Price Watch - Conor Pope: You spot the prices, we ask the questions
A PriceWatch reader who has recently returned from New York has been in touch about the cost of public transport here and there. When he arrived in New York, Richard Farrelly from Ballsbridge, Dublin, bought a swipe-type, seven-day Metrocard for $24, or just a few cents more than €19.
"Manhattan is nine miles long and two and a half miles wide. The subway runs 24 hours and the ticket allowed me to travel on the entire subway system and the Roosevelt Island cable car and back out to JFK Airport, approximately 13 miles from New York City," Farrelly writes.
He has calculated that in nine days he travelled more than 250 miles on the subway alone, not including "cross-town" bus rides and trains to other boroughs - and all for €19.20. He goes on to point out that a seven-day Dart ticket costs more like €20.
There is only one line "and the trains are not running at weekends [ at least southbound] until September! I rest my case," he concludes.
To be fair, Irish Rail also has tickets that afford greater flexibility and somewhat better value. A seven-day Short Hop ticket, for instance, is valid for unlimited travel on all Dublin Bus, Dart and suburban rail scheduled services between Balbriggan, Kilcoole, Maynooth and Celbridge. But still, at €28 it is nearly €10 dearer than its New York equivalent and doesn't even cover either the Airlink or Nitelink services.
What's more . . .
• Recently we carried an item about the high cost in Ireland, compared with other European countries, of a medical treatment designed to combat male pattern baldness. A reader wrote that he bought a box of 28 Propecia tablets in a pharmacy in Dublin for €245.56 but was able to buy a box of the same tablets in Paris for just €64.51. Dr Maurice Collins, who runs a hair transplant clinic based in Dublin's Blackrock Clinic, has written in with an explanation for the enormous price discrepancy. He says Propecia is not marketed in Ireland, so the tablets would have to have been ordered especially for our reader, hence the high cost. There is, he says, another medication called Proscar, which contains the same chemical as Propecia and is available on prescription in Ireland at a cost of between €50 and €60 for 28 tablets.
• Greg Scollan, from Skerries, Co Dublin, has written to alert readers travelling to Spain this summer of the potential savings that can be made on buying mobile phone handsets. Comparing catalogue prices for Sim-free phones, he found handsets in Ireland sell for nearly €100 more than in Spain. For example, a Nokia 6260, which can sell in Dublin for €449, retails for just €346 in TopDigital outlets across Spain, while the Motorola V3, which has a price-tag of €449 here, costs €379 there.
