Luas Finglas

Not “by far”: it won’t even be in the top three. Stephen’s Green, Glasnevin and Tara are expected to be the busiest stations. I also didn’t say the airport was irrelevant, only that it was not the major driver of the Metro route that people in the media seem to think it is.

The Airport really is not an overwhelmingly large traffic generator in the broader scheme of things. If you view it as an airport link, Metro will really only serve people who are already in Dublin, near to a stop, and are going to and from DUB. That's not as large a number as one would think at first.

The airport itself gets 73,000 daily passengers (that's 26 million per year, in and out). Let’s say a quarter of them are in the Metro catchment of 15 minutes walk to a stop, so that’s 18,000 passengers per day that could use metro. There’s a peak hours for people arriving to DUB for morning flights from 0500 to 0800, and for those leaving, it’s spread across the day. Let’s take the morning peak: 9,000 passengers in 3 hours, 3000 per hour. Metro running twelve trains per hour = 250 per train.

So, if everyone going to/from DUB who lived within 15 minutes of a Metro stop used the service to go to the airport, it would barely half-fill the trains between 0500 and 0800. And remember that I’ve over-estimated every number here: that catchment figure is definitely too high to start, and then I assumed that everyone who could use it, would use it.

73,000 per day in and out of DUB sounds like a big number, but only if you see it in isolation. It’s not really that much in the context of Dublin’s daily traffic. Every major approach road to Dublin except the M2 beats it easily, and large shopping centres such as Blanchardstown and Dundrum generate about 50% more traffic each than DUB (both of those average 50,000 visitors per day = 100,000 journeys, when counted the same way).

@Thunder87 I do take your point on the numbers, but I think they oversold it a touch. The figures for the stations north of DUB go a long way to explaining why it’s so high.. There’s about 19,000 people working at Dublin Airport according to Daa, and lots of them live around Swords. It’s the continuation out to Swords that makes the Airport station viable.

Best to move this to the MetroLink thread, though.