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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
58 — village july 2009
59
cen t of the public transport
spend proposed for Dublin is earmarked for
rail. One underground light rail line, Metro
North, will consume the lion’s share of the
money – estimated at some €- billion. But
the majority of the city won’t be served by
Metro North – or any other rail line. A sec-
ond class bus system, increasingly starved of
investment, is what everyone else using pub-
lic transport will be left with. This will further
disadvantage those too young, old, sick, dis-
abled, or poor, to join our motoring society.
This is not a solution.
Instead of a two-class system, we need to
serve the entire community with a compa-
rable quality of service. The bus system car-
ries over , journeys a day compared
to around , daily Luas journeys. Yet bus
travel times are unreliable, service informa-
tion is patchy, and the entire system is crying
out for radical improvements. A crisis pro-
vides a chance for change. Now is the time to
pull back from proposed light rail spending
that doesn’t deliver value for money, and im-
plement alternative bus proposals that have
been fine-tuned, with little publicity, over the
past four years.
A Luas line and a good Quality Bus Corri-
dor (QBC) both carry the same number of peo-
ple, something proven by Dublin City Council
surveys conducted each November. Yet it has
cost about ten times as much to build Luas at
€ m per km as our Quality Bus Corridors
at approximately € m per km (both figures
include infrastructure, vehicles and depots).
Metro North will be more similar to an un-
derground Luas than the Metros operating
in London or Madrid. It will have a capacity
of only - times that of a Quality Bus Corri-
dor, but at a cost of approximately €-
m per km. The alternatives considered should
not be to build the proposed light rail lines as
cheaper QBC’s but to spend the money to pro-
vide an integrated network of Luas-quality
bus services to the entire city.
Put it another way: city-wide high-frequen-
cy, high-quality public transport can be put in
place by investing in a qualitative change in the
bus mode, as a number of French cities have
done. This is not something we can do with light
rail because it’s just too costly to serve the entire
urban area of our low density city.
What light rail lines are proposed, will
The idea of building Metro while
letting bus services go to the
wall reveals the “fur coat and no
knickers” mentality dominating
our Department of Transport. So
wrote Fintan O’Toole in the Irish
Times back in March.
j a m e s l e a h y a n d j a m e s n i x
Libertas // The Media and Rossport // Frank Dunlop
