Give buses an even break

Posh people don't take the bus. And utility workers don't dig up railway tracks.
That, pretty much, sums up the relative value of buses and trams.
That is why we spent e700 on the Luas and why we throw a few million here and there to create quality bus corridors. Does it make sense?
Many people have wondered, and I'm one of them, what's so great about having metal instead of rubber wheels. Can it really justify all the cash spent? The passenger numbers seem to say that it does.
According to the recent survey, when the passengers were asked what they liked about the Luas, they cited the reliability of the service, both in terms of the thing actually showing up and accurate journey times. Buses, you see, can't do that sort of thing.
Except that the QBCs prove that buses can work. When the Stillorgan QBC opened the number of passengers more than doubled and the experience has been similar with many of the other QBCs. However the performance has been slipping because the buses get slowed down in town or by road works or by normal congestion.
The Luas has never has to cope with this. The Luas routes are never blocked and the trams have exclusive road space. Most stretches of QBC end at traffic lights where cars can enter and block the bus lane.
When the tram system was being built the first thing that was done was to move all the utilities out from under the track. That, in itself, cost millions but it guarantees that the tracks will never have to be dug up.
Furthermore, the Luas had bridges built, underpasses dug and whole streets set aside for its exclusive use. When all that is considered it would be damn disappointing if the Luas had not proven popular.
The question to be asked is: why can't all this infrastructure be provided for the bus system? The Northside, for example, had been promised a Luas line that never materialised. While QBCs have been provided across the northside there has been no roadspace cleared like that of the Luas, there are no overpasses or underpasses and the road space allocated has been fought over inch by inch and is subject to the vagaries of road digging. Indeed, outrageously,x buses have been banned from the Dublin Port Tunnel which caused Northsiders so much grief over the years of its construction.
So why is this? Go back to the first line to find out.
I'm not opposed to the Luas. Indeed I'm all in favour of extending it throughout the city. But the fact remains that the great majority of passengers in Dublin are carried on buses and, given our urban sprawl, this is likely to remain the case.
Yet we have no plans what-so-ever to change the way that bus transport operates in Dublin. The QBCs should have given us a taste but the ambition for buses must get much greater. For example, isn't there a strong case for building a shallow north-south tunnel that would allow five to ten bus routes to cross the city in a number of minutes?
It would cost a few hundred million but if we are serious about extending quality public transport right around this city it the kind of bus infrastructure that is necessary. It worked for the Luas.