[Article] Running to standstill

Victor

Beware, this one is well spun.

http://www.sbpost.ie/web/DocumentView/did-358655558-pageUrl--2FThe-Newspaper-2FSundays-Paper.asp

Running to standstill
08/09/03
By Niamh Connolly

The Luas
Age: Long overdue
Appearance: An unsightly mess on Dublin's streets
Newsworthiness: Luas contractors AMB JV want another €50 million to complete the project by 2004

It was a visionary plan conceived to resolve Dublin's traffic problems. Fine Gael senator Therese Ridge called it the longest pregnancy ever in 1997. "I'm beginning to wonder if we'll ever witness the birth," Ridge said.

Fast-forward to 2003, and the country is still pondering its arrival. The timetable for delivery has slipped from 2001 to 2003, then to summer 2004, and may now stretch to 2005.

The landmark initiative is undergoing a long and painful labour, with fresh controversies arising on a weekly basis. Little wonder it is viewed as a troublesome brat before it has even managed its first step. Four years too late.

However, the body behind the project, the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA) insists it can still achieve its target June 2004 deadline for the Sandyford line and August 2004 for the Tallaght line.

That is provided it can extract commitments from contractors AMB JV regarding its schedules, and avoid archaeological problems that AMB warns could stall progress.

Luas has overtaken the Dublin Port Tunnel as the state's most expensive national infrastructural project, running at a cost of €781 million, including a €90 million contingency plan, instead of its original €279 million.

The government is jittery about a light rail scheme which refuses to be pinned down on costs or deadlines and has fast become a byword for misfortune. "Loose costs, loose deadlines and loose and dangerous," one politician lamented.

The suitability of an overground light rail for an already congested city was raised over the summer - albeit six years too late – by TDs and senators on the Joint Oireachtas Sub-Committee on Transport.

The RPA continues in the face of adversity, and is confident the carping and complaining will subside as soon as the trams are unveiled.

"We will have probably the most civilised mode of urban transport in the world. It will be high quality, very reliable, and high frequency, and fully accessible to the mobility impaired," said Luas project director Michael Sheedy.

"It will be highly accessible, as opposed to a metro, where you have to go down to the bowels of the earth; it will provide a shop window in the city."

Sheedy is confident that Luas will be efficiently run.

"It will provide a link between the two busiest mainline rail stations in the country, Heuston and Connolly, and connects with the Dart at Connolly, as well as with Busaras at Store Street. It will also provide a valuable link to the two major hospitals, St James's and Tallaght Hospital.

However, Luas compares well to other similar light rail projects. Although it was in gestation for many years, if it meets its target date next summer, the construction phase will have taken only three years to complete.

But despite a plethora of consultants advising on the project, rarely has an infrastructural plan provoked such hostility.

From traders to taxi drivers, politicians to commuters - all are united in exasperation at its apparent slow pace, and the transformation of the capital into one noisy building site.

Last week, the Minister for Transport Seamus Brennan said he had told the RPA not to give "a penny more" to the Luas contractors. The company has sought an additional €50 million of the €90 million contingency fund to enable it to complete the Sandyford and Tallaght lines by next summer. The prospect of a legal action by the contractors has been raised by RPA chief Frank Allen with the chairman of the Joint Oireachtas Sub-Committee on Transport, Eoin Ryan.

Allen warned that "major infrastructural projects sometimes collapse into mutual recrimination ...with the merits of the arguments being resolved by an arbitrator several years hence".

The RPA appears reluctant to impose penalties included in the building contracts, fearing legal action.

Ryan said he was confounded by the agency's "hands off" approach. And a number of politicians have called on the transport minister not to appoint the RPA to oversee the city's proposed metro, on the back of its Luas performance.

There is also an internal problem at the RPA, which is chaired by Padraic White. The former acting chief executive, Donal Mangan, continues to turn up for work each day, but has been prevented from undertaking any work.

Mangan is taking a High Court action against the RPA over its appointment last year of international banker Frank Allen to the post of chief executive. The case will be heard in the coming months.

Commuters unlucky enough to travel through the Red Cow interchange on the M50 are in despair at a decision to run Luas over the country's busiest roundabout.

A proposal to raise Luas onto stilts at an additional cost of €20 million is unlikely to go ahead due to planning problems.

Separately, a filter light system on the busy N7 Naas dual carriageway to allow motorists right of way into the Luas `park and ride' area is set to create fresh tailbacks for southbound traffic from the M50.

In August, there were further sighs of despair when the RPA robustly denied it was in any way responsible for the collapse of the road at Harcourt Street where Luas construction was at its most intense.

At least seven basements under the 19th century houses on Harcourt Street were later found by Dublin City Council and RPA engineers to pose a structural threat to the road on which the Luas line will run.

This newspaper revealed that the RPA had received five warnings - three written and two verbal - from McCloskey's Civil Engineering firm about structural problems relating to the cellars on the road before it collapsed.

According to the RPA these letters confirm the basements were damaged years ago by their owners, and the agency is not liable for the road's collapse.

To add to the pressure on the RPA, city centre businesses are now gearing up for legal action, claiming losses and closures due to the construction.

"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.

In a typical robust radio interview early this summer, art gallery owner Noelle Campbell-Sharp spoke up for business interests when she lacerated the RPA's newly-recruited public relations manager, Ger Hannon.

Campbell-Sharp is seeking €200,000 in compensation for loss of business, claiming a drop of 70 per cent in customers to her Harcourt Street Origin Gallery over the past year. Insight Opticians on Harcourt Street was forced to close in June, while the Odeon bar was forced to lay off staff, claiming business was "decimated" by the Luas works.

The RPA is adamant it will not compensate businesses affected by the construction of the rail system. It insists that these businesses will benefit enormously when Luas is up and running.

But if the Harcourt Street traders were making noise, the RPA is now likely to feel the heat of more influential businesses such as department stores in the Abbey Street area.

Arnotts, Penney's, Clery's, Roches Stores, the Jervis Street Shopping Centre and Easons have threatened to injunct Luas construction. If major track laying work is not completed by December 1, as the Christmas shopping season begins, they threaten to move.

The warning came on the back of "slippages" in the timetable for the Tallaght Luas works, arising from unexpected obstructions and an archaeological find in O'Connell Street which had to be investigated.

Further delays to the Abbey Street works are likely to take the project beyond its track-laying deadline of November, and into the Christmas buying season and New Year sales.

Members of the Dublin City Business Association (DCBA), including Eason's chairman Michael Ryder, have taken the RPA to task over its timetable.

"They can do the work now and be out of there by December, or they can be served with an injunction. They have had their chance," said Tom Coffey, chief executive of the DCBA.

Cont./....

Victor

Continued

The angst created by the Luas works appears light years away from the positive approval it provoked at its inception way back in 1993. The proposal was adopted by the government, but abandoned the following year by Brian Cowen who held the job of transport minister for a short time.

The then Fine Gael transport minister Michael Lowry resurrected the plan in 1996, subject to EU finance. It was eventually inherited by Mary O'Rourke, who commissioned a consultants report in 1997 to advise on its design and delivery.

Intense political debate focused on the merits of a more expensive underground metro versus a comparatively cheaper overground tram then costing just €279 million.

The final plan was for two separate overground lines, with the Sandyford line ending at Stephen's Green, to be upgraded in the future to a metro going underground in the city centre and continuing to the airport.

However, according to Professor Wickham, this would involve separate rolling stock, still more cost and would shattering the plan for a unified light rail system.

The argument that an underground transport system - conspicuous in almost all European cities - would be too dangerous for the Irish public to countenance was widely aired at the time. It was felt that a return to the trams of Dublin would prove far more quaint and `very continental'. And so Luas was born.

But nobody appeared to detect the real implications of trams traversing the city's busiest junctions such as Abbey Street and St Stephen's Green every five minutes at peak times.

The light rail's capacity to alleviate Dublin's commuter congestion is now also being questioned.

Luas will carry 15 million passengers yearly compared to Dublin Bus with 150 million. At peak times, the city's busiest Quality Bus Corridor (QBC) on the Stillorgan dual carriageway carries 3,000 passengers per hour - not much less than the capacity of the hugely expensive Sandyford-Harcourt Street line at 3,500 per hour.

The transport bodies are far from united in relation to the level of precedence Luas will have over road users, including Dublin Bus, at key city centre junctions.

Dublin City Council's director of traffic Owen Keegan maintains Luas cannot have priority because, if it was to run every five minutes on O'Connell Street "that's two and a half minutes each way, there would be no time for other traffic to pass".

The Luas model - along similar lines to light rail in Montpellier, France - bans other public transport users on the same route from sharing the tracks. It will also force Dublin Bus to merge with mainstream traffic, sometimes in single lanes. St Stephen's Green will be reduced from four lanes to two when the system is completed, while Harcourt Street, a critical artery for southside commuter traffic, will be reduced to one lane.

The original design for laying Luas' tracks envisaged a clear pathway for utility companies such as ESB, Bord Gais, Eircom and cable TV to access cables without interfering with the trams. But it has emerged that the Sandyford tram could be brought to a standstill whenever utility companies need to carry out maintenance work on Harcourt Street, because tracks have been laid over a critical safety zone for an underground power line.

The RPA conceded that the track's alignment increased the chances of the line's closure whenever ESB, Bord Gais, Eircom, cable TV companies, and sewage or freshwater supply services needed to maintain or repair infrastructure.

"It's another level of compromise and there is not much we can do about it. In an ideal world, everything should be kept clear of the swept path, so that we're not experiencing third party interference," said Luas project director Michael Sheedy.

Luas contractors AMB have encroached on an established safety zone for the ESB's 220KV underground power lines on ten occasions.

And archaeological remains along the planned Luas extension line from Sandyford to Cherrywood could lead to route changes which would further drive up costs and force a public inquiry.

The final bill for Luas could yet hit €1 billion.