Dublin - Metrolink (Swords to Charlemont only)

I'd imagine there will be need for it once shovels are in ground. This place is going to be flooded with 100s of photos of TBMs in the near future.

I am curious about this post.

Is it important that there are 400 metres between the LUAS and metro at SSG?

Under what circumstances, under the current plan, would even a single person be interchanging at that point anyway?

Anybody travelling from the south would change at Charlemont, and anybody else would surely have interchanged well before SSG.

I can see that such a poor interchange could become relevant if - in the future, and as suggested on this page - the Green tram line were to be redirected to somewhere else in the city.

It's quite dissimilar to the situation at O'Connell Street, where the metro and the Red LUAS are clearly planned to cross each other perpendicularly, and thousands of commuters will be doing extensive walking, twice a day, to make their interchange.

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.

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

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.

Confirmed Oral Hearing Date. Can only imagine how this will go.

Just popping into this as a casual observer who lives “down de country”

so roughly 20 years after being mentioned as something we were going to do, are ye telling me we’re still only at oral submission stage? That’s mad Ted