JP Morgan Boss Slams Dublin Transport Infrastructure

coylemj wrote: »

Fine, let them feck off to Paris or Frankfurt.

Seriously, the housing market here is bad enough at the moment, imagine what the sudden influx of 1,000 or so bankers on massive salaries will do to it, we simply cannot absorb them, never mind what they think of our transport 'infrastructure'.

It's this attitude that contributes to us having crap infrastructure.

Also use a bit of common sense, if bankers "on massive salaries" can afford to live in exorbitantly priced housing in London, Dublin will be no problem. The housing crisis here isn't affecting rich folks.

Well we've failed to ever invest in proper public transport in Dublin and we look like we are about to repeat the same issue in Cork.

Compare like with like here:

For example Dublin vs Brussels as locations. Dublin isn't really comparable to Paris, London or New York in terms of scale at all.

Brussels has four metro lines and a really good semi-underground modern tram network called the "pre-metro" with a further three lines. On top of that it has overground trams and busses reaching everywhere. You've also got 8 heavy rail train lines that include local and long distance computer train. You also have long-established and very advanced integrated ticketing system now run on contactless cards called Mobib. It is far more tied together than Leap.

Dublin has two overground trams and a coastal electric railway and a few infrequent commuter lines operated by diesel trains, with the vast majority of suburbs having no no rail. The bus network is dense, but it's nothing amazing.

Dublin has better air connectivity, but Brussels has high speed continental train connections.

Housing:

Dublin - expensive and in the rental sector, poor supply and bad quality.

Brussels - not cheap, but has good quality houses. In the rental side of things the market is far more regulated and there are plenty of very high quality, reasonable apartments and houses available at rent that isn't backbreaking. It's a far more regulated and established rental market. You can find everything from very short term term lets (furnished) and aimed at business people, furnished 1 year leases to unfurnished longer leases that are aimed at people who may want to stay for more than a few years, or permanently.

Social life : similar - both are very full of vibrant bars, have good arts and cultural scenes and have similar scale of museums and public galleries and attract similar levels of gigs.

Office accommodation:

Brussels probably has more sitting ready to go than Dublin has.

What's hampering Dublin has been lack of state vision for public transport for decades. These aren't projects you just do in a single government term. You need to be working 30+ years out. Brussels does that, Dublin doesn't.
Part of that is attitudinal - we never really spent on proper public transit infrastructure here and part of it is economic, Ireland was not a wealthy country in the mid-20th century running up to the 80s whereas Belgium and most continental countries and the UK come from a much more economically solid foundation. Ireland is relatively nouveau riche

Irish planners also tend to benchmark against the UK and New Zealand and other places that are English speaking and in many cases those places are very poor at planning and transit too. Shortermism and neoliberal economics having been the main driving forces for the past few decades in much of the English speaking world.

Then you've the housing crisis which is largely caused by a combination of poor planning and the financial system crash in 2008/9. We were building huge numbers of houses and apartments and went from a situation where we were meeting demand to one where we just had the whole system fall over and all construction stop. That's why there's a housing and homelessness issues in Dublin, Cork etc. The fact that houses were built in places that nobody wanted to live - remote rural housing estates etc and may never have real value is another issue entirely but they are often just conflated together and.

Ireland's currently not meeting housing demand and urgently needs to get investment in.

If there's huge demand in Dublin, you would think that it would be bringing large multinational property developers in to meet it if the local ones aren't capable of doing so. So, there's clearly something restricting that from happening right now. A serious lack of vision on allowing large scale, architecturally attractive developments seems to be a major stabling block. We have everything setup to facilitate people flipping old residential houses into apartments, small time developers and so on and a paranoia about high rise.

Even Cork seems to be prepared to go higher rise and denser in a way that Dublin isn't.

I'm not saying that Dublin won't land some investments, it certainly will and has a lot of selling points in terms of business culture, language and legal system similarities to the UK that put it at huge advantage.

We also need to avoid repeating the same mistakes in Cork in particular, but also Galway, Limerick and Waterford.

Realistically, Dublin should have at least a couple of metro lines (and they should have gone in back in the first boom) and several Luas lines - most big suburbs should at least have a Luas perhaps connecting to an underground central station.

Cork at this stage should at least have a Luas-type tram serving Carrigaline and Balincollig and they should have put in electric light rail to Midleton, Cobh etc (probably a modern tramway system.

We keep going with the crappy short term view and using diesel trains on commuter routes instead of just running some wires and taking advantage of environmentally friendly wind power etc etc to drive them

We'll never get our eco footprint down doing what we're doing.

On public transport in particular, we have to stop thinking short term and small.

ClovenHoof wrote: »

Says it'll be the main reason why Dublin will probably lose out on the bulk of Brexit relocations.

Wonder if the "buses are enough", "Dublin too small for a metro!" ..and Ciarian Cuffe "western rail corridor comes first" are happy now.

"The buses are enough" say those who never take them themselves.