Clonmel train station to Limerick Junction. Yes, that’s right too: the service between the train stations of Clonmel and Limerick Junction is a bus, on Sundays at least. Clonmel is a town of 20,000 people and it has no train services on a Sunday.
At the locked train station there’s a volubly angry man from Cahir. He’s been waiting for a long time to get home. “I thought I’d leave the car and take the bus, but I’ll be driving tomorrow,” he says. “This is a farce.”
I arrive at the train station at just after three o’clock. I get home at half seven. It costs me €12.10 for the bus from Clonmel to Limerick Junction and €17.05 for the train to Cork, and €1.90 for the city bus service home.
It takes an hour to get to Clonmel to Cork by car. 20 quid in the tank would most certainly see you there.
And this is the problem I’ve encountered on my car-free living experiment all too often: the time it takes.
This week I’m not going to take you through a day-by-day account of my rather dull life and break down each individual day by cost and kilometres and time as I’ve done in the previous weeks.
I want to focus on what I think I’ve learned.
Speaking of learning, JJ reported from UCC’s first academic conference on cycling this week. It was good to read Dr Meredith Glaser acknowledging that Cork is not Amsterdam and that things like terrain do have an impact on people’s choices when it comes to active travel, because I’ve seen local councillors ridiculed for saying the same in the past.
There is one more story I want to tell you, and it happened on the bus on Friday evening.
I got the evening bus to Waterford and, thrills, it was a double-decker coach. Which was good because the service was very busy, with the queue to get on the bus stretching the entire length of Cork bus station’s ugly building.
Shortly before Youghal, a violent altercation broke out between two female travelling companions of rough demeanour: one punched the other in the head, and what ensued was about 15 minutes of emotionally laden, very nasty screaming and roaring and several scuffles.
It was dark, and there was a little girl of about six sitting in front of me with her young adult sister. No-one said anything, even though a couple of older ladies were getting elbowed in the head by the woman who was on her feet, stomping up and down the aisle and bellowing. I decided to have a word.
I asked the woman on her feet if maybe she should consider moving away from her travelling companion and sitting downstairs for the remainder of the journey. But they were too angry: I got briefly bellowed at myself. The driver did nothing. Eventually, the angrier of the women disembarked at the wrong stop, in Youghal. She had been destined for Waterford.
When we got off the bus, the two older women most frightened and closest to the incident were trying to complain to the driver, who was doing his best to pretend he hadn’t been aware of the whole thing, which is not even remotely possible.
Another elderly couple had said to me, “surely the driver will stop and deal with it?” But I said I didn’t think so.
When you’re on public transport, you have to deal with other peoples’ stuff. Sometimes more than is comfortable: once when I was in my teens a homeless gentleman soaked in his own urine got on the 208 (then the number 8) and lost his balance when the driver swung around a particularly sharp corner. For a brief, eye-watering time he came to a rest seated on my lap. I was very embarrassed but he seemed frankly quite pleased with himself.
Public transport needs to be more comfortable and more respected.
The phrase often incorrectly attributed to Margaret Thatcher, but certainly Thatcherite in its loathing for the Great Unwashed, is that “anybody seen in a bus over the age of 25 has failed in life.” And Ireland has bought that one hook, line and sinker. Cars are sold as status symbols: people are judged by the calibre of vehicle they have managed to take out a crippling loan for.
The best way to counter this is to make sure public transport is as comfortable and pleasant as possible and to design and think for all.
There are hidden challenges impacting people’s travel choices all around us all the time.
Have you ever considered, for example, that one reason why older people prefer train travel to buses is that trains have proper toilets? One in five older people is experiencing continence issues.
Another example, a new recent bugbear of mine is the removal of seating in bus shelters: this is a strong disincentive to older people, people with chronic conditions (18.1% of Cork city inhabitants, and 12.6% of Cork county, have a self-reported disability, according to Census 2016), pregnant women and others to waiting indeterminate durations at bus shelters.
It’s a nasty, lazy, ableist and ageist approach to the potential problem of anti-social behaviour, the same mindset that leads to bins and public toilets and other facilities in the public realm being taken away instead of properly policed and serviced.
We need many more bus shelters, and they need to be comfortable.
At Cork County Council’s meeting in January, the issue of bus shelters was discussed and it was disappointing to see the number of councillors citing anti-social behaviour as a reason not to provide them. If young people feel they need to congregate in bus shelters, the answer is more resources for them too.
A couple of years back we cycled from Riga in Latvia to Tallinn in Estonia, up the Baltic coast towards St Petersburg. I highly recommend it as a spin, not least for the pine forests and the wild blueberry bushes and the fact that it’s very flat. And the thrilling sight of black bear paw prints in the woods.
Estonia is a country with relatively sparse services, at least on the secondary roads we were travelling.
But at every crossroads, there was a bus shelter that looked like a quaint cottage, complete with door and little window, and often prettily painted and planted with window boxes of flowers. There might be a scrap of litter or a vaguely pissy smell from a couple of them, but the vast majority were lovely, not only as a shelter against Estonia’s lethally hard winters, but were actually an aesthetically pleasing addition to the landscape, a tiny fairytale cottage against a backdrop of trees.
How come Estonia can do this and rain-drenched Ireland can’t?
At the end of the day….
It’s been a month since I’ve had a personal motor vehicle. So the big question is how long I will continue like this.
The answer, unfortunately, is that I am very unlikely to make the decision to remain fully car-free in the longer term until such time as my travel needs regularise - my work requires the ability to be in an unpredictable variety of places at fairly short notice -or until public transport comes on in leaps and bounds in terms of regularity of service.
Time has been by far my biggest cost this month and I can’t afford that to continue.
I’m always going to love cycling and prefer it over any other way of getting around, and I’m more conscious now that over time, sedentary behaviours become habit-forming, so even after I do get a car again, I’m going to try to avoid the “I’ll just nip out in the car” mentality, to have the personal discipline and organisation to cycle all journeys that are short enough and that don’t involve passengers or heavy hauls.
Right, I’m off into town on my bike now.
So, after a month of being car-free, my personal conclusions:
The dismantling of the rail network in Ireland has been criminally stupid. We need a series of very ambitious infrastructural projects to bring back rail as a functioning form of travel that provides a service that is both regular enough and attractively priced enough to become a viable transport alternative nationwide.
Intercity and rural transport are as much, or more, in need of urgent upgrades than city commuter services. Lots of Irish people have developed lives, like mine, that involve commitments of family or work in different parts of the country. If these people need to get a car because they can’t rely on the patchy or non-existent public transport over longer distances, then they will be encouraged to “get the use” out of their initial outlay in terms of the cost of a vehicle for shorter journeys too.
Making it more affordable for people to choose to live close to work, schools and shopping districts would make a huge impact on how people are able to balance their commuting choices: our transport choices are intertwined with the other societal conditions we face.
Law-makers need to strongly consider the ethical implications of using “push” factors to make car travel more costly and difficult before they have instituted very serious improvements to public transport. They run the risk of causing real hardship and stress in many people’s lives, and they run the risk of inadvertently furthering disadvantage and isolation amongst groups of people like the elderly or the mobility-restricted. And if they don’t see this, they run the risk of alienating their electorate.
Bikes are the best way in and around most of our big towns and cities and, for people who have reasonable levels of cycling ability, will be faster than any other form of transport over distances under 10km. Although I didn’t try one, an e-bike might be a big assistance for those who can’t or don’t want to tackle big hills.
For families, hauling groceries by bike is tough. Unless you have a cargo bike (no, I can’t afford one) you will need to make many more shopping trips and take a lot more time just to do basics like make sure your household is provisioned.
People who aren’t ideologically motivated towards active transport are generally calibrating factors of time, money, energy, comfort, and the network of commitments in their lives. They are largely making their choices as to how to get around based on these factors, and this is the majority of people. Condemnatory or holier-than-thou attitudes here are extremely divisive and unhelpful in the conversation, as is a narrative that pits drivers against cyclists.
Factors like hilly terrain and rain do make an impact on how people choose to get around.
fair play Ellie - so good to see someone testing and gathering evidence that will hopefully inform some better strategy for human transport and ecology