Dublin - Metrolink (Swords to Charlemont only)

The longer this is dragged out the higher the cost. If it was built in the 80s it would be a fraction of what it will cost now. Equally if it goes for review and looked again in 2040 it will have escalated too. Either we want a metro capable to moving large volumes of people quickly and accept the high cost or we keep the status quo of disjointed public transport and over reliance on buses. If this gets stalled again we have no hope as a nation to move forward.

Are you serious?

I thought the video was really impressive, most positive and confident I've felt about this project since before the crash.

If you are being serious, I don't know why you think comparing a high speed intercity line with a commuter line is realistic, a more reasonable comparison would be the new Heathrow branch of crossrail which takes 35mins to Paddington.

Metros goal is not a shuttle from city centre to airport, any connections to the airport are a bonus - the metro is principally about distributing people across the city. Sure you could go from South to North ends of the line in no time if you cut out all the stops in between!

As for ambition, well you said it yourself the rest of Europe already had this stuff ages ago - we do not. We do not have experience to draw on here, and cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Get it built as quick as, you can add lines in future. The difference something like this would make is massive

I consider this a very ambitious project. Fully automated running means the system is future proofed from day one to allow absolutely enormous capacity later. Trains can enter stations at higher speed as there's almost no risk of someone falling in front of a train or whatever. The frequency can be down to a train a minute with fully automated systems. That means future branches could be constructed and make use of the city centre spine. The system will almost certainly be extended to the south or south west too at some stage. The Green Line will eventually be upgraded to feed into this. We learn slow but we will learn that doing anything else is complete nonsense when the Green Line is largely metro ready.

But still, one slick youtube video does not an underground make. Need to see the diggers roll in before I will believe it's happening. Just too many false starts in the past. Hoping I'm wrong and that it really will begin for once it begins it will be impossible to stop. And once it opens it will be impossible not to extend.

I have no faith we’ll ever put a spade in the ground.

But the project is appropriately ambitious - it isn’t the fault of the team behind it that we bottled running it out the south side.

This can’t be said enough, I see on social media the shouts of build the dart spur and all that to connect the airport just run more buses, the airport is just one stop, it’s an important one but not the sole reason for the metro although I’m sure it strengthens the business case.

Well this is complete nonsense! The NTA won't be building it anyway, construction will be done by private companiesand will be overseen by TII who oversaw the development of Luas and our motorway network.

IÉ don't have engineers capable of taking on anything like this and even if they did, asking them (or anyone else) to design a revamped Dart Underground plus an Airport link would be madness. Presumably you envisage a spur off the Northern Line but you'd need more tracks for that. It would be a much bigger, more complicated and far more expensive project.

The pricing for less than 20KM of rail link and some stations is out of control.

We need a serious look at why this is forecasted to cost 10 billion (more than likely a lot more) then look to see why we aren't investing this kind of money into the "regional" cities to try and address the massive imbalance of population.

Dublin is absolutely creeking at the seams, traffic, housing, health, the airport, a lot of other resources while other parts of the country could better be used to host business/companies/other airports etc etc

10 billion is just crazy and could be used in so many better ways.

I know that an Airport DART link would require 4-tracking from Connolly to Clongriffin. I know also that much of the preparatory work done on DART underground can be the basis for a revived project. I also suspect that the NTA is likely to know even less about the technical aspects of projects that experienced railway engineers. We have a public transport bureaucracy (D of T, NTA, TFI, CIE, IE) which has shown itself hopeless at actually implementing anything on time and within budget.

You may give out about Irish Rail, but some years ago when there was the Mini-CTC signalling scandal, Irish Rail took over the job themselves and did it more or less as intended.

We should be doing both. The Luas proposals for Cork should be advanced, as should the commuter rail options for both Limerick and Cork, as well as BusConnects for them plus Waterford and Galway.

However, there are no simple solutions.

If you build the infrastructure before the development, then sometimes the development doesn't happen. If you wait for the development to happen, then sometimes the infrastructure is in the wrong place and sometimes it is too costly because of the development.

Dublin is creaking at the seams so lets...not improve its transport infastructure?

The Dart spur to airport is like the N24 route instead of the M20. They miss the objective of the planned project and the media give far too much credence to these alternatives. Ironically both projects (metro and M20) were mothballed during the financial crash and both still badly needed but dogged with set backs and increasing costs in the intervening period.

Also he made up a figure and just states it as fact.

Well if Ryan said that effectively it would cost €5bn in to-day's money, one can only assume that the extra €4.5 billion is for forecast cost inflation. As this is for a period of well over 10 years it's utterly worthless: you cant forecast cost increases over that long a period. It does seem to imply that "construction inflation" is well ahead of the official ECB target of approximately 2% per annum. Why?