Cork - Light Rail [route options idenfication and initial design underway]

The NTA at this stage. TII are more of a build/maintain body

Not fully accurate info from NTA: the councilors are hostile, but the council themselves and engineering teams etc are not.

They do appear to be hostile on Bus Connects though from what I've seen.

I don't think it's over yet in Cork, some councilors are being won over to the mindset of "infrastructure could be a good thing".

A lot of old-fashioned thinking around the place still unfortunately. Its taking time to turn things around.

Too late now I'd say, the NTA have moved resources off the project and there's currently no plan to continue working on a preferred route option or public consultation in the short term, its dead. Luas Finglas will likely benefit from this, community groups in finglas have been hassling their TDs to get it built quicker than the post 2030 timeline and there's no local or political opposition to the project. The NTA is choosing its battles. Its simply not worth fighting people to give them something, just move on from it. Revisit when the stakeholders mature and after the budget has been spent on infrastructure elsewhere and jealousy rears its head.

It's not Ann and her colleagues though, it's the elected representatives. Some of them are doing unbelievable damage to the council's own projects. Some of them are actively organising the public to block almost anything that's sustainable transport oriented. It's the same few names all the time and some of them even have vested business interests in selling car related stuff. They're fairly brazen about it too, not quite Mannix Flynn level stuff but not far off it.

I used to criticise Ann and her colleagues a lot previously, but I think they're working really hard now and are singing broadly the right songs.

Very disappointing to hear the NTA are moving on though, even if it is understandable.

Although County Council is different from city, the mindset seems to be similar. This is what Cork councilors are up to with TII

https://www.independent.ie/regionals/cork/news/cork-county-council-to-write-to-transport-infrastructure-ireland-seeking-a-review-of-their-planning-policies-in-relation-to-national-routes/a1992328690.html

Tiny violins at the ready... 🎻

https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41393686.html

Some more images that could hint at route selection. MacCurtain St. and Skehard road shown. This would suggest that the greenway route is not going to be used, going by the Skehard Road photo; and it would head towards Boreenmanna road.

Sorry I never responded to this. Yes it's difficult to present something that's shown in confidence, but I'll try and post up some of the public discussions. The live commentary of some of the council meetings by Eoin English on Twitter/X were very good for showing some of it. Not sure if he still does them.

These mockups do not represent a change of route. If you look at the LRT proposal maps, you can see that the tram does traverse MacCurtain Street before crossing the river onto Patrick Street, and also that it leaves the old railway alignment just north of Skehard Road. The proposed route from there to Mahon Point diverges from existing roads, and to be honest it always looked very "hand-wavey" on the original proposal map, especially as the Ballinure housing estate effectively blocks the kind of southward turn needed to get to the commercial developments at Mahon Point. (There isn't space at the CSO site). I suspect that in the final route they'll now carry on east on Skehard Road until the cemetary, then make a hook south and then west back through Mahon Point.

My guess it's there's two reasons. First, Skehard Road is a main arterial road, and it lies on a major spine in BusConnects, so a stop there is desirable. Unfortunately, there is not much space to build a properly accessible tram stop on the old rail alignment where it crosses Skehard Road. Any stop not at street level needs to be wheelchair accessible, and that may require lifts as well as ramps, and there's no room for that here. At Blackrock Road, the presence of the former railway station does provide the necessary space for a fully accessible stop.

The second reason is that I believe the planners did not want a conflict on the Mahon Link Road where the existing heavy car traffic would seriously delay the tram service, and if you run all the way down to St Michael's Drive, you have to then cross this road at its busiest point if you want to serve destinations in the Mahon Point commercial parks. An off-street routing from Skehard Road south to Mahon Point would not suffer this kind of contention, and would also allow the northern half of the office park to be served. The accessibility issues also apply to a stop here, but there would at least be room to address them; I think the bigger issue is traffic conflict.

I'm not sure if you mean that the project will be slow, or the rail itself, but I just wanted to say that I've been impressed with the pace of the Cork commuter rail projects over the last year or two.