Unified Proposal, the Circle line and the Luas

Tuesday September 23 2003



It's a bit like the old joke about asking directions at a crossroads in the back of Connemara and the old man sitting on the wall says: "You want to go to Clifden? - ah well, you wouldn't want to start from here at all."Asked about the Luas a week ago, Transport Minister Seamus Brennan said: "If we were starting with a clean sheet of paper, knowing today's figures, you would probably opt for a complete city-wide metro, and you would probably do 100pc of it underground." In other words, you wouldn't want to start from - or end up at - where we are now.
This painfully honest admission by the Minister that the Luas project is a mess and probably a huge mistake provoked a predictably furious political reaction. But the fact is that almost all our politicians must bear some of the blame. And Mr Brennan, at least, is new to it all - one can understand why he is unwilling to carry the can alone.
To those of us who have been aware of the lunacy of Luas from the very beginning, it has been fascinating in recent months to see how it's become acceptable in politically correct circles to be sceptical about Luas or even to be anti-Luas altogether.
Everyone is a Luas sceptic these days - even those media gurus who were zealous supporters of Luas in the beginning can now be heard regaling each other with the latest Luas horror stories. But there was a time - and it's not so very long ago - when anyone who dared to suggest that the Luas might be a bad idea was regarded as a Luddite, an environmental vandal, an anti-public transport capitalist pig or even, the biggest insult of all, a part of the car lobby.
There was a consensus in the loftier reaches of the media at the time that the Luas was good for the city and any opposition had to be firmly stamped out. This politically correct cabal - and they and their high priest know who they are - dismissed any opposition to the Luas as selfish and blinkered. Now they are clambering back on the fence and loudly asking the questions they should have got answers to years ago.
Those of us who were against the Luas at the start were ridiculed as promoters of the car, driving in from our fancy houses in Foxrock everyday, jamming the streets with our polluting automobiles at rush hour and turning the city centre into a giant car park throughout the day. We were accused of being against public transport and for the building of motorways gouged through the old city streets. We would have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, out of our cars and onto the shiny new trams.
Of course, this kind of ridicule was one way of avoiding the serious questions that were obvious even then about Luas. But no matter how cogent the anti-Luas arguments made at the time were, anyone who opposed Luas in the beginning was dismissed as a crank. Even Garret FitzGerald, who pointed out the problems with great clarity right from the start, was patronised as some kind of dotty professor who wore odd socks and read airline timetables for amusement. Sure it's only Garret being Garret, they said.
Yet the concerns raised by FitzGerald and others were genuine, like how the Luas was to get around corners and across junctions in the city centre without creating chaos. And, more fundamentally, whether it was worth going to such enormous trouble and expense for a very limited return in terms of the relatively small number of people that the Luas would carry.
So why were the obvious questions not answered at the time? Simple, really. Back then anything with a polluting combustion engine in it was bad. And anything with a non-polluting electric motor in it was good. So Luas was good and cars, and even buses, were bad. (Except now we know that generating all the electricity has consequences - hence the talk about carbon taxes).
Concerns about the cost of the Luas were raised right from the start. The original estimate of between £200m and £300m was always going to be unreliable because of the necessity to move all the underground services - like water, gas, electricity, phones etc - out from under the trackway. No one really knew what that would involve until digging started.
This was glossed over by the pro-Luas lobby at the time. Subsequently it turned into a huge and costly undertaking, with streets being excavated to a great depth, sometimes for months on end. (It turned out to be almost as expensive as tunnelling but, in spite of this, the pro-Luas lobby would not consider the idea of putting the Luas underground in the city centre - it began to seem that causing grief to motorists was part of their strategy.)
But an even bigger concern at the start was the number of passengers that would be carried - again it was clear at an early stage that the capacity of the two Luas lines was going to be around 7,000 people an hour each. The best estimate was that this would take a few thousand cars off the roads as many of the Luas passengers would be former bus users. At the time it hardly seemed worth the bother. The best estimates even now are that Luas will reduce the number of cars coming into the city each day by around 2pc.
And that is the real tragedy of the situation we are now in - after all the disruption and the chaos and the months of dirt, noise and smells, the effect on Dublin's traffic will be minimal. In fact, instead of making the traffic any better, there is every chance that the Luas will actually make it worse, given what the trams will do to the rest of the road users in the city.
And the really sad part of this, the truly maddening part of it all, is that there was an alternative to Luas that would have solved Dublin's entire traffic problem for a fraction of the cost of just two Luas lines.
Right from the beginning, this section of the Irish Independent made the point repeatedly that the solution to our traffic problem lay, not in the ludicrously expensive and inefficient Luas, but in the Quality Bus Corridor system.
No digging up streets, no moving services, no years of chaos and misery - just a wide line painted down the main routes into the city and bus-friendly traffic lights. And a special traffic corps to police the corridors with draconian measures to stop motorists encroaching.
For less than half the ?750m or ?800m that the two inadequate Luas lines are going to cost us, we could have installed a complete system of QBCs on ALL the main routes into Dublin and bought a huge fleet of new buses.
The capacity of the Luas from Tallaght will be 6,800 passengers an hour and that of the Luas from Sandyford will be 7,100 an hour, which is only a fraction of the 140,000 people carried into the city every morning on the present handful of QBCs during the rush hour period. A good example of what can be achieved is the Stillorgan QBC, launched in 1999 amid predictions it would worsen congestion. Today it is regarded as a triumph of traffic management. The Stillorgan QBC carries nearly 50,000 rush hour commuters, with buses departing every two minutes.
The success of the QBCs, in spite of the traffic congestion which engulfs them as they get into the city, has proved that bus corridors, rather than light rail, are the real solution to Dublin's nightmare congestion. Plus they are so much easier and cheaper to introduce - QBCs cost around ?500,000 per kilometre to lay, much of it going on modifying junctions and traffic lights. The comparison with the hundreds of millions being poured into Luas - not to mention the chaotic disruption to traffic during construction - could not be starker.
In general, the number of people carried on a QBC is roughly the same as the number which will be carried on each of the Luas routes - but at a fraction of the cost. It would have been possible to introduce an entire network of QBCs feeding in from all around the city for less than half the cost of the two Luas lines.
Dublin Bus wants to introduce nine new QBCs and upgrade its existing ones. It has plans for SuperBusways across the city centre, crossing the city north-south and east-west, into which the QBCs would feed and which would have absolute priority and traffic light sequencing.
Again all of this could have been done for peanuts in comparison with the cost of the new Luas lines, serving just two routes. Luas lines, of course, which don't interconnect, one of which stops short of the city centre and the other of which runs through four kilometres of empty space while bypassing populated areas. And don't mention anything about Mad Cows and different gauges.
Now, as this disaster unfolds in the city centre, what is even more irritating than the sight of the huge holes being torn in the city's streets? It is the spectacle of the pro-Luas brigade adopting a critical and questioning position. Now, when it's too late, they are asking the kind of questions they would not listen to at the start.
Seamus Brennan is right. The reality we all have to face now is that we are much too far gone with Luas to stop at this stage. But, given a second chance, there is no way we would do it again. Now, for good or ill, the rest of the city's transport solutions will have to work around Luas.
No doubt the Luas will be a pleasure for those who live near the two lines. But, for everyone else, a full system of QBCs from all the suburbs and the two SuperBusways across the city centre are likely to be the real answer.

dowlingm wrote: »

Manuel Melis (Madrid Metro) told the Oireachtas committee on transport the same thing in 2003 - don't build stations underground, it's dangerous, cut and cover them. (http://debates.oireachtas.ie/TRJ/2003/06/19/00003.asp)

monument wrote: »

Where there was a fair bit of over the top reporting on Luas, it had its problems too.

There were internal problems with the RPA, deadlines missed and the Red Cow was proven to to a bit of a mistake. Harcourt Street was also a mess, even if it was a mess waiting to happen even with no construction - it was no handled well.

As the article says:

"In places like Harcourt Street they appear to have organised the construction work to cause the maximum disruption for the longest possible time, thus ensuring that local businesses and passers-by lose all faith in the system before it is even built," said Professor James Wickham, an expert in urban transport at Trinity College Dublin.

If you try calling Wicham anti-rail, I'll laugh.

Re other article about how open the system and the likely losses because of that: I'm a firm supporter of having barrierless Luas, but also Metro and Dart. But very few people are. Cities survive without barriers on metros, but most Irish people are used to London, New York and Paris. LA used to be barrierless but I read recently that while their former head of Metro (transport authority) pleaded -- even after he left his job -- that the system be kept open, those pushing barriers won on the basses of everything from fare collection to terrorism protection.