GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Ryanair blames falling passenger traffic and high airport charges for its decision to stop Dublin-Kerry and Dublin-Cork flights in the south of Ireland. The company says it will end the first in early September and the second in late October. Ireland’s greatly improved highway system has cut travel time by road in the south, and the company mentions this as a factor in falling traffic, reports the Irish Times.

Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Effective 2 December, Ryanair will no longer fly to Basel, the budget airline announced Tuesday 10 November. The company has said that it offered Basel airport 13 additional flights and 200,000 more passengers per year if the airport reduced its airport fees. The airport refused.

Ryanair flies to six destinations from Basel. The company says the airport will lose 200 jobs as a result of the closure. Passengers with flights after 2 December will be contacted for  a full refund, the company says.

The city of Geneva has a fairly good Geneva realtime traffic map that allows you to zoom in and see, for example, if it’s better to go from the WTO to Plainpalais via the train station or over the Mont Blanc bridge. You’ll need a cell phone that lets you check web sites if you want to look while in your car – worked on an iPhone when I tried it. But what I found most useful was the realtime report on the number of parking spaces available in city parking garages. Note that the French version seems to work better than the English one, which didn’t allow me to zoom, for example (this could have been a temporary problem).