[Article] Luas in the news

Victor

http://home.eircom.net/content/irelandcom/topstories/3503257?view=Eircomnet

€770m Luas gets enthusiastic welcome from 30,000 fans
From:ireland.com
Thursday, 1st July, 2004

The first Luas tram carrying the Minister for Transport, Mr Brennan, and more than 300 invited guests rolled into St Stephen's Green from Sandyford at 1.35 p.m. yesterday - one minute ahead of the scheduled 22 minutes for the journey. Tim O'Brien reports.

Twelve years after it was approved by the Cabinet in 1992, and at a cost of around €770 million, the Luas had finally arrived to a hugely enthusiastic welcome. People converged on vantage points and lined adjacent streets to see it go by. At least 30,000 people travelled on it during its first day of operation - the numbers boosted, perhaps, by it being free up to and including Sunday.

The level of interest was such that the intended 3 p.m. launch of public services was brought forward by an hour after the Minister's tram was mobbed by enthusiastic sightseers in St Stephen's Green.

The operators had to increase the number of trams from five to 11 by five o'clock as the evening rush got underway.

A spokesman said passenger numbers had far exceeded expectations. At one point in the afternoon, the frequency exceeded the intended one tram every five minutes, he said.

The day did not go entirely without a hitch, however, with one of the first trams to leave Sandyford running into problems closing its doors at the Kilmacud stop. The tram had to be evacuated and there was a 10 minute delay as passengers waited for another one. The Railway Procurement Agency later said a bottle had become jammed in the door.

Passenger services resume at 5.30 a.m. this morning - but morning commuters will have to wait until early August to enjoy the promised peak service of a tram every five minutes.

Between now and the end of July services are to be restricted to one every 10 minutes - a "running-in period" to allow drivers and passengers as well as other road users to familiarise themselves with the service.

Commenting that it was "an exciting era for infrastructure and public transport in Ireland", Mr Brennan said: "There were those who said it shouldn't be done; there were those who said it wouldn't be done; and there were those who said it couldn't be done. But it has been done. Luas is the foundation stone on which to construct in phases a city and county-wide metro system".

He said comments by the Taoiseach in the Dáil yesterday that the city's metro could not be developed immediately related to the full metro network and did not reflect on plans for a metro to the airport.

Mr Brennan said the Luas was just one element of the transport agenda.

He instanced the Dublin Port Tunnel, the completion of the M50, the DART expansion, the expansion of suburban rail services to Kildare and the development of additional quality bus lanes as "initiatives which are being rolled out aggressively" to address congestion in the city centre.

http://home.eircom.net/content/unison/national/3503442?view=Eircomnet

Winner alright . . . Luas tram beats opposition and gridlock
From:The Irish Independent
Thursday, 1st July, 2004




TRAMS returned triumphantly to the streets of Dublin for the first time in 50 years yesterday on an historic day of Luas celebration.

Thousands of people poured onto the trams which finally opened to the public at 3pm, ending years of controversy over dug-up streets and the cost of the €774m project.

A great Irish Independent race against time at evening rush-hour proved that Luas was fastest.

Our correspondents, travelling by Luas, Dublin Bus and private car, found that Luas was the quickest way to get from St Stephen's Green to Sandyford on Dublin's southside.

The journey times were Luas 22 minutes, private car 35 minutes and Dublin Bus 52 minutes.

But it was not all plain sailing for Transport Minister Seamus Brennan who took the first tram into the city. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern dampened the party mood when he shot down the minister's plans for a full metro linking the Luas lines across the city.

The Taoiseach said the cost of the metro was "way out of line with what is considered reasonable for the taxpayer to bear".

The Rail Procurement Agency had brought forward many proposals over the past few years - the difficulty was the cost of the projects had been huge, said Mr Ahern.

To put a metro into the city on the scale proposed by Mr Brennan and the department would take up an enormous section of the capital programme for the entire State for an inordinate length of time.

Undaunted, Mr Brennan said the Taoiseach had been referring to the entire city-wide metro.

He was still pushing on with proposals for the first element of the metro, a line from the city centre to Dublin Airport.

Treacy Hogan Environment Correspondent

Victor

http://home.eircom.net/content/unison/national/3510142?view=Eircomnet

All aboard as Luas demand exceeds target by 500pc
From:The Irish Independent
Friday, 2nd July, 2004

IT was standing room only on the Luas yesterday as numbers travelling on the new tram service soared close to 100,000, five times the expected average daily number of passengers.

Dublin's new public transport system found itself becoming something of a tourist attraction as visitors to the city mingled with commuters to take advantage of the second of what will be five days of free travel on the route between St Stephen's Green and Sandyford.

Following the success of the first two days of free travel the Rail Procurement Agency (RPA) is due to announce today that a similar five-day free entitlement will mark the launch of the Tallaght section of the route, expected at the end of August.

This had been hinted at in the Seanad on Wednesday night when Transport Minister Seamus Brennan said it was entirely appropriate that the launch of the second route should be marked by just such an arrangement.

Fine Gael Senator Brian Hayes who had raised the matter said yesterday: "Anything else would have been an act of discrimination and would have left a very sour taste for residents who live along the new Tallaght to city centre line."

On Wednesday Padraic White, chairman of the RPA, said an estimated 20,000 plus passengers were expected to use the new line on average each day. But last night a spokesman for the agency said they had been overwhelmed by the public response to the new service.

He said at most they had expected that some 40,000 people would enjoy the free travel each day. He added that while it would be today before the total number of passengers would be known, the figure appeared to be close to 100,000.

"We even had reports of people coming from Donegal and staying overnight to ride on Luas," he said. He added that there had also been reports of one couple proposing on a tram.

Throughout yesterday trams were running at peak time rate to meet demand. A total of 11 trams were in constant use rather than the anticipated four to five.

To ensure that passengers along the entire route were able to board trams the RPA responded to demand by limiting the numbers boarding at each terminal. This followed some complaints by commuters that trams leaving from Sandyford were already full by the time they reached Dundrum.

One hundred staff from the RPA were on duty at stops along the route to ensure the minimum delays for queues, which at each of the two main terminals sometimes numbered more than 600 people.

An RPA spokesman said on average yesterday despite the high demand there was a tram departing every 10 to 15 minutes. Trams have the capacity to carry 315 people of which just 90 are seated.

Meanwhile, the views of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Transport Minister Seamus Brennan were "compatible" in regard to the Metro, Tanaiste Mary Harney told the Dail.

Labour leader Pat Rabbitte had asked her to clarify the remarks made by the Taoiseach that the Government had decided against the Metro and the remarks by Mr Brennan that he intended to go ahead with it.

Ms Harney said Mr Brennan intended to bring proposals on a Metro to Cabinet "soon, probably after August".

She said Mr Ahern had been talking about the "grand plan" for the Metro "which cannot happen quickly for logistical and financial reasons".

Mr Brennan's proposal was to "start" on a metro for the greater Dublin area, she added.

Also, UK safety consultants have been asked by Dublin City Council to carry out a safety audit of the plan to make most of St Stephen's Green two-way for traffic from Sunday.

Amid concerns that many drivers would not be familiar with the radical new layout, the council said any safety problems identified in the independent audit would be tackled.

Traffic changes include:
* Introduction of a righthand turn from Leeson Street to St Stephen's Green east.
* Closure of part of St Stephen's Green west from Cuffe Street and Harcourt Street to York Street.
* Introduction of two-way traffic on St Stephen's Green south (the Iveagh House side) from Cuffe Street to Leeson Street.
* Reversal of traffic flow on St Stephen's Green east.
* Reversal of traffic flow on St Stephen's Green north (the Shelbourne side) from Kildare Street to Dawson Street.

Eugene Moloney and Treacy Hogan

Victor

http://www.rte.ie/news/2004/0703/luas.html

300,000 will have used Luas by tonight

03 July 2004 19:19
Over a quarter of a million people have so far travelled on the Luas line from Sandyford to St Stephen's green, and it is estimated that over 300,000 people will have used the tram service by teatime this evening.

Travel on the city's light rail system has been free of charge since it opened on Wednesday, and free travel continues until the last tram tomorrow night.

Passengers will have to pay to use the LUAS from Monday morning.

Victor

http://home.eircom.net/content/irelandcom/breaking/3528711?view=Eircomnet

Fares come into operation on Luas
From:ireland.com
Monday, 5th July, 2004

Fares come into operation today on the Luas line between St Stephen's Green and Sandyford.

Fares were suspended for the first few days of the operation of Luas, and by last night, over 430,000 passengers had travelled free on the tram system since it started running on Wednesday.

Trams are due to run from 5.30 a.m. today and will run until 12.30 a.m. tonight.

Passengers can get a ticket from a vending machine at the Luas stops. Tickets can also be bought at 13 selected retailers along the route at a reduced rate, a move designed to minimise queuing delays.

Luas fares are to be divided into three zones on the Sandyford line, and four zones on the Tallaght line, which opens in August.

Standard fares within one zone are €1.30, with two zones at €1.60 and three zones reaching the maximum single fare of €2.

http://www.breakingnews.ie/2004/07/05/story155531.html

Free LUAS travel ends today
05/07/2004 - 07:49:54

The five days of introductory free travel period on Dublin’s new LUAS system has ended, with the trams accepting fares from this morning.

Almost half a million people have used the LUAS since the Sandyford to Stephen’s Green line opened five days ago.

Sixty thousand people are expected to travel on the line every day.

A LUAS spokesman said staff would be present at all stops on the line for some time to help people get used to the new ticket machines.

Victor

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2765-1167111,00.html

Comment: Alan Ruddock: The Luas is shiny, beautiful but a monument to waste

If you were ever in any doubt about why Bertie Ahern has managed to get away with seven years of fumbling leadership, the fanfare that greeted the opening of the first Luas tramline in Dublin provided some clues.

Here, remember, is a project that was sketched out on the back of an envelope by our estimable public servants; a project that was delivered late, that cost a fortune, that will inevitably increase traffic chaos on the nation’s busiest intersection. But no matter: the trams are pretty, so pour on the praise.

Thousands of words greeted the tram’s arrival last week, and the begrudgers were told in no uncertain terms to get back in their cages. This Luas is a thing of beauty, something everyone will come to cherish, so why quibble about a few hundred million?

Rest assured that the same amnesia will strike in a few years’ time when Ahern unveils a redeveloped Lansdowne Road, or when Seamus Brennan, the minister for transport, opens Cork’s new airport terminal, or the M50 motorway is eventually completed. Who will care that they will be monuments to waste, inefficiency, poor planning or political foot-dragging? Such will be their beauty that complaints will be deemed petty. Our political leaders will bask in the reflected glory of visible achievement: the length of time it will have taken to deliver them will have dulled the memory of the incompetence that characterised their conception.

The amount of money involved is vast, yet the sense of outrage that should accompany such waste has been strangely muted. Last week the comptroller and auditor-general reported on why the national road-building programme, which was originally expected to cost €7 billion, is now, three years later, expected to cost €16.4 billion. Almost €10 billion above forecast (a year’s spending on the health service, or more new schools and hospitals than we could ever use), yet we accept it with a shrug and continue to wonder why Ireland’s new-found wealth has not delivered better public services.

When asked to defend the astonishing miscalculation, Brennan was candid, just as he was when asked to defend the spiralling cost of the Luas. Way back in 1999 (the last century, as Ahern would style it) the national roads authority had used a “rough, ballpark, back-of-the-envelope” calculation when it tried to work out what all those new roads would cost the taxpayer.

The comptroller and auditor-general’s report tells us that back in those historic times when the national development plan was adopted — about five years ago — the practice of cost estimation “was not well developed”. Well, that’s all right then. Our political masters didn’t really know what they were doing, our public servants didn’t really know how to do it, but no worries; there’s no point going around blaming anyone because the poor chaps just didn’t know how to do their jobs.

It is staggering to discover that a national development plan, involving billions of taxpayers’ money, could be conceived in such shoddy circumstances; that ministers would commit to a plan without having the wit to question its basic assumptions. Even more staggering is that the revelation of such incompetence fails to exact any political price. Brennan assures us that the problems have been fixed and that “virtually all the projects” are now on cost (revised) and on time (revised). So that’s all right, then.

If we cannot get angry about €10 billion being magicked out of the public finances, what can we get angry about? If we had known the true cost of building roads, would we have changed the way we did it, prioritised some schools and hospitals instead, saved money and been more efficient? Surely the answer has to be yes. Yet we shrug and move on.

This cavalier style of government has not been confined to building roads, or airport terminals. The lack of attention to detail, the grotesquely inadequate planning, the failure to spend our money with proper care and attention, has been and remains the defining characteristic of Ahern’s two terms in office.

If the roads programme was devised on the back of an envelope, so too was the wheeze to shunt civil servants and government departments all over the country. No planning and no strategy for a plan that fundamentally changes the way in which we are governed: just announce it, and wing it. Nobody knows what Ahern’s decentralisation programme will cost, and nobody knows the consequences, because nobody has been asked to think it through.

Government departments will be scattered around the country and what skills base there is in our civil service — and, to be fair, there is excellence within it, even if planning is a notable exception — will be severely diluted as individual civil servants, with years of experience and expertise in their area, are forced to move departments because they cannot dislodge their lives from Dublin.

An additional consequence of decentralisation will take yet more taxpayers money away. No matter that the Economic and Social Research Institute deems another round of benchmark pay awards unnecessary, and subscribes to the view that civil servants already earn far more than their unsheltered colleagues in the private sector; Ahern and his colleagues will press ahead because they will not want further to rouse civil service anger. A bad policy will be compounded by the expansion of an equally bad policy. It is madness, but this is government in the Ahern style: unscripted, ill-thought-out and, ultimately, expensive.

The Luas trams are, in many ways, an ideal metaphor for his regime, a triumph of style over substance, an overpriced, late- delivered response to a problem that had changed by the time they were introduced. They may look pretty, they may speed commuters to the centre of the capital, but they are testaments to waste and poor planning.

It is never too late to change course, and this government could still run for another three years. There is still time for Ahern to inject some steel and some purpose into his administration. The first signal of what he plans to do with his remaining years in office will come imminently, when he announces Ireland’s new commissioner for Europe. Joe Walsh, the charming veteran of his cabinet, may well move out of agriculture and into Europe, creating the necessary space for a cabinet reshuffle that needs to happen now, but which the ever-cautious Ahern may yet postpone until the autumn. The selection of a commissioner, however, is a minor act: what matters is the scale of the reshuffle.

Ahern has an opportunity to be dynamic, and he must know that the coming months will be fraught with danger. The trades unions are squaring for a fight — the transport unions are already promising a series of politically motivated strikes to blow government policy off course — and he needs to be decisive. His own backbenchers are justifiably nervous and his ministers are jumpy: there is nothing to be gained by waiting to reshuffle, and much to lose. The local and European elections showed the scale of the voters’ anger and he has to show that he has the capacity to learn and to respond.

The signs, unfortunately, are not encouraging. This government has lacked leadership, vision and direction and it has presided over an astonishing waste of our resources. The result is in plain view: a creaking, ramshackle health service that receives more money than ever before, a road network that is mind-bogglingly expensive, crumbling schools, an overpaid, underperforming and soon to be scattered civil service and now, bizarrely, the very industrial unrest that all Ahern’s money-scattering was meant to avoid.

It is a mess, but at least the strength of the economy and the booming tax receipts give the taoiseach the wherewithal to lead regeneration. Trouble is, of course, that more money makes it easier for him to revert to what he does best: throwing it at problems in the hope that they go away. But look on the bright side: we now know what it costs to build a road, Dublin’s got its trams back and, even better, they look good. Who needs begrudgers?

Victor

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Luas expects to carry 20,000 on first full fare day
From:ireland.com
Monday, 5th July, 2004

Up to 20,000 people are expected to use Dublin's Luas tram system on the first full day of paying customers, the Rail Procurement Authority (RPA) said this evening.

Fares came into operation this morning on the line between St Stephen's Green and Sandyford after five days of free travel marked the tram system's launch last week.

By last night, over 430,000 passengers had travelled free on the Luas, the company said.

A RPA spokesmen told ireland.com that, based on this morning's rush hour passenger numbers, the company was hoping to have a final figure of around 20,000 which he said was well within the planners' estimates.

The spokesman said there had been a "steady flow of passengers all day" with no major delays.

He said there had been a problem with the vending machines accepting credit cards for about an hour and half this morning when the software failed.

He said the first few days would be a "learning curve" for both operators and passengers.

Trams started running at 5.30 a.m. this morning and will continue until 12.30 a.m. tonight.

Victor

http://home.eircom.net/content/irelandcom/topstories/3533787?view=Eircomnet

Fare play as Luas carries 20,000 with hardly a glitch
From:ireland.com
Tuesday, 6th July, 2004

Despite some early-morning problems with credit card and laser card payments, the first day of normal operation of the Luas went well yesterday.

It is estimated that some 20,000 passengers travelled on the tram yesterday, the first fare-paying day.

Early morning commuters who wanted to purchase tickets with credit cards and laser cards yesterday ran into some difficulty when ticket machines at tram stations refused their cards.

The "technical software glitch" was sorted out within 90 minutes, according to a spokesman for the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA), and only affected a small number of people who wanted to buy weekly or monthly tickets.

"IT staff were able to sort it out quickly and RPA staff on site were able to accommodate these people," he added.

At the moment, trams are running at 10-minute intervals. Once the system is normalised, this will change to five-minute intervals at peak hours and 10-minute or 15-minute intervals at off-peak times.

It will run from 5.30 a.m. to 12.30 a.m. on weekdays. On Saturdays it will start at 6.30 a.m. and run until 12.30 a.m. on Sunday.

On Sundays the service resumes at 7 a.m. and runs until 11.30 p.m. Tickets are available from a vending machine at Luas stops. Tickets can also be bought at 14 selected retailers along the route at a reduced rate.

Luas fares are divided into three zones on the Sandyford line. Fares range from €1.30 for a single fare in zone one, €1.60 for travel in two zones and €2 for travel in three zones.

Anyone who cannot produce a valid ticket on request is liable to pay a €45 standard amount immediately.

Failure to pay will result in prosecution.

"We have customer service officers going up and down the tram asking people to show their tickets. Despite predictions, the vast majority of people behave properly," the spokesman stated.

Some 430,000 people travelled for free on the Luas since the Sandyford to Stephen's Green line opened five days ago. Although numbers were nowhere as high on the first paying day, the RPA reported a "busy" day.

"We were not expecting the volumes we had over the first five days, but we are very pleased with the way yesterday went. It was quiet enough between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., then it gradually picked up with commuters from 7 a.m. and it was relatively busy from 8.30 a.m. on, with a steady flow throughout the day."

The novelty of the Luas has not worn off yet and curious day-trippers were still among the passengers yesterday, he stated.

Passenger numbers picked up at rush-hour again, with people queuing to purchase tickets at St Stephen's Green stop.

Staff from the RPA will be present at all stations to assist passengers in purchasing tickets this week.