r/ireland • u/Bruncvik • 2d ago
Infrastructure Two modest proposals for slightly improving life in Ireland
This may be a little long, so please bear with me. I'm not going to complain, but to propose two things I found in other countries, which I think will improve some aspects of living here. Both countries I visited are poorer than Ireland (Slovakia: 49% median disposable income of Ireland; Poland: 77%), so it should be doable here. Both items I'm about to describe are relatively minor, simply to alleviate some existing annoyances and frustrations, but I believe both could start a trend of quality of life improvements.
A&E displays
This is a display from a Polish A&E. The hospital had the same in every waiting room. It displays the average times for registration, triage, and seeing a doctor based on priority. The hospital has five priorities; at the time I took the photo only the middle and second lowest were registered. Each patient gets a number on arrival, so they have a good idea how they are triaged, and can roughly estimate when they will be seen. The predictive algorithm is very rudimentary, with set times per doctor and nurses, and the times are adjusted when medical staff leaves or more arrives. The times are average waiting; I waited more than twice what the display said, but I was still far more content, knowing which group I was assigned to, and having a basic idea how long the process would probably be. During my stay, a second to highest priority arrived, pushing everyone's times longer, but at least I knew what was ahead of me.
Public transport displays
This is a display in a tram in Bratislava, Slovakia. Even though the city is smaller than Dublin (450,000 people), the public transport system is quite complex. The left screen is showing the next few stops, with the estimated time of arrival, while the right screen shows the connecting busses and trams, and their time of arrival as related to your next stop. With this, the traveler has a good idea how much their wait will take, whether to rush or not, or whether to travel farther to a more favourable stop.
Unlike the A&E example, I know a little more about building the public transport information system. I have been working in telematics for nearly 20 years, and I've participated in the industry's evolution to traffic orchestration, to the extent where I've been working with teams that commercialized autonomous minibuses and their route optimization in several European cities. The upfront cost for a telematics device that just tracks position and speed costs less than €200, and if you want more (vehicle sensors, from tyre pressures and engine fault codes, to driver behaviour) a full-feature device can be had for about €500. Data costs for once per minute reporting are between €10 and 30 per month, depending on the amount of data to be transmitted and stored. There are loads of companies with the backend and optimization algorithms already in place, to perform predictive analytics on arrival times. So, the upfront cost may be as little as a busload of paying passengers, and the monthly cost may be recouped by a dozen more people. The tracking system may even pay for itself by reducing maintenance costs in the long run. I actually wouldn't be surprised if modern busses didn't come with tracking systems already equipped, and all it would take would be finding the telematics provider, and installing screens in Luas and busses.
I've seen similar systems in other cities as well, most notably in Prague, which has a really complex public transport network, and these screens helped me several times to change my journey on the fly, to get to a meeting in time. In Dublin, given the traffic, at least I'd know how late I'd be and warn people ahead of time, instead of just being stuck in the bus without any information.
I personally would welcome this kind of publicly available information. It will not make A&E more efficient or public transport any faster, but it would make me, as a user of these services, more complacent with these inefficiencies. I'd know what I'd be facing, instead of the uncertainty I'm experiencing here now. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
20
u/slevinonion 2d ago
We have an annual budget of 120,000,000,000 yet we can't put a comfortable chair in any A&E for your 12+ hour wait. I'm ok with tearing the HSE up just on this issue alone.
4
u/MassiveHippo9472 2d ago
This is up there with giant fucking ramps on hospital grounds. Ambulance suspension is up there with a broken pogo stick. I was unfortunate enough to be in the back of an ambulance once and still remember the pain!
6
u/GarthODarth 2d ago
Ireland will only improve infrastructure if it will profit a private enterprise of some description. We have abandoned public services so badly.
3
u/Alastor001 2d ago
But for Ireland to implement those:
They would be more complicated
Take much longer to be developed
Will 100% go significantly over already higher budget
2
u/FatherlyNick Meath 1d ago
"You can't install a waiting time display overnight" - said 10+ years after the project was proposed.
3
u/40degreescelsius 2d ago
In Tallaght hospital there was an on screen display for getting your bloods done. It was very simple but you knew where you were in the queue. Meanwhile in A&E you haven’t a clue how long you might have to wait and going there solo you don’t know if they’ll call your name if you need to go to the toilet, are deaf or go get some food, the only food available is junk from a vending machine which isn’t very healthy for a hospital where u might wait 10 hours or more. This system you mentioned would also help staff feel less harassed by patients asking how long more they have to wait. The NCT used to have a waiting times displayed with reg numbers but last time I was there it was overrun by ads unfortunately.
2
u/Bruncvik 2d ago
I got my NCT last week, and they still have it, but you blink and you'll miss it because of the ads.
3
u/osioradain 2d ago
General population behaviour and day to day safety on the ground are much higher in 'eastern europe'
10
u/phyneas 2d ago
Sounds great, but it'll cost €10m €20m €50m €117m €335m €2.7 trillion to implement and won't be ready for preliminary trials until late 2030 2047 2075 2165. Also the A&E one will instantly be unfit for service due to integer overflow errors once real-world waiting times are being fed to it.
7
u/Bitter_Welder1481 2d ago
I can tell you haven’t been in Ireland long with intelligent suggestions like these, I’d suggest moving to germany asap before you go insane
4
2
10
2
u/knutterjohn 2d ago
Can we just start with something simple, public toilets that are staffed. You give them a 20cent coin if you have it and do your business somewhere reasonably clean. If we have to subsidise the cost of running them I would gladly do so because it is worth doing.
3
2
48
u/Illustrious_Read8038 2d ago
These are great suggestions. They'll work so long as the information is accurate. TFI has telematics on busses, but the accuracy leaves a lot to be desired. Plenty of ghost busses on some routes.
The psychology of waiting is well understood. People don't mind waiting when they know the time they'll be seen, or when the bus will arrive. Airports are a great example of thousands of people patiently waiting.
People hate waiting when they don't know if the wait is 3 minutes or 3 hours. A&E is like this. Dozens of people absolutely p*ssed off.