Infrastructure that never happened

Such interlining usually comes with increased complexity and thus usually reduced frequency, speeds and capacity.

That is why you rarely see it done in any of the busy high frequency, high capacity Metro or underground systems. Usually such systems make people interchange between lines.

Given how busy and relatively high capacity the Luas is, it would be a bad idea here.

In fairness if they had cut and covered the Luas red line under abbey street, it would have solved a variety of problems with the line and other infrastructure.

The maximum capacity of the red line is seriously constrained to the max 40meter long trams due to the distance between road junctions on Abbey Street.

Had they made it a tunnel, they could easily have had 55m trams like the Green line or even longer Metro type vehicles.

Also it would have avoided the issues with the junction at O’Connell St and have had a much faster journey time.

You could then use Abbey Street as Reuther a cycling route or bus only route.

I know what you mean, I’ve been in plenty of cities like that, in particular all over Eastern Europe. The difference however is that in general they are using much smaller trams. Often the trams aren’t much larger than a bus, so it is more like a bus network with trams going here there and everywhere.

The green line trams are some of the longest and highest capacity trams in the world. The green line is more approaching Metro like operation than these sort of tram networks.

Even in those cities, when they start putting really long modern trams on, they tend to have far less interlining on those routes and run those as more like core fixed routes.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for us to have an extensive tram network like these cities. Basically they have trams instead of buses. But I don’t think the interlining model is suitable for how our Luas system is designed.