Certain public transport routes in rural Ireland need to be increased in order to accommodate passengers, according to independent TD Michael Fitzmaurice.<\/p>\n

Given the restrictions that are in place at the moment due to Covid-19, buses are only able to carry a fraction of the passengers that they normally would in order for social distancing guidelines to be followed.<\/p>\n

Speaking on the matter, Fitzmaurice said: \u201cWhile people must continue to follow social distancing guidelines, public transport providers such as Bus Eireann must run additional services on particular routes to accommodate demand.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people depend on public transport to get to work, to attend medical appointments or for other essential travel as they have might not have direct access to a car.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpeaking to constituents in recent days, I have been made aware of incidents where some passengers have been left on the side of the road as the bus that had arrived had already reached capacity.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn one instance, two constituents had pre-booked and pre-paid for their tickets online the day before they were due to travel.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, when it came to boarding the bus, they were refused entry as it had already reached capacity. They were then faced with the option of waiting a prolonged period for the next bus \u2013 with no guarantee that seats would be available for them then \u2013 or make alternative travel arrangements at short notice.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is unacceptable given that they had pre-booked their tickets for the given route and time. If a service is running, it must be reliable and dependable.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople cannot afford to miss out on essential appointments due to an issue like this,\u201d Fitzmaurice concluded.<\/p>\n

Michael Fitzmaurice 086-1914565<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Certain public transport routes in rural Ireland need to be increased in order to accommodate passengers, according to independent TD Michael Fitzmaurice. Given the restrictions that are in place at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[188],"class_list":{"0":"post-3334","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-press-releases","7":"tag-public-transport"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3335,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334\/revisions\/3335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}