Dublin - Metrolink (Swords to Charlemont only)

Metrolink will be 18.8km with 16 stations.

An extension to metro line 14 opened this month in Paris.

• 15.7 km / 9.8 miles
• 8 new stations
• 1 million pax per day
• Similar to our plam: fully driverless trains with frequencies up to 85 seconds
• 6 years of construction

Cost: €2.8 billion (€178M per km) (no cost overrun)

Given that stations are expensive, we should be able to do it for 5bn - 6bn?

How long was it in planning?

We don't.

We have judges making decisions about whether the actions of ABP, or any other government body, complied with Irish law. That's what a judicial review is, it's very limited in scope, and it can only be the job of the judiciary - I'd rather not have the government deciding on whether or not the government is acting lawfully.

More resources for ABP to prevent mistakes, and the proposed small changes to the planning laws are all that's needed. Like all process improvements, it will take time to see things getting better: you can't magically step up capacity in any organisation overnight.

We cannot adopt a "continental approach". First, because there is no such thing : each European country had its own procedures; and second, even if there were one model, those countries operate under a different, and incompatible, legal system to ours.

The planning process worked fine in the 2000s when we had money to properly fund ABP, our delays now are a result of the cubacks in the 2010s.

Unfortunately I don't think it's as simple as "hire some more people to prevent mistakes". We have a growing culture of NIMBYism, supported by a legal system who make a tonne of money objecting to anything and everything. It wasn't like this in the 2000s.

It's not so simple as ABP preventing mistakes - not when others are spending huge resources to find "mistakes" or oversights, or decisions that failed to consider section 435, clause 205, subsection 17.22c, or some obscure reference to an endangered moth no one has ever heard of.

Go away money becoming a big issue too and no doubt plenty of objectors (rightly or wrongly) smell it.

IT had a story the other day about locals who objected and got go away money and other locals who didn’t. The headline kinda implied that one lot were smarter than the other.

Moral of the story: object to everything.

No. It's none of their "way". Every party you list has either proposed Metrolink or publicly supports it (Labour, PBP and SD have all berated the government about the delays). SF too.

The only ones against it are a small number of professional contrarians in rural constituencies, and they change their mind every time they listen to the local radio phone-in.

Any chance we can leave the political doomsaying off this thread and talk about the actual project..?

Bad-faith objectors looking for go-away money are a problem with private planning, not large infrastructure projects. In large infrastructure projects, the bad-faith objectors turn up at every meeting anyway, and then mount a legal challenge once the planning is granted.

In your part 2, you seem to misunderstand what a Judicial Review is. In the current situation, JRs can only be brought on points of law - they are not appeals. Putting another body in the way between planning grant and JR would just lengthen that process: a NIMBY group would drag out the procedures of your PAT, and then launch a JR.

Basically, the problem with vexatious respondents is that they are just as happy to delay a project as long as possible, in the hope that funding dries up. Giving them another place to call in just helps them.

The proposals already put forward for the next Planning Act are better, in that they limit the scope of people who can appeal against planning to those who would be directly affected, or members of existing civil-society groups whose remit would cover the project. That won’t stop FIE and company, but it will stop the phoney “Nxx Alternative Campaign” or “XYZ Action group” objections that are secretly bankrolled by property owners whose potential future profits will be negatively affected by the new infrastructure.

How long will procurement and tendering process take? More than a year?

So construction might start in 2026.

So 2033 might be earliest opening.

Ah now. "The Civil Service" isn't one thing, and even if it was, there's more work for them in planning and managing a multi billion spend like Metrolink than there would be if it's cancelled.

With respect, by blaming "the Civil Service", you're veering into the exact kind of guff engaged in by those populist politicians we both despise.

This project is proceeding. People have been hired to run it, and bar some idiots, the whole of Irish politics is pushing for it. Some cynicism around political promises is normal and healthy, but at this point, for this project, it's misplaced.

Which would be fine (for the thread I mean) — then at least you'd know something is happening when there's a new post. Right now it's purely off topic discussion.

Infrastructure Is built for the future, not for the present. There are thousands of apartments being built in Sandyford, Clay Farm and Cherrywood right now. The LDA has its eyes on land at Central Bank Sandyford and Leopardstown Racecourse. There is a huge amount of underdeveloped land around the ghost Luas stops near Cherrywood. Large parts of Sandyford business park are still extremely low density warehouses that will almost inevitably be rezoned or redeveloped in the future.

The population along the Luas line will explode over the coming years.

That’s not to say that other parts of the city don’t need better public transport too but an upgrade of the Luas line would have been relatively cheap and served a fast growing area. Cutting the metro at Charlemont will be seen as extremely short sighted in the future.