Clear Limerick - Village Magazine

60 — village july 2009

beneﬁt comparatively few: those in new de-

velopments such as Cherrywood, CityWest

and ParkWest, or those who already have a

car and can drive to large park-and-ride sites.

But, taking the city as a whole, this is small

potatoes. Think of the all the areas left on bus

routes with decreasing frequencies, from Coo-

lock to Finglas, Blanchardstown to Jobstown,

Kimmage to Irishtown, and so on. Transport

investment can no longer be the preserve of

industry insiders: we are coming face-to-face

with vital spending decisions which have the

potential to reduce mobility, hamper people’s

employment prospects, and increase social

division.

New light rail lines cost upwards of €

million a kilometre. French-style Quality Bus

Corridors – which include on-road priority,

real time passenger information showing the

number of minutes to the arrival of the next

bus, and level ﬂoor boarding to aid the elder-

ly and inﬁrm – cost €- million a kilome-

tre. Both modes can carry the same number

of people while the advanced bus mode can in

some cases be faster: the existing Lucan Qual-

ity Bus Corridor – without some much-need-

ed improvements - takes  to  minutes,

even in the morning peak period, while the

proposed light rail line to Lucan will take 

minutes, according to the promoters of Luas,

the Railway Procurement Agency.

There is an alternative to cutting bus fre-

quencies and routes while funding a small

number of high cost light rail projects – and

that’s replicating what French cities like Rouen

and Nantes have done. They have used their

light rail systems as a benchmark of quality,

and rethought all aspects of their bus servic-

es to provide this same level of service. This

systemic change is what was originally pro-

posed for our Quality Bus Corridors in the

Dublin Transport Initiative (). The French

leave our current Quality Bus Corridors in the

shade. There are other advantages too in radi-

cally improving the bus mode.

Surveys completed by the Dublin Trans-

poratation Oﬃce show that only about a third

of Luas passengers previously drove. The re-

mainder have switched from walking cycling

and the bus. Crucially, there is no evidence

for any overall reduction in total car use in

the areas served. Meanwhile, on the better

Quality Bus Corridors (Lucan, Stillorgan,

Malahide) there has been direct shift from

car to bus with large reductions in car use.

The reason is that light rail and the proposed

metro avoid reallocation of road space by go-

ing underground, or by

building very few lines,

while with Quality Bus

Corridors general vehi-

cle lanes are reallocated

to bus and cycling. Which

should the state be fund-

ing?

Bus investment will

cut Ireland’s dependence

on fossil fuel to a much

greater extent than light

rail. This is because for a

given investment, much

more bus capacity can be deployed, and a city-

wide system can be created. Although buses are

currently diesel or diesel-electric hybrid, this

will lead to short-term fuel savings through the

reduction in car use it allows. In the medium-

term as renewable electricity comes on stream,

the bus system can be electriﬁed through the

new generation of trolleybuses or battery pow-

ered buses which can be charged by wind en-

ergy at night.

Bus investment will create jobs in Ireland

for the local designers and contractors that

already have the expertise of doing the small-

scale streetworks required. Metro North, on the

other hand, will see a ﬂight of capital as money

goes abroad on imported expertise, tunnel bor-

ing machines, rail vehicles, as well as energy to

produce materials for these heavily engineered

projects. For example, Luas vehicles are import-

ed from France, while Dublin Bus’s last order was

manufactured in Ballymena.

Another downside of light rail as proposed

is that it continues the type of property specula-

tion that got us into the current ﬁnancial mess.

For example, because Metro North is speciﬁcally

designed to avoid taking road space from cars,

the roads will remain full of traﬃc, and park-

and-ride collection points built to increase pa-

tronage on light rail will see new houses spring

up in north Dublin, Meath, Louth and Mon-

aghan. All of this contributes to long-distance

commuting by car, and creates pressure for re-

zonings across north Leinster.

The shift in public transport investment

that yielded Luas shows what can be done. It

set a standard. Technological advances mean

that this standard can now be achieved with

the bus mode at a fraction of the cost. The

question is can we replicate this standard

across our cities, and deliver follow-on bene-

ﬁts in employment creation, fuel savings, and

pollution reduction?

Modern bus investment – such as the well-

established Bus Rapid Transit systems in the

French cities of Rouen and Nantes – persuade

people to switch from car to bus. City-wide

modern bus systems takes investment, but

compared to light rail we can build four times

as much, and serve four times the number of

people, for the same money.

Across our urban areas, people want a high

quality public transport network, not an un-

viable hodgepodge. To the hundreds of thou-

sands left to wait longer at bus stops, the hope

that there will be rail services on some distant

corridor in ﬁve or ten years time is useless.

What the French cities of Nantes and Rouen

have now delivered is exactly what the Gov-

ernment-sponsored Dublin Transport Initia-

tive recommended for Dublin’s Quality Bus

Corridors in . And there have been three

reports since setting out the detail – from MVA

Consultants in , the Oireachtas Transport

Committee in  and Deloitte in .

Serving entire communities, modern bus

systems are a just and rational allocation of re-

sources. Light rail, on the other hand, conﬁnes

a beneﬁt to comparatively few, and because

it consumes so much investment, it leaves all

those outside its catchment with an ever-di-

minishing service. How long will we wait for

real leadership to end the current light rail

charade?

James Leahy is a chartered engineer and has recently com-

pleted an MSc in Sustainable Development at DIT including

a dissertation comparing bus and light rail urban transport.

jamesleahy13@gmail.com

James Nix holds a Barrister-at-Law degree and a masters in

transport planning. james@ien.ie

“A crisis provides a chance for

change. Now is the time to pull

back from proposed light rail

spending that doesn’t deliver

value for money…”

 Metro

 Clare Limerick

 

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