LUAS Network + Future Expansion

Parts of Lucan are quite close to Dart South West so they have that. The areas of Lucan that will be served by Luas Lucan are by and large just housing estates. I spend quite a lot of time in the area and it really doesn't seem high density enough to justify a metro.

I think a Luas through the Liberties is perfectly fine. It will go to the Stephens Green area which is where a lot of jobs are.

If they're going to build a big plaza in College Green I think a Luas line going through it would greatly hamper the utility of it. The Luas is fairly loud if you're right beside it.

Here’s a couple of ideas…

Link 1 connects Red line to Green at College Green. The High Street to Dame Steet section could eventually be taken over by Luas Lucan, but in the meantime it provides a Heuston-Southside link.

Link 2 provides an alternative N/S link between Red and Green - this is mainly for the benefit of Red line, which could now run to Finglas.

Link X is where I’d like to see the Lucan line continue: Pearse station, Merrion Square, Baggot Street, then to the canal end of Leeson St to meet the future Green realignment.

The reasoning behind this is that on-street sections in the city centre are are slower than lines in the periphery, so to reduce that bottleneck in the centre, split the services into different city-centre destinations, then re-combine them before leaving the centre.

This kind of branching doesn’t add much end-to-end capacity, but utilisation would increase, because passengers have a greater choice of destinations available to them, and within the city, there are more access points for travel further out of the city. Also, having multiple lines in the centre means it’s possible to implement city-area services without killing long-distance capacity.

Thoughts welcome, but do keep in mind that this was 20 minutes with a drawing program, and not some highly-researched plan..

Would DART Underground not provide that while providing all the other benefits to the rail network?

Granted yes a dedicated metro going all the way to Ringsend would serve the purpose better but it seems a bit daft to build both DART Underground and a metro to Lucan when they would both have very similar routes, given how much these things cost.

Well yes but we don't know if we'll ever get Dart underground

It happens all the time in Amsterdam, and that have routes that criss-cross and change, so you could get Lucan-Dundrum for example and Broombridge-Ringsend, as well as the existing ones.

I think the yellow line is the most likely, but with I think it would be extended all the way up Sean Moore Road to terminate with the Red line after Luas Poolbeg. Though I would hope it would run south of ssg with either an elevated or cut and cover so it avoids a junction with the green line.

In general our trams are fairly long. Looking at other Citadis or even Siemens Avenio and CAF Urbos customers, 30-35m seems to be a very common number, making even the red line trams at 44m seem long but at least not uncommon. But our 55m green line are truly a beast, only surpased by (from what I can find) some countries which link trams together (similair to what we do with the 3+4 unit 22Ks for heavy rail) and Budapest with 56m trams (sadly it looks like these went into service before the 402s were extended to 502s).

But I can't see TII building any new lines that aren't capable of using 55m trams, and I imagine they have some plan on how to lengthen all the red line platforms in the distant future (last I checked the new red line fleet is planned as being 44m), but stations like Busaras are making it difficult.

Are there any detailed drawings or road maps of that Knocklyon line?

When you say high level map- is that the one you posted or is there a more detailed one?

Paragraph that might be of interest to you. It seems recently they have decided a Luas is feasible based off those maps but who knows.