[Colm Moore]

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...321449516.html

Planned Cabra strand of Luas gets green light
OLIVIA KELLY

DUBLIN’S cross-city Luas line, the only major rail project sanctioned by the Government, is set to carry its first passengers in 2017 following the granting of permission by An Bord Pleanála yesterday.

The Luas BXD, will run from the Luas Green line at St Stephen’s Green to the Iarnród Éireann station at Broombridge in Cabra, connecting the Green and Red lines for the first time.

It will also serve the new DIT campus at Grangegorman – which was recently approved and will accommodate more than 20,000 students – and will provide a new mainline rail connection at Broombridge where it will link up to the Maynooth Line.

Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar yesterday said the line would cost “in the region of €300 to €400 million” to construct, and would be built within four years. The Railway Procurement Agency said it intended to start work next year and open the line in 2017.

Mr Varadkar said he was confident the project would go ahead because, unlike other more “grandiose” transport projects, the Luas BXD was funded by the State, not a public-private partnership, which meant it was not reliant on market forces or private finance.

“It was a mistake not to link the Luas lines up and part of the reason why that was done was that decisions were made to go for much more grandiose and much more expensive projects, like undergrounds for example, which we can’t now afford,” he said.

However he said the “business case” for the new line needed to be updated to take into account the changes made by An Board Pleanála before financing could be put in place.

“Any project has to have a good business case and a very strong benefit-to-cost ratio. An Bord Pleanála have made a few changes to the original plan. They’re not huge and we’re very confident that they will be doable within the existing budget.”

The Railway Order granted by the planning board is subject to 17 conditions, including the omission of a stop on Dawson Street. However the board has not ordered that power lines be put underground for the city centre sections of the line.

This condition, which would have greatly added to the cost of the project, had been sought by Dublin City Council and heritage groups on the grounds that overhead lines would have a “visually intrusive” impact on the historic core of the city.

The board determined that placing the lines underground could cause problems in extreme weather conditions which might impair the functioning of trams.

Dublin City Council’s director of traffic Michael Philips said the council was “very happy to work with the board’s decision” .

“When you’re working in the city everything is about balance. While it might, from an aesthetic point of view, have been more desirable to have the lines underground, if that was going to affect reliability it wasn’t going to wash.”

He said there might be an opportunity to revisit the issue when and if Metro North went ahead, as technology might have moved on.

The new line will link the Green line, from Sandyford to St Stephen’s Green, with the Red line, from Tallaght to Connolly Station. The lines will meet at O’Connell Street. The Luas BXD will then run to Parnell Square, Broadstone, Phibsborough and Cabra. It will service 13 stops with a journey time of 24 minutes and is expected to attract an additional eight million passenger journeys on Luas each year, an increase of 25 per cent.

The board’s decision was welcomed yesterday by Dublin Chambers of Commerce, the Dublin Institute of Technology and Government and Opposition politicians.

Mr Varadkar last November confirmed that Luas BXD would go ahead but said the Metro and Dart Underground would be shelved.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...321449509.html

Belated link-up corrects costly mistake
OLIVIA KELLY

ANALYSIS: New Luas line cheaper than Metro project but €185m already spent on other shelved schemes

YESTERDAY’S DECISION by An Bord Pleanála to grant permission for the Luas Broombridge line to link the existing Red and Green Luas lines underscores the folly of having built two independent lines in the first place.

Not having done the job properly when the lines were built eight years ago has proved extremely costly in terms both of inconvenience to the travelling public and, probably more importantly, money.

With Dublin’s mainline stations on the outskirts of the city centre and the Dart hugging its eastern edge, it surely made sense that when a new rail system was being devised it would service the main shopping and business district. But that’s not how it panned out.

When the light-rail plan was first mooted in the mid-1990s the line was to have cut through the city centre linking the north and south sides of the river from St Stephen’s Green through to O’Connell Street.

However, by the end of the decade that plan had been abandoned by a Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats government which feared public reaction if they removed traffic from narrow Dawson Street and Nassau Street. Dublin Bus wasn’t too keen on the idea either as it feared it would be squeezed out in competition with trains and cars in the congested centre.

Instead they opted to construct two separate lines, the Green line from St Stephen’s Green to Sandyford and the Red line from Connolly Station to Tallaght. At their nearest point they were a good 15-minute walk apart.

Just a year after they opened in 2004 the plans changed again. The government’s new Transport 21 plan recommended that the Luas lines be connected and not only that but a Metro, covering largely the same ground as the Luas in its city-centre section, would run underground.

While that decision might have seemed a bit odd, the logic for the Luas connector seemed irrefutable. The two lines were hugely popular. Exceeding projected passenger numbers in the first year, Luas remains the only public transport system to wipe its own face, requiring no Government subsidy.

However, the Luas connector wasn’t about to get an easy ride. In July 2010 it was dropped again just a month after the Railway Procurement Agency had applied to An Bord Pleanála to build the line. The Luas BXD was shoved out of the government’s capital spending programme in favour of the Metro, although the planning process was allowed continue so it could be picked up again at a later date.

It was the change of government that saved Luas BXD. Soon after Leo Varadkar took up the transport portfolio, he announced that only one of “the big three” transport projects – Metro North, Dart Underground and the Luas interconnector – would be going ahead. Although he didn’t announce until last November that Luas was the winner, it was clear that was the way he was leaning.

Metro may have had the advantage of taking people all the way to Dublin Airport, but Luas has the advantage of being cheap, expected to cost about €370 million, while the Metro was projected to cost at least €3 billion.

There has still, however, been an outrageous waste of money caused by the will-they-won’t-they nature of successive governments’ transport planning. An estimated €150 million was spent on Metro North and €35 million on Dart Underground before they were shelved.