Yea it’s important that ordinary people that support us should also attend and highlight their support for it and the positives it will bring.
Trinity will complain about the route going under their campus and it might damage buildings.
"I for one think my house is worth quite enough as it is, so I oppose this Metro thing!"
Things that will happen
1: Every single Councillor and candidate that can get the day off will attend and try to raise some point, any point, to ensure their name gets in the papers
2: Some absolutely hatstand stuff will be raised by a residents association
3: Someone will ask about a sodding DART spur.
Confirmed Oral Hearing Date. Can only imagine how this will go.
Only had to go back 2 pages for this gem
Its cyclical
...
excuses excuses. no i'm only kidding but there are still people out there going on about spurs from clongriffin.
Except there's no capacity on the Northern line for any additional DARTs. So there's no "could just" about it.
And an airport spur does nothing for Swords. The airport is only one of many areas that Metrolink will serve.
or we could just build a spur from clongriffin to the airport
Really the Finglas Luas should have happened as part of the original Cross City project, it doesn't make sense that it wasn't included.
Well it does make a very sad sense. I suspect the planners were worried that if it was built to Finglas, some idiot politicians would use it as an excuse to cancel Metrolink and say extend Luas to the airport instead, leading to a much worse service and of course not serving Swords, etc.
That all sucks for the people of Finglas, but overall it is understandable. I suspect very soon after the TBM's are in the ground building Metrolink, that Finglas will get it's extension then.
Works on the R132 Swords By-Pass are due to get underway this week with a focus on integrating with the delivery of MetroLink. Changes to road layout / junctions and so on. Things are progressing in the background.
R132 Connectivity Improvements On Way As Planning Permission Granted | Fingal County Council
100% agree if possible. I'm not sure if the Luas can go all the way along St Margaret's Road though.
It's frustrating how long Finglas Luas is taking. It's only 4km with 4 stops.
The more inconnectivity of routes the better.
Extending the Luas Finglas from its planned terminus beside Charlestown to Northwood would be an easy win. Continue up St. Margaret's Road, through that new Estate there on the main road and then a stop at Ikea and the new DCC facility, terminating at Northwood luas with an interchange.
It’s one of the reasons I favour a Grand Canal light rail or D+ tunnel alignment.
You would be able to sell it to more of the public as well.
TII certainly do, though obviously they also bring in consultants too. But those consultants need to be managed by senior engineers and project managers at TII, or otherwise a project can go off the tracks very fast. They would have only so many resources to manage major projects like this.
I doubt the NTA or TII have much in the way of engineering expertise in-house, I would have assumed it was all outsourced to third parties.
If I was to guess, it is simply because all the people who might work on this project are currently busy working on Metrolink.
Totally agree. I'm not sure why Luas Finglas is slow to progress given the detailed route in place. The GDA transport strategy released last year pegged Finglas extension for 2030s and I've no idea why.
Ideally we'd have Metro from Sandyford to Donabate. Then could extend Green Luas to Bray no problem. Also Finglas Luas should connect with Metro at Northwood maybe.
With Dart+ also improving capacity and frequency and a new stops in places with Ballyfermot, this would resemble something like a public transport network.
It's actually not even very ambitious or expensive and could all be done in 10 years easy.
The Busconnects orbitals can feed into all these routes also.
It also would help with housing as it opens land for development and also gives people more options for places to live. Eg you could live in Bray if you work in Sandyford. Or live in Drogheda if you work in the airport.
It would take a huge amount of cars and buses off the road also and we could pedestrianise more of the city center.
I totally get what you are saying here overall, but I don’t think it would be an issue for the Finglas Luas extension.
First of all the northern end of the green line is much quieter then the southern section, there is plenty of capacity on the northern end of the line to extend it, in fact arguably it is relatively underutilised on that side of the city.
The other point would be that Finglas is just 5.5km from O’Connell Bridge as the bird flies, while Bray is 19km, not at all the same, in fact Dundrum is 6.5km from the city, so really no reason not to extend it to Finglas.
The city center would be a beautifully quiet pedestrianised area.
Indeed, the problem with removing more private car traffic from the centre of the city (and I agree with the policy 100%) is that it is mostly a win for improving PT capacity/efficiency. If the private cars on a street are replaced by more heavy vehicles like double decker buses then it actually makes the urban environment worse for pedestrians and cyclists.
Removing cars from the core/centre is a necessity because of Dublin's dependence on buses for PT of course. But for me, somewhere like the quays, for example, can never provide decent urban experience while being used as a 4 lane dual carriageway for double decker buses. But that's just the way it has to be for the foreseeable future.
This is a good idea if it was possible.
The bus takes you as far as the canal maybe or just outside, then trams take you the rest of the way.
Most of the pinch points are around the canal area.
There could be a congestion charge for cars also.
Quality of life. If you lived in Ballymun, you could wake up at 8.30
Sure you could walk that and be in work by 9PM 😁
Someone on here said that "with Metrolink one can wake up in Swords at 8AM and be at work before 9PM". This kind of thing needs to stressed and promoted time and time again. As things stand, more Joe Soaps think the Metro is nothing more than 'deh train to the airport'
"with Metrolink one can wake up in Swords at 8AM and be at work before 9PM"
NEEDS TO BE A MANTRA SEEPED INTO THE PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Completely agree with this. It shows the importance of getting Metrolink built. Eamon Ryan said recently that they won't extend Luas to Bray as there simply isn't capacity. Same probably goes for Luas Finglas. Those plans are well advanced, but it's pegged for opening in the 2030s.
If they can't progress these extensions until Metro is built, they really need to prioritise Luas Lucan down to College Green. It would take huge pressure off the Red Line which will be needed when Dart trains start arriving into Heuston, which will happen years before Metro is finished.
It makes no sense at any level - it is double decker buses that are clogging up the streets, not trams which have much higher capacity and require a much smaller footprint particularly as stops can be "in-line". Check out google maps - street view along much of the quays is semi-useless as the views are blocked by walls of buses and basically a single bus "alignment" requires two wide traffic lanes so that non-stopping buses can pass stopping ones.
An issue is that Dublin doesn't have a strategy to integrate bus services with tram services the way it is done in other European cities. Except for London which lacks trams in the centre, in European cities with multiple modes - buses, trams, metro and heavy rail - bus routes generally link suburbs by skirting the edge of centre/core or else terminate just outside it - and don't pass through the core. If you want to get into the central core, you transfer from bus to tram (or metro) at some point.
Of course this isn't currently practical for most Dublin bus routes - for historical reasons buses do too much of the critical heavy lifting for suburban commuters. And the density of tram lines in the centre isn't there and unfortunately there seems to be little inclination to densify the tram network in the centre - preferring to add more km to the extremities which just funnels more passengers into an over-crowded central core. As a result there isn't the tram capacity to offer the kind of integration would make sense - e.g. the G and C spines for example could dump their passengers onto the red Luas at Heuston or an new Luas route say south of the river along Thomas/Dame/Pearse, instead of crawling along the quays crossing the centre of the city.
I'm hoping that more appreciation of the different properties and strengths/weaknesses of the 4 modes: buses, trams, metro and heavy rail will be taken into account in whatever comes after transport 2042. It's understandable it hasn't been a priority in T22-42 given the sorry state of PT infrastructure currently and at least the 2042 plan provides pretty good heavy-rail, metro and to a lesser extent tram integration.
I’m sorry, I know this is all off topic, but two points to the folks talking about ripping up the Luas Crosscity line, points I’m suprised no one else has made.
First, folks seem to be suggesting ripping up the tracks to make more space for buses. But that doesn’t make any sense as buses can and do already use the Luas tracks. Plenty of locations in the city center where buses drive on the Luas tracks like in front of trinity.
So let’s for argument sake say there is less demand for Luas Crosscity when Metrolink open, they could simply reduce the frequency of the Luas Crosscity trams and increase the number of bus routes that use the tram tracks, thus allowing for both to use the space.
And in extreme version you could simply stop the Luas service completely, while leaving the track in place for future potential use, while leaving the buses use the space.
The second point is, actually ripping up the tracks would cost tens of millions and cause massive disruption to the city, similar to the original cross city project, but all for no actual benefit. Frankly it would be political suicide to even suggest it.
It really doesn’t make any logical sense, worse case scenario, you just leave the tracks in place and run more buses, in reality we are likely to see these tracks used heavily in future for a slightly different service when the green line is rerouted when Metrolink gets extended south of Charlemont.
