Irish Rail: Solution to overcrowding

JupiterKid wrote: »

Here's a novel idea: why not properly plan for, fund and deliver public transportation projects in a proper manner?

Public transport infrastructure in Ireland is shockingly poor and along with serious deficiencies in housing and health is compromising economic competitiveness and social cohesion, not to mention quality of life.

Let's be honest here the real issue is that the goverment in the past has treated rail as a money making semi state instead of treating it as what it should be: Core infrastructure. The whole problem is all the cutbacks and "cost savings" from the last decade are coming back to bite everyone in the áss as the existing infrastructure is buckling under the strain of the demand.

Remember they went and cancelled Dart Underground moaning it was too expensive even though it was ready to go essentially for a bloody metro thats a decade away. DU wasn't just about a new underground tunnel it would have doubled capacity because you'd have 2 Dart lines from North Dublin through to Hazelhatch and another from Maynooth to Bray both intersecting at Pearse. This would have also included new rail stock that would have increased capacity as well not to mention splitting the lines take's alot of pressure off the critically bottlenecked Connolly section where 3 lines from the North merge into one going south.

This is the reason everyone's suffering now because to "save money" instead of considering it an investment in infrastructure that would have paid off in the long term, we now have an ageing Dart fleet in which the older ones are regularly failing due to various issues from their age and insufficient capacity to meet demand as we can't get more and the current Rail network in Dublin is essentially still VICTORIAN in design. The only thing the company can do now is encourage people to try and use less demanding services to avoid the worst of it because they're tied down physically by the current constraints of poor vision, goverment meddling and a struggling stock that part of it is reaching life expired status (40 year's is about the normal life of an average rail stock).