A rail fares calculator to examine the National Fares Strategy - Thomas Bibby

The National Transport Authority released a National Fares Strategy summary document on 27 April 2023, which indicates the approach that will be taken to calculating fares for rail and bus services outside the Dublin metropolitan area in the future. Fares will be calculated according to a simple formula:

Fare = Boarding Charge + Distance [as the crow flies] Based Fare

To help illustrate this, I’ve put together a calculator for intercity rail journeys. You can change the value for the boarding charge and the distance based fare and see how fares compare to the existing cash fare. Fares are taken from the Rail Users Ireland Irish Rail Fare Calculator and represent the maximum fare payable: cheaper fares are often available online and the National Fares Strategy document has indicated that this will continue to be the case. Distances (as crow flies) from the Google Maps API.

To be clear I have no insight into what the boarding charge or distance based fare will be, and the defaults here are chosen fairly randomly. I just thought it’d be interesting to put together a tool to illustrate what the potential impact on specific journeys would be.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like more journey pairs added to the table or if you see any errors.

Change the values and hit recalculate to see updated new fares and % change in the table below:

Boarding charge (in cent):

Distance based fare (cent per km [as crow flies]):

Recalculate