Metro West Railway Order

Jack Noble

Telchak wrote: »

Minister freezes planning for Metro West

Metro West has been put on hold indefinitely after the Minister for Transport suspended the planning process.

Leo Varadkar said funding to construct the new railway will not be available for the foreseeable future.

In a statement, the Minister said until financial credibility is restored, the international debt funding market would be reluctant to lend funds to finance projects in Ireland, and the exchequer will not be able to make its contribution to the cost in the foreseeable future.

Mr Varadkar said: "Acting on the advice of the National Transport Authority (NTA), I have instructed the Railway Procurement Agency to withdraw its application for a Railway Order from An Bord Pleanála".

He said Metro West has always been considered a long-term project and many of the new communities that it will to serve have not materialised due to the collapse in home building.

However, Minister Varadkar did not rule out the project completely saying it will be examined again when the country's finances have improved.

The Metro West line was due to go from Tallaght through Clondalkin, Liffey Valley and Blanchardstown, and link up with the planned Metro North line to end at the airport.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0925/metro.html

Seems crazy to withdraw the applicaion at this point, will it really cost that much more to finish this last part of the process? It would probably have been quite a while before the order was granted in any case.

According to ABP website, a decision was due in late November.

Strange indeed that he has done this now - why not simply wait for ABP decision and then suspend planning?

Even the RPA at its most optimistic didn't expect construction to start before 2015/16 and trams to run in 2019/20. They wouldn't have needed to go near markets for PPP until 2013 at the earliest.

BluntGuy

The first in a line of announcements one would imagine, but MW was never going anywhere. What we await is the formal killing off of the other major transport projects.

wildefalcon

Jack Noble wrote: »

According to ABP website, a decision was due in late November.

Strange indeed that he has done this now - why not simply wait for ABP decision and then suspend planning?

Even the RPA at its most optimistic didn't expect construction to start before 2015/16 and trams to run in 2019/20. They wouldn't have needed to go near markets for PPP until 2013 at the earliest.

I suspect that there isn't enough money to pay for the various people that "mind" these projects. Lawyers, Planners, RPA staff, Marketing (fancy brochures with bad maps) and the like can consume money at a significant rate, even if only laying the administrative groundwork.

Not huge amounts of money, but when the country is running a current spending deficit, in times when the international credit markets are tight, well, every little helps.

Easier than taking on the unions and getting the existing public transport systems to work properly.

Sponge Bob

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0925/breaking24.html?via=mr

Mr Varadkar said Metro West had always been regarded as a long-term project and that many of the communities that it would have served had not materialised due to the
collapse in home building.

“This does not mean that Metro West has been cancelled. However, with very limited funding available for capital projects over the next few years, I did not consider it to be a good use of taxpayers’ money to advance Metro West any further through the planning process, as I do not know when we will be able to build it.

strassenwo!f

It is very positive that the RPA are not going to waste any further time and money on this absurd project. Even when the country was awash with cash it should have been a very low priority, but for some reason it made it to the top table.

By all means reserve a route for this project for when it might make sense to build it, in many years time when the other necessary projects have been completed.

As Martin Cullen said in praise of the metrowest: "The problem we have with a lot of the public transport systems that exist is that they all come into the city centre."

So cities like Munich, which has a pretty well developed public transport network and where practically everything travels through a 1 km stretch of the centre - they were the ones that had a problem, according to the Minister.:mad:

There were and still are many more important projects for Dublin than the metrowest. If it is ever possible, we should be building routes into and then across the city before we countenance spending money on routes around it.

The planning was poor, the project was not a priority for Dublin, and it's good that it has finally been binned.

DWCommuter

Surely we all realise that this project was merely a vehicle to drive outlandish planning and development on the basis of the Celtic Tiger madness continuing forever. It was just following a semi circle belt of hopeful development that started in the 1970s.

MN is the real deal, but will inevitably fall at the expected hurdle, along with DU. It is indeed over and I am not surprised after 3 years of continuously saying it. The reason? More politics than money.