Dublin - Metrolink (Swords to Charlemont only)

It's completely bizarre - we've already ripped up an extensive, 30 line, street tram system in the early part of the 20th century. This was a bad mistake but making the same mistake AGAIN less than a century later would be simply insane.

On-street trams and metros are not in competition - they complement each other.

Street trams are slower but they offer more frequent stops and quicker/easier (at street level) entry/exit. Metros are faster but stop less frequently and thus make much longer distance journeys feasible.

You're making the same category error the likes of Colm McCarthy makes - when he argued that we didn't DART because we have buses. The operational characteristics of these two modes are very different so they fulfil different roles/provide different utility to public transport users.

The reason cities from Amsterdam to Zurich to Paris to Madrid are a delight from a public transport point of view is because they have BOTH metro and street-tram (as well as heavy rail and bus networks) and nobody gives a shite that some A to B trips can be made with more than one mode. Also, notably none use heavy buses to provide PT in their city cores.

Yes, currently we rely on buses to poorly fulfil a bunch of different commuting roles but this is because of a strategic error made in the early part of the 20th century when we ripped up tram tracks, mothballed heavy rail commuter lines and decided that a single solution - roads + buses - could do it all. Thankfully since the mid-1980s we've started to row back - first with DART, then with LUAS and now with Metrolink.

This makes no sense.

You're saying people will switch at Charlemount for ML but are now saying that the GL is fine to be kept if an alternative route can be found.

If ML cannibalised the GL then maybe there would be an argument. But it won’t.

Metrolink from Charlemount will see new users taking it as it offers new destinations i.e. someone going to DCU or the Airport (I’m sure some people use the GL and integrate with buses more centrally for DCU but I’d say it’s a tiny number). It will likely help alleviate capacity issues to a small degree with people switching at Charlemount for OCS but I doubt it will be material.

You can’t consider something like this before finishing Bus Connects and pedestrianising College Green, not to forget the plans to restrict through traffic using the quays/Pearse etc.

Once the above changes are finished, the Luas will be significantly faster. It is also higher capacity than buses, so it would probably make more sense to limit buses driving in front of Trinity, not Luas.

Also, taxis are the issue for College Green congestion, not buses or Luas. The idea that we’d stop running Luas trams in favour of taxis is utterly absurd, ridiculous, laughable and hard to believe you could be seriously suggesting such.

It's not. The Metro is duplicating the same journey. It's perfectly logical.

The Luas cross city clogs up the city center.

It's duplicating the Green Line for 4 stops. Meanwhile there are plenty of folk from Broombridge, and in future from Finglas, who will be travelling from Broombridge to Harcourt, Phibsborough to Trinity, Finglas to St. Stephens Green, who would prefer to stay on the one mode for their journey, as a transfer likely would be slower. Also should the Green Line tie in with ML at Charlemont, you likely will see the Green Line redirected.

What clogs up the city centre isn't one tram, its the dozens of taxis and private vehicles crammed onto the Luas tracks on a daily basis.

It's a side effect of there being no visible progress on the actual project. This thread repeatedly disappears up it's own arse with pointless arguments about minutiae and ridiculous ideas that will never happen because there's nothing new to talk about. I keep unsubscribing, but just when I think I'm out, it pulls me back in!

How would that work without also affecting the frequency of the line to Phibsboro?

Metro was stopped at Charlemont precisely to avoid cannibalising Luas Green line in the city centre, which wouldn't have just reduced the return on the sizeable investmemt of building Luas Cross City, but it would also have increased loading of the city centre stations of Metro... all without providing any additional catchment.

If on-street Luas services are "too slow", that's a good hint that there's too many cars/buses using the same way. Both are very cheap to divert, and in the case of buses, it will alsi help the problem of "bus-jams" as every service tries to traverse the same short stretch of road...

It was halted primarily because TII didn't want to be fighting court battles with Ranelagh residents which might sink the whole project. The tie in will happen, just much much delayed. It "cannibalising" the Green Line was doing what was always intended to be done with the old Harcourt line.

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.

Because it very often gets sucked down rabbit holes and tangents that inevitably lead it to being OT.

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.

I can see a pedestrian subway being built between Abbey Street and the OCS station, not at the beginning of course, but eventually.

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.